Rosa Koire

“Smart Growth” and Agenda 21

freeacre

Finally free from pressing duties organizing the La Pine Chicken Coop and Garden Tour (Google it to see our cool website), processing rhubarb, taking care of puppies, attending meetings, supporting candidates, etc., it looks as if I have a few moments to myself. So, I want to take the time to share with you the sobering book that Rosa Koire wrote, entitled “Behind the Green Mask: U.N. Agenda 21.” For anyone politically involved, or doing work with non-profits, or community organizing, this is a “must read.”

I found it to be a sort of kick in the gut. Those who are familiar with my values know that my allegiance is to our Mother, the Earth, and to our brothers and sisters, the animals, fish, and flora. I consider myself an environmentalist and come from a “left-wing,” tradition. I support “Think Globally, Act Locally.” I endorse books like James Howard Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency,” the “Long Descent” by the Archdruid, and most of the depleted resource information by Heinberg and others. We live our lives pretty much in sync with the stated goals of the agenda – clean air, water, land, food, etc. So, it is with much chagrin and resentment that I find that, once again, a movement of which I have been in the vanguard has been co-opted by the nefarious nozzles of the corporatocracy.

Rosa Koire has been filmed by various groups that she has spoken to, and she does of great job of explaining the high points of the research she has done to prove her points. I suggest that you listen to her presentations on the web if you want to get an overview without having to read her book. One good one is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugaQzc7OpmY. This one emphasizes the ideas of “communitarianism” vs. individual freedom. Another is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDtCb45Lqt0&feature=related
which is a talk she gave to the Tea Party that has a little more detail about land use issues. She ends both of her talks with encouraging us to stand together and resist this globalist agenda to control all the resources and people of the world. She says, “We can do it!”

I gotta tell you, I am not so sure. You see, we have been fighting land use issues and working on creating a County Planning Commission Plan for years now. La Pine was chosen along with three other communities in the U.S. to be guinea pigs for a plan to eventually go national that requires sophisticated ATT systems to replace septic systems in rural areas. The U.S.G.S. used millions of dollars to do a study that concluded that there is an on-going “emergency” (projected to hit in 100-150 years at the rate the county was growing in the height of the housing boom) with the projected nitrate load in our water, land, and rivers. La Pine was picked because our area has mostly 1-5 acre lots, whereas north of here, the lots are 5 and 10 acres. So our population is more “dense.” Anyway, these new systems would require about $25 to $40 thousand dollars to install and endless money to maintain. They require a dedicated phone line to keep track of the information, as well as a $400 to $500 per year maintenance contract with regular inspections. They also burn up their pumps if they are left more than three months at a time with nothing to process because the home is a vacation property. They also can’t be installed just anywhere and have to be in approved sites. Much of our area is being red-tagged and no building is being allowed. So, people can’t live on their own land. And, they are not being compensated for it, either.

Happily, this area has a lot of retired government employees, researchers, statisticians, scientists, water experts, etc. who have not just departed from a banana boat, and who were able to find many significant flaws in the USGS report. We went to work to stop this thing. That was five years ago. So far, we have petitioned, attended countless meetings, replaced two county commissioners, the mayor, got the most disagreeable county staff toadies laid off, and voted to officially end the “Local Rule” as it was called in the best Owellian tradition. But, it still has not stopped. Then the county gave up control of the issue and tossed it to the DEQ as well as to the twenty year state Planning Commission to resolve.

But, despite the fact that the voters decisively repealed the “Local Rule,” it lives on. Coming up with one lame excuse or reason after another, the bureaucratic minion in charge continues to require these outrageous systems be built despite the law’s repeal and the replacements on the Board of County Commissioners, and despite evidence that the nitrate load in our area is going down, not up.

How can this be? All of us have been perplexed. What is the ultimate motivation? We figured “greed.” But, there seemed to be more. My answer now is “Agenda 21.” It is not so much about greed as about Control. This is only a fraction of the greater corporatocracy ideal of world-wide control of basically all people and things. This is the Matrix that we are finding ourselves living in. Individuality and freedom are concepts that are to be denied in favor of “community” and the “public good.” That is, we are disenfranchised of our right to live in the word as sovereign individuals and our constitution promising “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – as well as our Bill of Rights. We are dumbed down and silenced if we object to being herded and milked like bovine animals raised in a feedlot as a resource of the globalist Big Agra, Big Pharma, Big Finance, and One World Government elites.

Not that many years ago, I would have thought that only the paranoid, fear-based, moronic ultra-right wing pin heads and flakes would subscribe to this idea.

That was before I recognized how the Women’s Movement was high-jacked or co-opted by the same cabal. Right about the time that Henry Kissinger started dating that “champion of women’s rights” and editor of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinham, the scum queen. Let’s take a quick look at how the “women’s liberation” movement has morphed into us as a people embracing tyranny, not gaining freedom.

Back in the early 70’s, upon the publishing of The Feminine Mystique, we were struggling to re-define ourselves as females. We were exploring our femininity. We were discovering our cervixes and clitorises. We were beginning to gain a measure of control of our bodies and ourselves. We were exploring the value that we contributed to the world with our unpaid service as mothers and wives. We began to demand “equal pay for equal work,” and ask that more careers be opened to women who had differing talents and skills. We wondered if there was a power in femininity as well as masculinity. We explored the idea that there was a metaphysical component to this dual relationship. We resented only being “ornaments” on some guy’s arm, and valued on something as superficial as our appearance. We were looking into the Divine Feminine and the concept of “Mother Right.”

