Village Blog

You may have read a little about the economic crash in Argentina and how nice middle-class ladies were seen attacking ATM machines with knives amidst other mayhem. Well here's an article formed out of what appears to have been a series of postings to a peak oil message board by a guy living in Argentina. From what he says Argentina is in a permanent post-crash situation and the article is both highly illuminating and very frightening with the advice it dispenses. Particularly worrying is the amount of time the guys spent talking about guns.

 

Yes I still believe that oportunites for community will occur but I after this I am much more convinced of the need to be  prepared for, shall we say, other eventualities.

Further to Ran’s discussion of roofing materials yesterday, I was indeed glad he bought the issue up, We will probably end up using a modern roofing material on the house we will build but I think we will make it steep enough so that long term some kind of thatch can be used over the top of it when it begins to fail, or else make the timbers strong enough that they can take homemade clay tiles if it comes to that.

 

Ran quoted an email of mine which ended with:

 

This roofing issue is hard, maybe we need to get away from attempting to go long term and look at what renewable materials are available locally so we know we can always maintain it.

 

If we’re looking long term then this really is our only option but I have to admit that it wasn’t my ‘position’ on sustainability that prompted me to make this comment. It was a combination of trying to think really long term along with a quote from a book called Home Work, by Llod Kahn. This quote got the point across to me in a way that no one had previously:

 

In the early 70’s I got on a charter flight to Ireland, crossed the Irish Sea and got a long ride with a salesman; when he learned I was interested in building he started pointing out buildings and showing us that each was built of materials from near the site. You see the slate roofs, there’s a slate quarry nearby…” and then, “Now the roofs are tile because there is clay in the soil here…” As we travelled through England, it was striking: the thatched roofs in Norfolk, land of marshes and reeds; the sandstone walls of the Cotswalds, where the light tan colours blend perfectly with the surroundings; cob in Devon; flint in Sussex…

 

I got the book because it has a photo collection of unusual and low-tech buildings in it. It will serve as creative fuel for when I get to designing our new place but it also has more than that. It's full of inspiration for dropping out and using non-mainstream methods of constructing homes. Plus it's great eye-candy. Here’s some of the pictures from the front cover. Note the house on the little island.

One thing that bugged me though was the collection of people in the book who had gone off the grid. The main focus for all of them was their wind and solar power generating systems. Clearly the issue of EROEI was never discussed but somehow it seems worse that in their attempts to get ‘away from it all’ they had actually bought ‘a lot of it’ with them. They had simply altered the energy equation so that they could maintain essentially the same lifestyle - except with the addition of more trees about the place.

 

A minor quibble though, it's a great book, not just for the know-how but also for the inspiration. 

 

 

Via Idleworm, we might be the last culture to try large cities but we certainly weren't the first - researchers discover that Angkor Wat in Cambodia used to cover an area the size of Los Angeles.

Just read this excellent article from Information Clearning House by Carolyn Baker. I've read a lot of intelligent and scathing articles about the corruption of America by a guy called Mike Whitney at ICH but this, if anything, is better. For people who don't read Cryptogon or similar sites this article will give you a nice summary of where things are with the US economic system.

 

Carolyn Baker talks a lot about the corruption of the system and mentions the law changes that are going to be used to control the population, I just wish I could find someone in New Zealand who was making a similar conmmentary for us down here.

 

I think I'm going to have to resurrect my old radio show so I can have an excuse to interview people like Carolyn Baker.

 

Stop Press. No I won't. I just went to her website and saw that she already does radio.

 

Anyway, here's a wee quote:

 

It is crucial to understand that the current economic meltdown is a transfer of wealth from the middle and lower classes to the ruling elite. Wealth transfers do not just happen, nor are they the products of incompetency. They are intentional and well-planned. Central to wealth transfer is corruption at the highest levels of the economic and political systems

I'm feeling really frustrated at the level of paranoia that exists around these parts at the moment. Sure there is plenty of commentary about the technical issues surrounding the money markets, peak oil and the machinations of power but when these technical experts start trying to predict the human response to these technical situations they unknowingly step into an area where I think they are out of their depth. They seem to be quite unaware that their thinking  has been colonised by the Mad Max 'scenario' that the elites regularly feed us through the media. I talked about community v Mad Max in a previous post but now I want to deal with this damn paranoia thing.

This has been triggered by Ted's post on the issue but it is just the tip of the iceberg for me.

 

The first thing I want to deal with is the idea of agent provocateurs. I've got a rough list of people I’ve seen mentioned in this context. Before I get into this though I want to say up front how appalled I am at the lack of judgement people seem to bring to this problem - relying instead on a kind of personalised suspicion to decide who to trust. I really want people to talk less about who the source a particular piece of news is and instead discuss the power of the facts and the argument they present. Naturally this is harder and involves reading more widely and building up our map of the world but if we hadn’t been dumbed down at school this is precisely what we would do without beign conscious of it.