Instead, we got funneled into being “able” to work “like a man.” We became engineers, scientists, athletes, soldiers. We never have achieved equal pay, but now it takes two paychecks to even begin to make ends meet. Mothers of young children put their toddlers into daycare centers that were supposed to educate and socialize them for the betterment of the larger society while their mothers could develop careers of their own. Now our kids are dumber than ever and we have a gang problem of breath-taking proportions - an abundance of children seemingly raised by wolves. Up the income ladder a bit, and the children are often self-absorbed, materialistic, demanding, alienated little mutants with no way to contribute in a helpful way to their families. Of course, we still love each other for the most part. We and our dogs love each other too. But, striving to create a world where each person is valued for the God-given abilities that they were blessed with is no longer in the picture. Now the “news” features tits and ass wherever one looks. Now, we’ve got Sweden making it illegal for men to pee standing up. Now they are taking gender pronouns out of the language. “Males” and “women” are “wales” or something…. There! They have destroyed that which has given us our identity from the start – both masculinity and femininity – that which protected us and nurtured us until now.

What happens to people who’s culture has been destroyed? Take a look at the American Indian experience. In the latest National Geographic, it outlines the destructive power of the government schools and broken treaties, the lies, the alcohol, the poverty, the lost traditions and religious center of the people. It’s the same in Australlia with their aboriginals. People forced to deny all the things that made them uniquely human. Great job, Brownie!

This contrived, planned, all-encompassing, planned demolition of all that we believe in cannot be defeated by a direct onslaught. They have all the money, media, governments, banks, special interests, and on and on. I hope that I am wrong, but not from what I have observed so far. And, I am getting to old to spend my whole life fighting them. Even if we were to be able to apply the brakes to this Titanic of a culture, the momentum will last through my lifetime.
So, as our elder, Montana Freeman, has often lamented, “What’s a motherfucker to do?” Do I continue to shun the bastards as much as I can? Do I join some sort of revolution? Do I move to Ecuador or Bali? Do I pray for the leveling of the playing field by EMP or asteroid hit? Look for the “benevolent” aliens that should have shown up already? Eat my medicinal brownies all day long and try not to give a rat’s ass? What?

I think I want to focus on what feels good. Kindness, humor (although I have not been very humorous today, have I?), relationships, nature, puppies. I probably will not give up sarcasm, vulgar gestures, and name-calling, as it is enjoyable. But, that’s just me….

A Pathetic 4th

A couple weekends ago we went to see some friends compete in "cowboy mounted shooting" contest, held twice a year. We got lost and a late start so we only caught the last few minutes on the day we went. Photo is of our friend, he and his wife both compete. LOL his wife usually places in the contests, he hasn't yet.

from murph

Well, here we are on the cusp of another national holiday, July 4th, the celebration of our day of emancipation from British rule. Community activities glaringly advertised on banners, flags all over the place, yard sale signs up all over the telephone poles and folks stocking up on beer and grilling meat of choice for the long holiday. Charcoal bags loaded in shopping carts and propane gas tanks being filled, their sales must be a years worth of profits from this holiday. Preparations are being made for guests or the motor home being prepped for traveling to relatives and or friends for a few days.

According to government stats, the personal savings rate increased pretty well again this month, amounting to over $3000, on the average, per working person for the month for the 115 million wage slaves in the country. Is there ANYTHING wrong with this stat? According to these stats, on the average, household should have saved over $10 grand in the last 3 months. How’s your savings plan going?

Meanwhile the appearance is that there is another conflict brewing for execution in the Mid-east. All kinds of military hardware are being shifted around and deployed on land and at sea. Of course, we saw this happening a while ago, and it didn’t escalate into a shooting match beyond individual countries being manipulated by the western power blocks. Is this time different?

Yup, time to celebrate the liberation of this country from despotic rule. I often wonder if a new national holiday will be proclaimed celebrating the instituting of the new world order of despotic governance. Historical analysis of this period 50 years down the road would be interesting to see. I don’t figure I’ll be around to read it.

This morning our chickens left a note for me when I got up, they arising much earlier than I do. They had a rather obscure statement that things were going to be changing big time very soon and to be stocked up on chicken feed, as they didn’t want to be caught with nothing to eat. It was specifically noted that if I didn’t want to stock up, better open the gate to the garden for their access. I reminded the leaders that they had already decimated the garden 3 times this year where I had to replant half of it again and there wasn’t enough out there to eat and wouldn’t be for some time. Ever see a chicken shrug their shoulders? Those feathered anarchists have dug holes all over the back yard area for their daily dust bathes. I requested that they fill the hole back in so that people wouldn’t stumble in the holes they made. They just cackled. I reminded them that we had an upcoming tour of gardens and chicken coops in about a month and they mentioned I needed to spruce up the chicken house unless I was to die of shame. Shabby and pathetic was their description. I reminded them that I was down to only 10 projects to get done by then and not sure if I had time to do as they requested. They screamed at me to get with it instead of spending time on the computer. Sigh, I just can’t win with them.
I wanted to remind them that they could all be stew for the winter but refrained because of the threat of their contacting PETA. For a bunch of anarchists, they sure can be dependent on political correctness as a weapon.

As you can see, toting water and chopping wood take precedence over international affairs around here.

Sure are a lot of folks in our area that are moving out. A large variety of reasons but predominate is lack of income. Some of the retired folks leaving are going to live on kid’s property somewhere else. Most are leaving because their homes have been foreclosed. Lots of pretty inexpensive property for sale right now. Saw a stat recently that over 40% of homes around here are under water. Economic recovery? What recovery? A long time, now retired, resident of the community is moving to their kids owned house out of the area, very soon. Big time contributors to the community and will be most sorely missed. I wonder how many small communities across the nation are experiencing similar problems. As usual, younger folks are reluctant to take up the slack. It’s not that I don’t sympathize with them, but if we allow our communities to deteriorate I would project that any social cohesion will also break down and with the coming collapse of the economies at the national level and the local levels, local cohesion is a survival factor. I anticipate that national cohesion will be channeled to another war along with a drastic increase in social control by the government.

So let’s all get out and eat ourselves sick and drink ourselves into a stupor and celebrate our national holiday of freedom and democracy. It’s the patriotic thing to do, don’t ya know.

STUPID SHIT I COME ACROSS

from murph

(Authors name was obviously not included for security concerns and was never revealed in the original piece. Obviously reprinted without permission)

Ok, all you folks out there that are whining, bitching and complaining about what they think is going on, listen up. You don’t know what your are talking about.

Lets deal first with all of you who are don’t like all the surveillance revelations going on. What is your bitch? If you aren’t doing anything illegal what do you care? You accuse the government and some wild ass ideas of secrete organizations watching your every move and you don’t like it. Well tough shit. You know as well as I do that we have a small group of malcontents roaming around under cover of society that would destroy every vestige of our way of life. We call them terrorists. The damage they can do to our society is immense even though there are very few of them. A small nuclear device, or a biological or chemical device planted in every dense metropolitan area would destroy us. They have to be stopped. Just how many hippy scum determined to contaminate our cities water supply with LSD or Bath Salts would it take to decimate civilization? Not very many. So of course we have surveillance, under cover brave Americans dedicating their lives to stop our destruction.

Don’t like the idea that someone can watch what your doing in your back yard or what stores you go into? What is your problem? Afraid someone might spot your shopping cart filled with household chemicals to make a bomb or something?

What you simply don’t seem to understand is that those people you elected are concerned with your well being. They are in a position to protect you against those that would kill you if they are allowed to run around free.

While what we call our founding fathers were very well intentioned, they never dreamed that our society would have so many folks that were only concerned with the destruction of our near perfect life in western civilization, the greatest civilization to show up on this planet. Why would they want to destroy it? Because they are insane and insane people must be eliminated from our society, and besides they are jealous of us. Don’t like that idea? Well why don’t you just up and move to where they don’t care about being civilized, where everything evil and against God’s wishes is allowed. Maybe Pakistan or India or Afghanistan would be more to your liking, where the godless rule.

Oh yes, and while we are at it, don’t like the idea of someone snooping in on your private life in the bedroom? For Christ’s sake, your probably part of the crowd that sure likes to watch other people having sex on the internet and looking at pictures of naked people and the like. So just what makes you think government officials don’t like the same thing. Stop being so sensitive about it and just consider that your helping those government folks get off too. Besides, in the new world order all of this sex stuff is going the way of the dinosaur, be only used for procreation in the future and get rid of all this anti-God-for-fun sex.

While I am at it, all you out there that want to see illegal drugs legalized, forget it. We don’t need a society composed of zoned out hippies trying to fly planes or driving busses. Just stick to your legal drugs and be happy. After all, the drug companies are just concerned with the health of the nation and your contribution to them helps support research into more effective ways to keep you happy and satisfied with your life. When it comes right down to it anyway, happiness is found at your local Wal Mart and not in contemplating your navel.

For those of you who are tolerant of the gay culture, get off it. It is destroying our American way of life and our sacred marriage vows. If it is allowed to flourish, our country is doomed since right thinking folks would never be born, and that does not include God’s revenge on the perpetrators. Don’t let yourself get involved with these people (if we use a broad definition of people). They are evil and will lead to our destruction. They must be eliminated.

You out there that think our economic system is wrong, you got to get with the program. You just want to eliminate those that are innovative and smarter than you. Can you imagine what our lives would be like without the bankers to loan us money to start new businesses, to provide capital for expansion of companies that provide us all with the benefits of an advanced technology? Our lives would be far worse off, no dishwashers, no TV’s no nice cars to drive, no grocery stores with 200 choices of morning cereals to choose from, no chance of visiting grandma during the holidays who lives several states away. There is no future in being a Luddite. Get with the program and be in the now.

You peak oilers and peak everything else believers. You obviously have forgotten God. He will provide for us, at least those of us that still believe in him. The earth will never run out of what we need to live because God will see to it. You have forgotten God’s promise of a better life coming. Wake up and start attending church and give thanks for our way of life.

And lastly, you folks out there that don’t like our foreign policy and the use of our military to keep our way of life intact. Get over it. History is filled with stories of groups and countries hording resources for their own benefit and not sharing. That has to cease and it is legitimate to use military force to get them to share. It is obvious to any sane person that we have a destiny to fulfill in this great country and we need those resources to fulfill that destiny. We need to have the resources to show the rest of the world how great they can be if they would only adopt our way of life.

And this folks, is the reality of our way of life and that’s all I have to say.

PS. I don’t do it very often but I enjoy writing satire every once in a while. Murph

And while we are talking about some pretty serious stuff, I presume you have heard how some herds of cattle in Texas have dropped dead because the hybrid (not GM) grass they were grazing on was suddenly producing cyanide gas. (from Cryptogon 6-24-12) At this time, nobody knows why this should happen. The field they were grazing in has been feeding cattle for many years with the same hybrid of grass. Speculation is that maybe the drought down there had something to do with it.