 

Noam Chomsky. I’ve seen people say he is a CIA asset because of his position on the JFK thing. Whilst anything is possible in this world I find it hard to believe that anyone could fake the kind of analysis he brings to his writings. He’s the best there is in his area. I think we need to accept the role that human emotion plays in the lives of these people (of course to do that we have to first accept the role it plays in the decisions we make, but that’s another posting).

 

Chomsky is able to obliterate the US government’s stated reasons for it’s foreign policy by using it’s own documents. What he does is impossible to argue with if you’ve got an open mind - Impossible. I think he’s comfortable doing what he does, he's carved out a particular niche for himself and doesn’t see the point in straying into vaguer territory – and he basically says as much.

 

Besides, if he was a CIA asset he’s not doing a very good job because it was a Chomsky book that got me started on my move away from the mainstream. He’s a great gateway radical.

 

Amy Goodman and Greg Palast: Yes they have their limits too, they come from a traditional journalistic background and they probably just can’t handle the idea that 9-11 was an inside job (this is a problem for the vast majority of the population). They also hang out with other journalists, especially Palast with his BBC connections, and no doubt have the very human urge to want to be liked and fit in with their crowd. It takes a bloody-minded bastard like John Pilger to be the sort of journalist we’re looking for.

 

All that aside though, if mainstream journalists were like Palast and Goodman the world would be a profoundly different place.

 

Michael Moore:  Basically Michael Moore is positioned where the Democratic Party is supposed to be, its entirely possible that he provides a boundary to what is considered acceptable leftism but on the other hand he has bought a few issues out into the open in a way that is accessible for a lot of ‘normal’ people and that’s nothing that anyone else I can think of has achieved.

 

He’s another gateway too, his website has links to more radical sites and he’ll set a lot of people off down a path of radicalism before he’s done.

 

Derrick Jensen: This suggestion was part of the discussion at Free Range Organic Human on the basis that Derrick does promotes the idea of destroying civilisation and that this would play directly into the hands of the elites. I can just see it now; “It’s not just swarthy men you have to look out for. Now the terrorists look like us. They could be your neighbour, or your friend, or the person behind the counter at the supermarket. You better look out!”.

 

That’s exactly where the PTB want to take us but Derrick is very real. Like Chomsky the power of his analysis is just too good to be conjured up. Reading A language Older than Words shifted my thinking in the same way my first Chomsky book did.

 

Having said that though, I see no reason why the PTB wouldn’t promote Derrick’s books, even without his knowledge, because a bunch of anarchists bombing cell phone towers and dams has got to be one of their ultimate dreams.

 

Daily Kos: OK this guy is pure CIA, no doubt about it 

 

Gloria Steinem:  Sorry folks, it looks like the CIA funded Ms Magazine. I found it  hard to choose between the  jesus-is-saviour link or the save-the-males link but choose the ‘males’ one in the end. There’s a bit of ranting about feminists destroying society but follow their links to their source documents if you want. It certainly does tie in with this astounding interview with Aaron Russo where he said the Rockefellers promoted feminism to help break up the family and make children dependant on the state from an early age.

 

Now here’s the catch, none of these people need to be CIA assets for this whole thing to work. I just wasted a bunch of time researching and writing this post to try to deal with the paranoia that’s out there, while other people are getting into arguments about it or are just plain confused about who they can trust. All an agent provocateur needs to do is seed a little doubt about various people and they very quickly get us all running around in circles like a bunch of headless chooks.

 

We shouldn’t forget that going to school made us  think we need an authoritative voice to trust so it’s important to rebel by ignoring the personalities and developing our own judgement on these issues.

 

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The suggestion that Greg Palast was an agent provocateur came from some people commenting at Cryptogon (including Matt Savinar) and Matt turned up again, quoted by Sharon (link see comment 22), in a discussion about  a proposed general strike in the US:

 

“I think most Americans may also be too frightened. I emailed the guy who hosts lifeaftertheoilcrash.com, and he emailed back that participation in a general strike would end with me being tortured and raped in an internment camp.”

 

I have to say I don’t know what else was in the email but the above advice is not very good. Matt Savinar has a great deal of technical expertise but not a lot of understanding of human nature.

 

Derrick Jensen has written that the Jews in Warsaw who actively opposed the Nazis had a better survival rate than those who kept quiet. He emphasises this a lot for obvious reasons and it’s something people in the US might do well to remember.

 

Aside from that though, a proper general strike would involve way too many people for the PTB to deal with. They might assassinate an organiser but getting everyone who strikes would be an impossibility. The PTB know this which is why they have schools and Television to keep everyone apathetic and afraid.

 

I’m starting to think that if anyone is an agent provocateur it’s Matt Savinar, the paranoia seeping out of LATOC is palpable and as I’ve said before one of my major fears about post crash culture will be the peak oil survivalists. I want to know where they are going to be so I can go somewhere else. Matt won’t tell anyone where he is and may well move again I hear. I don’t think there’s much more we can learn from someone who hasn’t the good sense to build a community around him.