HOW MUCH MORE CAN WE TAKE?

Meet Jake


Meet Ellie

Since the loss of our dog Brie, we have had a bit of emptiness around our place. So, we decided to introduce a bit of chaos back into our lives in the form of two puppies. Whew, what a hand full. We have concluded it is much easier to house break one pup, and not so easy to train two at the same time.


From Murph

Every day, when I scan through multiple news sites and commentaries I am again impressed with our capacity to endure an every increasing amount of problems that keep arising. Chief among these problems is the energy supply in the form of hydrocarbons.

Even though I talk of it frequently, I still, at times, feel that I do not have a real handle on the energy problems and their full implication. It sure enough appears to me that most of the easily accessible hydrocarbons have been extracted. While improved technology has so far supported more expensive extraction processes, there will still be a limit. There is always a limit. Exactly where that limit will be and it’s impact is under intense debate. The abiotic oil folks are adamant about limitless oil availability and yet are not able to answer what appears to me as crucial questions concerning its extraction if abiotic production is indeed a fact, which appears to me to be a tenuous platform to begin with. I read that there is limitless oil being produced all the time from deep in the core of the earth. If this is true, then how come the earth is not covered with oil at its surface? After all, this process has been going on for how long? After millions of years, it would sure seem to me that all that migrating oil toward the surface should be really the dominating liquid of the planet and that is obviously not true. So, even if abiotic oil is a fact, it also appears to me that it also has a limit and its replenishment rate is rather slow, like millennium slow. So, they talk about drilling 5-10-15 miles beneath the surface to tap those pools. That is a very expensive endeavor and despite advancing technology for well drilling, will increase the cost of extraction.

The folks ginning up the oil sands and oil shale extraction don’t seem to recognize that there is an energy-in energy-out ratio that is nearly at par. Even with advances of the technical problems with this extraction, we would have to make some pretty wild leaps in technology to make it economically viable. Without government subsidization of the energy sector, sand and shale extraction is a totally losing endeavor from an economic standpoint. The same can be said about off shore drilling. This of course does not include the extreme environmental degradation from these sources.

It sure appears to me that the data indicates that conventional production of oil is declining. Drilling more holes and extracting more liquid crude has just about had its day. Those big pools of oil are becoming less productive year over year, indicating that the pools are running dry, or at least of low enough extraction as to be non profitable.

If my assertions are any where near reality, our society is living in an extreme position of denial. Somewhere down the time road, total energy extraction will become untenable, costing more in energy extraction than can be realized in benefit.

The implications of this, I think, are enormous. Food production is the final setting for oil depletion. We have numerous examples of attempts at reducing the use of hydrocarbons in producing food. I recently had an interesting web site sent to me.
http://www.nextworldtv.com/page/760.html
This 40 minute film is an British farmer’s explorations into the use of hydrocarbons to produce food from a permaculture standpoint. Toward the end of the film, they briefly explore what food production would look like without the use of hydrocarbons. That is, back to pre 1900’s farming. It is labor intensive to say the least and the film points out that the farming community is ill prepared to go back to animal power to produce food. And this does not even touch on how to put up a distribution system for the food produced with no, or very limited, hydrocarbons. The film asserts that with very different concepts of farming, that it is possible to feed 10 people per acre. That means that for the population of the US, it would take 35 million acres of this methodology to feed the present population if we all went primarily to vegetarianism and very little meat products. Here is some interesting data http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
This site asserts that there is only 349 million acres that is planted in crops and most of that is to produce feed for meat production.

The next question I ask is how much of that land could produce food with vastly reduced use of hydrocarbons? Actually, very little of it. Most of the land used for agriculture has been literally killed for biodiversity and non-hydrocarbon farming and this is the result of factory farming and monoculture farming, GMO crops along with government subsidies. And this does not even start to address the quality of food produced by these methods. It also does not address the irrigation aspect and how water is also becoming a big problem. Along with climate changes and some real dire predictions on how that is going to change food production we have a very serious problem that is not being addressed.

In other words, we have a food crisis staring us in the face somewhere down the road. And this is just our country and the crisis is even worse for other countries that are being drastically affected by climate changes. It appears to me that the production of food to feed populations might possibly become a very real problem before long. It already is showing some cracks and I expect them to get worse.

Of course, we can expect that the solutions that will be advanced will be more of the same practices but on an even larger scale, which appear to me to be self-defeating and will end badly. That is, large population die-off simply due to non-availability of food, and/or food that is so adulterated as to cause premature deaths of much of our population.

I would suppose that with enough time, humans might very well be able to physiologically adapt to this food adulteration, but I suspect there won’t be enough time for that to happen. That kind of adaptability takes rather long lengths of time to accomplish. Even if we had a national policy to begin change over to a more sustainable method of food production right now, the amount of time it would take to make the land viable again would be measured in decades, not even multiple years. A great deal of our farmland has literally been poisoned to death by modern agricultural practices and it will take considerable time to reverse that. I do not see any national inclination to even begin to talk about it. The political hold that big agricultural concerns have on the government is an iron fist at this time.

I expect to see a push to put even more land into factory production of food to be initiated, thus destroying even more whole ecosystems. Even reinstitution of a victory garden on a mass scale is not going to solve this problem. During WWII the victory garden is credited with nearly 40% of the food supply. It would not be enough today if you could sell the concept on a social wide basis. All of the experimenting with organic/alternative/permaculture will not work without a national policy and support, and is not going to make a dent in this problem, and even if it was tried, the fight with big ag businesses would be fierce and protracted. From my perspective and information, any change should have been started many years ago and I don’t see it taking place in any near future.

On a personal basis, the backyard/frontyard production of food is about our only alternative and that has a whole host of problems in and of itself, Zoning laws, being only one obstacle. Land use descriptions are another.

In our area, I have frequently made descriptions concerning the problem with home based food production; quality of land for growing and climate being the big ones. Another problem that is showing up right now is land contamination with herbicide use. One of our local big time self-sufficiency gardeners has suddenly run up on this big time. Our soil has to have soil amendments, and the most economically means of doing this is animal manure. Herbicides have shown up in her garden and she is strictly an organic gardener. Now our area has a lot of horse folks so there is lots of horse manure available. Problem is, to be able to take your horses to other areas, you have to have certification that your animals are fed weed free hay. In order to have weed free hay, you have to buy or produce hay that is heavily contaminated with herbicides, principally for our area, is Milestone, made by Dow chemical Co. The aminopyrolids (one of the chemicals in the herbicides) taken in by the animal, among other consequences, is excreted in the manure. If that manure is used for soil amendments, it kills broadleaf garden plants, which comprise most of the edible food produced in a garden. Its life span under ideal situations is about 5 years in the soil. Testing for and removal is quite expensive. Soil tests for it run about $250 bucks a whack, although, if you want to take the time and effort, you can determine it for yourself. Plant some seeds in a cup with the suspected soil. When the seeds sprout, and grows above the soil, if the leaves curl up and in, it is probably contaminated with aminopyrolids or even some other chemical soup. The curling of the leaves is the result of interruption of normal hormonal metabolism of the plant, how most of the herbicides work.

All of this does not address the contamination of soil and surface water with aluminum particulates from aerial spraying, that is still being denied by the government and a large amount of the general population as being conspiracy theory. Interesting how Monsanto is applying for GM seed release that is supposedly impervious to aluminum contamination.

I have to conclude that food is going to be the next really big emergency, and probably in our lifetimes. I wish I had some hard answers to this problem but I don’t and the permaculture advocates are only a partial answer and I doubt that we will have enough time to solve this problem before the crisis is upon us anyway. It takes a lot of effort and time to grow your own food needs. Most folks are simply unwilling to go to that amount of effort. We work at it, but we still have to supplement our food from the store. City folks are in a real bind and suburban folks are hindered by regulations. In the more rural areas, land use laws can be a very real impediment. We have them here too. Homeowners associations are also a biggie for stopping individual food production. It is such a complex problem with no real governmental will to alleviate these problems that I become despairing of it being solved. Maybe the reason there is no effort to solve these problems is because there is an agenda to not do so. By appearance alone, I can subscribe to that conspiracy.

All we can do is continue to do the best we can.

ON PETER KROPOTKIN

That picture of a bearded gentleman is Peter Kropotkin, the subject of today's post

ON PETER KROPOTKIN from murph

I finally got the formatting to look right. Thanks Hotsprings.

I mentioned some time ago that I was delving into Kropotkin’s writings. His stuff is not something to breeze through with understanding and is taking me some time to absorb his concepts. Had a friend mention to me that Kropotkin was excellent at putting him to sleep. I mentioned back that I felt the same way about Eckhart Tolle.

I think it behooves us to ask some questions; what is the legitimate function of government, and how powerful should it be?

We currently have a majority of our citizens that are totally dependent upon the government to enable them to live, dependent upon that body. Is this a legitimate function of government? If you are of a more politically liberal point of view, yes it is. Some of the arguments for this are hard to refute. What do we do with citizens that for various reasons cannot support themselves, temporarily or permanently? Should the government have the mandate to confiscate fruit of an individuals labor to support someone else?

Of course, without government-backed efforts, we would not have our highway system, most universities, most research labs, and stifled advanced research. Without government backing, our lives would mostly be at a much lower “standard of living”.

All of which evades the point. Is it legitimate for a government, in a moral or even a ethical sense, to forcefully confiscate money from you for projects that you may not approve of? Should the government have the ability to force you into military service for wars that have an agenda we care little about? I am using this in a broad sense. A government that creates the financial situation for which the only way a young man can get 3 hots and a cot and must join the military is still confiscating your life. Of course, that young man in actuality has a choice, between bad and maybe a worse situation.

From a political view, Jesus was an anarchist. Your only loyalty was to God.

Kropotkin is what I would call a fundamental anarchist in that whatever government is formed has to be with the agreement of the population involved and if it becomes intrusive or advocating actions that people can’t stand, it is dissolved.

Kropotkin and modern anarchists insist that human relations should all be voluntary right from the start. Kropotkin asserted that people will act morally from an innate need for the relationships.

One of the best futuristic novels (IMO) that speculates on what an anarchistic society would look like is “The Probability Broach” by L. Neil Smith.

In the modern anarchistic thought, I have put this in the blog before.

YOU MAY ALREADY BE AN ANARCHIST
It’s true. If your idea of healthy human relations is a dinner with friends, where everyone enjoys everyone else’s company, responsibilities are divided up voluntarily and informally, and no one gives order or sells anything, then you are an anarchist, plain and simple. The only question that remains is how you can arrange for more of your interactions to resemble this model.

Whenever you act without waiting for instructions or official permission, you are an anarchist. Any time you bypass a ridiculous regulation when no one’s looking, you are an anarchist. If you don’t trust the government, the school system, Hollywood, or the management to know better than you when it comes to things that affect your life, that’s anarchism, too. And you are especially an anarchist when you come up with your own ideas and initiatives and solutions.

As you can see, it’s anarchism that keeps things working and life interesting. If we waited for authorities and specialists and technicians to take care of everything, we would not only be in a world of trouble, but dreadfully bored—and boring—too boot. Today we live in that world of (dreadfully boring!) trouble precisely to the extent that we abdicate responsibility and control.

Anarchism is naturally present in every healthy human being. It isn’t necessarily about throwing bombs or wearing black masks, though you may have seen that on television; (Do you believe everything you see on television? That’s not anarchist!). The root of anarchism is the simple impulse to DO IT YOURSELF; everything else follows from this.

Here is an interesting take on anarchism and the early Jews; http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/03/29/the-subversive-commandments/

In the previous post, I mentioned one aspect of Kropotkin’s concern about biological survival of a species. He asserted that it was only through cooperation would a thinking species survive. That survival of the fittest only pertained to individuals, not to a group.

Kropotkin’s greatest moral attribute of humans is the dictate of “treating other as you would be treated, under similar circumstances”. He further states;

“We all love moral strength, we all despise moral weakness and cowardice. Every moment our looks and words show the repugnance we feel towards cowardice, deceit, intrigue, want of moral courage. We betray our disgust, even when under the influence of a worldly education we try to hide our contempt beneath those lying appearances which will vanish as equal relations are established among us”. Sounds pretty egalitarian to me.

Kropotkin is a great believer in equality, across the board and respect for the individual. He does not support the mutilating of an individual in the name of some moralistic ideal.

Kropotkin was born in 1842, and makes many observations to his contemporary society. I find it interesting that what we bitch about today, he was bitching about back in the late 1800’s; Hypocrisy, deceit, wars, inequality, lies, backstabbing, and a general restriction on individual freedom. He was deeply concerned with the hierarchy of authority and its abuses. He goes to great length to demonstrate the morality of an anarchist system of social organization. He sometimes becomes rather bitter with religion, pointing out the hypocrisy of that social force and its abuse of hierarchy.

I have much to go in reading Kropotkin’s essays and dissertations. But so far, he was a man of his times and just as applicable in today’s world, and for me, a very interesting man to learn about. There are a few questions that have come up concerning his writings, but maybe they will be answered as I plow through his stuff. I suspect that his influence today will be similar to his time, a small but vocal adherents to his ideas.

It appears obvious to me that a strong central state will always become corrupt and self-serving, always, at least so history teaches us. Central states always seek control over everything that can be controlled. Their dissolution may take some time, but dissolution always occurs. Central states, always, are run by a very small minority of elites that always have an agenda that is self-serving. Even during the formation of this country and its constitution, which was rather radical at the time, the folks writing the document were self-serving, looking ahead by generations for a continuation of elitist control.

It sure appears to me that Kropotkin’s contention that only an anarchistic society can actually survive over the long term at the benefit of all of its citizens with maximum freedom. This would necessitate that each person is willing to take responsibility for their actions and that only freely accepted associations would be the norm. That societies are prone to grant power to the few in a hierarchy because of the promises they make to grab power keeps us from having a free society. If a more anarchistic society is ever to become a reality, there will be great pain within the society to form it because of this dependency. The present attitude of populations across the globe, and its dependency on a strong central government, does not bode well for such a change. However, folks have to make a decision as to which causes more harm and hardship over time. It is the same with our present economic situation. The pain that would have to be endured by the population to cure what ails us economically is unacceptable to most folks. But, it will come, it always does.

Elections - Think Local

photo credit: Time Magazine A Blast from the Past - Note how well third party or alternative candidates have done. by murph I have refrained from saying too much on this blog about the coming election, and like the last election in 2008, the very low probability about whether it will even be held. Remember back in 2008 there was some speculation whether there would be a contrived crises and elections would be put off? It didn’t happen then and I really don’t expect it to happen this time around. It would seem to me that we are going to have only a choice between two candidates that have no significant difference in foreign and domestic policies and economic policies. Ron Paul has only one thing that seems to really differentiate himself from the others, (the dismantling of the federal reserve) and that seems to be going over like a lead balloon. I am currently convinced that Paul has no chance; the financial folks are simply not going to allow that to happen. The Libertarian party candidates so far simply have nothing really new to say about anything and do not even adhere to their own party platform and haven’t enough traction to have a chance. ANY candidate that would actually dare to stand up and advocate any real changes and improvement in our national predicament can not get coverage in the mass media and in today’s world, has no chance at all. Carl Denninger, of The Market Ticker, had some very pertinent comments on this in his Saturday April 29th postings that talks about this. Here is a quote from that posting; “How about these ideas -- all of which are very Libertarian? · All the fraudsters who were involved in the 2007-08 financial collapse are going to be investigated and where possible indicted and imprisoned, starting with those who ripped off the most money. How many jobs and homes were lost in the last few years and how many people would vote for a candidate that said this and actually meant it? I'm willing to bet there's not one person in America of voting age who was not impacted personally by this series of scams and frauds or has a family member or close friend that was. Oh sure, you won't get any Wall Street votes with this platform plank, but they're the 0.1%, not the 1%. · The banking system will be put on a One Dollar of Capital basis when I am elected, preventing you from being ripped off again, and wage and environmental arbitrage will be ended through the Constitutional process of tariffs to end the abuse of people and the environment that happens to also offshore our manufacturing jobs. Again, how many jobs have been lost and how much looting has taken place? Couple this with my monetary inflation and income graphs and you have an instant winner -- show the people that they have had 10% or more of their purchasing power stolen annually for the last decade! · The monopolists in the medical system will have their privileges revoked and the free market will be restored. The drug that is available for $2 in Canada but costs $25 here will be able to be imported by anyone who wishes; your cost for medical care will collapse. You won't need insurance for other than catastrophic events such as a heart attack as everything else will be affordable on a minimum wage job. Yes, you won't get one vote from the pharmaceutical industry this way (or one campaign dollar) but you will get votes from Seniors and everyone else who currently can't afford reasonable medical treatment and who has seen their insurance expenses go to the moon. Incidentally that's all the small business owners, self-employed and once you educate people, those who work for big businesses and union employees as well! · With those steps along with a real foreign policy (see my link here) we could actually balance the Federal Budget. Not the weasely crap that Johnson parades around with claiming he'll submit a balanced budget (but note he doesn't say he'll veto one that is not balanced when the bills get to his desk!) but a real balanced budget that allocates funds only from what's actually taxed. · Yes, I recognize that this will result in an immediate 10% or so economic contraction in GDP -- once. But the cleaning out of the bad debt in the system is both necessary and healthy. See 1920/21 for what happens when you do the right thing -- the asset price crash comes, as does the bankrupties,(sic) but immediately following that is economic recovery, realignment and progress.” Now, of course, all of these ideas would also get no play in the mass media, the only place you would hear about it would be on the internet. Just like with the current Ron Paul blackout. It appears to me that the political elites and the financial elites are so intertwined that this kind of reformation is currently impossible. The appearance that this intertwining is going to eventually collapse this nation, and others as well, is completely immaterial. These folks are not stupid, they know damned well what will be the outcome of the continuance of our current policies. I therefore have to conclude that it is deliberate. These folks in power evidently have a vision of the outcome of these policies that has nothing to do with national and population health. It is some kind of a New World Order agenda that we have only a hazy and incomplete picture of and thus a whole bunch of speculation by us peons. I suspect that Denninger’s projection of a 10% reduction in GDP is minimalist. I suspect it would be a lot more, and while true it would be just once, it would be a disaster for some time. Contractions like that last for quite some time. During this campaign, I notice that no candidate wants to deal with the actual issues of constitutionality, energy, environmental degradation, and actual population well being. Even Ron Paul is mostly a single-issue candidate, seemingly thinking that his fix will fix all that ails this nation. I will posit that there is no single fix for what ails this country and for that matter, the rest of the world. In my life experiences, there simply ain’t no silver bullet, no panacea to cure all that is so deadly wrong with western culture in particular. Western culture has existed since the Roman times by looting other areas of the world. Empires, including the present one, have developed sophisticated wealth pumps into the elites pockets that create impoverishment in the subjected countries, wars and environmental disasters. It also appears that this has taken place throughout history, even pre Roman. The difference is that the world was rather sparsely populated and the worldwide damage was limited to regional areas. Now, it is a total worldwide problem. I see no means for this to end, unless by some kind of outside influence. Alien interjection? Even with that----? Even with that, we have what sure appears to me to be what we call ”human nature” to contend with; desire for power, desire for wealth, selfishness, greed and all the other assumed negative attributes of being human. And this is taking into account those few individuals in the world population that do not buy into that mode of thinking. My experience is that many of the folks that claim they do not buy into it, when the chips come down, actually do. When self-interest is threatened, we are going to resist, or at least talk about resistance. No political candidate at the national level is going to base a campaign on the rejection of what appears as the primary parts of “human nature”; limiting of greed, selfishness and the desire for wealth. No politician in our present day and age is going to advocate policies that are contrary to the elitist’s desires. He can’t possibly win. Every one of the panaceas I come across are false thinking. Everything is too interconnected for a silver bullet to cure what ails us. It would take a massive change in attitudes and the consequent change in policies that are not on the horizon that I can see. We can play around with all kinds of speculations about what the elitist’s agenda’s are and how to counter it. But we are doomed to failure if we do not have a huge attitude change about human’s role and place on this planet. There will be no changes until the majority of the population realizes just how much they have been manipulated by a very few members of the population. Those few people that do understand this, are simply not influential enough to affect significant change. Along with the national elections going on, States and local elections are also taking place. Our organization here, (Citizens Action Group, CAG) held a “meet and greet” the candidates forum. We did it a bit different. Each candidate could speak briefly on what they considered the 2 most basic issues on a local basis. Then, it was one on one question and answer period where the folks in attendance got to circulate around and talk to as many candidates as they could. IMO, it was one of the more successful forums I have attended. I found it amazing how little each candidate really understood the local issues, with a few exceptions. I actually talked with a judge running for that office that did seem to understand a lot of it. Some of the candidates for different offices seemed to be in some kind of outer orbit that I simply could not fathom. Of course there was the usual “got to create jobs” and the got to have “growth” bunch. Only 2 candidates seemed to be able to grasp that “growth” was the problem, most of them not understanding that resources for “growth” were limited and that actual sustainability was important with no growth, you know, the standard business Chamber of Commerce position, the “if you ain’t growing you are dying” position. With a couple of candidates I asked how growth could occur with resources becoming a limiting factor. They sure didn’t want to deal with that question. I also asked what they wanted to do about the herbicide problems. They only looked confused, like “what problem?” I asked one candidate about aerial spraying. He just laughed, said he wasn’t into conspiracies. Now I will admit that from personal exposure, at least at the local level, most of the folks that take on political office spend a huge amount of time at long meetings and study concerning what they are in office to do. They also must spend a lot of time going out and meeting their constituents and believe it or not, they also have personal issues and a life to live too. With a very limited amount of time available they simply can’t get up to speed on every issue that other folks are concerned with. It is very easy for them to depend on “authorities” to give them the low down and never check out that information. Which means that many actual critical issues are never brought to their attention and the contradictions of information. At the local level, they don’t have the money to put together staff that has checks and balances concerning their information. So a lot of bad decisions are always going to be made. And, god forbid if they advocate something that is unpopular with their constituents, regardless as to whether it is the best decision. Got to admit that I couldn’t do it. Got to admit that I am cynical enough that I probably will not bother to vote for anything above the local elections where some control over events are possible. Not only do I have very limited real knowledge of national candidates positions, (limited to national MSN pronouncements) but I also assume they are never going to tell us what their real positions are anyway. We have been lied to so much I don’t really understand how anyone can accept what they say. Very short memories? Sorry for the long rant. Nothing new in this post. Just putting it together in a condensed fashion.

Darwin? Not So Much....

by muroh

Hot Springs Wizard, in the last post, put up a link to Survivalacres blog with a posting on his view of “bugging out” when the SHTF. I have been advocating much the same thoughts on this for a long time now and have occasionally mentioned some of my thoughts on the subject at the campfire. However, I have a few disagreements concerning his conclusions and the scenarios he offered.

He starts off with the idea that a family man decides to abandon wife and kids and hit the wilderness with a backpack when things turn absolutely sour and lists in detail what he is leaving behind and the consequences. No problem with that scenario but personally I don’t know any men that would be willing to abandon their family like that. Granted, some might be so inclined, but most would try and make it with the family I think, maybe even with a few others at the same time. Safety in numbers and all that implies. The problem with this is that very few people from modern society are actually knowledgeable enough to even try and pull it off. That is, the death rate for such attempts would be quite high, probably around the 90% mark.

Let’s take a look at some things he didn’t mention.

Depending on your locality and what kind of environment you are escaping into, food, water and environmental protection are the primary concerns. In a desert environment heat, water and food would be very hard to overcome. In the northern environments, cold weather is a real problem. None of these problems are impossible to overcome, but so few would be prepared to deal with it as to be a nonsensical try. Remember the Apaches from the early history in America? They did it.

Some time ago, I had a young fellow (20 something) tell me that if things got real bad, he would head off into the wilderness and be self sufficient as he knew how to hunt and fish and build rough shelters. I asked him if he knew how to make his own clothes, how to make gunpowder, how to replace his supplies as they broke or were used up and how he would make the time to do so if he did know how. I got a silent stare. I then asked him just how much game he figured was available and how many other folks would be trying the same thing. I suggested that there would be so many folks so desperate for food that the game would rapidly disappear or become very wary and very difficult to get to. We aren’t living in the 16th century any more, with abundant game and wildlife to sustain humans to any large degree. They would soon be gone. Then what? Plus, I would think there would be a whole lot of folks out there trying to find whatever was edible and willing to take whatever you had.

If you read the diaries and what information there is available concerning the folks that did this kind of living back in the very early days of this countries settlement, it was a very tough way to live in comparison to today. Our modern way of living does not prepare us for this, even close.

What Survival Acres did not mention is the idea that living in a SHTF scenario will demand a much lower standard of living and a much greater demand on an individuals or families ability to adapt, to become much more sustainable by their own efforts. Living in a large urban center doesn’t make that very possible. You will have to supply much, if not all, of your own food and water right off the top. Until the human population is vastly reduced and game recovers (if that will even be possible due to environmental degradation) people are going to have to figure out how to grow their own food wherever they are. If you are living where this is flat out impossible you will need to get somewhere where it is possible. Then, you will have to deal with those folks that figure looting and stealing is the best way to go.

This has little to do with temporary dislocation due to some kind of disaster like volcanoes, or flooding or even radiological dangers. Human populations running away from immediate dangers are common enough. I am not going to even try and deal with cosmological disasters like pole reversals, meteor impacts, continental shifts, rising oceans, or extreme sun activity.

If we look at recorded human history and speculate on unrecorded human history, we can see that small bands of humans survived very well over fairly large land areas in all kinds of environments. But, survival of individuals without the support of some amount of other humans was very rare indeed. The survival needs were broken down into fairly specialized skills that contributed to all of the group; those that learned to make clothing, tools, shelter, hunting, finding water, and, yes, fighting.

One of the more specific thinkers of the early 1900’s was Peter Kropotkin on biology and politics. He maintained that the concept of Darwin’s survival of species by the fittest was off base. He maintained it was cooperation that insured species survival, particularly humans. The survival of individuals by the fittest worked ok, but not for a species. After all, over 90% of all the species that have ever inhabited this planet are now gone, become extinct. Without cataclysmic interruption, it appears that humans are the best suited to for survival as long as they cooperate with each other in that endeavor. It sure appears to me that humans have ceased to really be cooperative to survive, and, instead have become entranced with individual survival; the whole social Darwinism concept that seems to be predominating today.

Our environment has warmed up, but is still wet and cold. We have begun to plant some early starts for the garden in the greenhouse and the cold cases. I’ve got some small engine repairs and clean up to do and a whole bunch of clean up on the property to get done. Finally the wintered over garlic, onions and rhubarb are poking up. It’s still so cool that nothing else is showing signs yet of interest to do much. Warm enough though that the chickens are perking up on the egg laying. Still have to determine what hens to cull out for not being productive at all. I’ve got about 60 rabbit hides drying to get to the tanning when I have the time. I’m really missing Brie.