 

Please note I’m not actually saying he IS a provocateur, I can’t prove that and he’s probably just a graduate of an American childhood of schooling and television. What I am saying though is his advice needs augmenting by reading some Derrick Jensen or Ran Prieur.

I was planning to write a post about dropping out but geopolitical events of the last two weeks have rather distracted me. It really feels like the financial system is on the verge of a serious collapse. A few weeks ago there was a collapse of a couple of hedge funds in the US and this week there have been problems with funds in Europe as well and now the European Central Bank has released a truckload of credit into the system to make up for a lack of ‘liquidity’.

Basically no one is buying anymore.

Oh yeah, and China is threatening to withdraw it’s support of the US economy.

All this is kind of independent of the peak oil issue and It’s been a long time coming but I’m starting to feel like there’s not going to be much left to drop out of fairly soon. It’s not a good feeling.

I’m supposed to be working on getting prepared to ride out the crash but it’s so easy to get distracted by normal every day stuff – especially when you have children. I have to admit that when I wander round town with everyone going about their usual business it’s hard to hold the idea in my head that it’s all going to end – or at least change a hell of a lot. And when we were travelling in the bus, totally immersed in our immediate life experience it was nearly impossible to hang onto the idea.

It does feel more real this week though, especially as a friend told me ont he phone today that at a spiritual level he feels like a massive paradigm shift will happen in the next couple of days. I don’t yet know what he bases that on but it just adds to a growing sense of unease that I have – and it’s not helping me make decisions. I may actually just have to makes some guesses on a few things - which I don’t normally like to do.

 

However, in the event of life continuing in a kind of normal way for some time yet, which is just as likely, here’s some thoughts on dropping out;

I was looking in the Cryptogon archives the other day for an old posting and discovered this instead, it’s from the comments as opposed to an actual posting but here’s what Kevin had to say about dropping out.

 

… I formally studied insurgency and counter insurgency in college. I have a pretty good grasp of how low intensity warfare works, theoretically. I thought long and hard about how I could strike the most damaging blow possible to this diabolical system.

Drop out.

Dropping out to the extent possible is the best choice. Doing that hurts this system in a serious way.
And, nope, it’s not easy out here on the Farmlet. But nobody said it was going to be easy! If I ever start to feel as though it’s too rough, all I have to do is think about that corporate prison camp reality I left behind. Fixes me right up.

What interests me about this is that someone like Ran agrees with him. The two guys are operating in entirely different head spaces, one a philospher, the other a techie but they’ve arrived at the same place on this issue.

The only thing I would add to that is that the simplest way of dropping out is to become debt free, or at least less in-debted. I’d estimate that roughly half of economic activity is devoted to generating income to pay back loans, meaing that half of economic activity is dedicated to gifting money to the people who own our banks, bless their flinty little souls.

Put aside things like leaving our high paying jobs and living lightly, the one, most signficant thing we can do is to focus on getting out of debt. We got our of debt in about 6 years, which means we have deprived the banking system of 19 years of interest payments. The other benefit of course, is that we have a lot more freedom because of it, which was thereal motivating factor at the time - not striking a blow to the heart of capitalism :-) Although the two issues are intimately tied together.

 

Basically our entire society has evolved as a mechanism for creating wealth for banks, it’s why we must have growth for the economy to function successfully. It's so that us serfs pay our dues to our masters, except now they’ve realised there is a limit to growth and are in the process of engineering a fun new system for us.

After my recent five-filling marathon at the dentist I decided that whatever modern dentistry had to offer, it wasn't enough for me. I followed some of the links Ran posted after his recent visit to a dentist and here's what I have learned. Some of this is from a retired chemist at this site. I include the link because it wasn't directly included in Ran's selection. In order to really review his ideas I would need to read his book which I haven't done but I do think there is a lot of merit in listening to people from other fields.

 

1. It's not bacteria that eat into our teeth, it's acid. It is often however the bacteria that produce the acid (by fermenting glucose) when they consume the food we put in our mouth. Apparently this is basic chemistry:  The proton on the acid pulls the phosphate out of the enamel and fast, if you sip water is reacts with the acid to form a hydronium ion and saves the enamel. 

 

2. Some food are naturally acidic, like citrus fruit and tomatoes. This makes sense to me, sometimes after drinking orange juice it actually feels like a layer has been stripped from my teeth. 

 

3. The acid does it's stuff for only a short period which is why dentists say not to eat between meals, so that your teeth are free of acid for long periods of the day - if only they could have explained why.

 

4. Rinsing your mouth with water or milk or coffee neutralises the acid immediately so have a drink to sip while you eat. Note; I tried this and it does leave a weird taste if you've just had something like citrus fruit to eat.

 

5. Sugars have large molecules so they only eat into teeth slowly. Wash the sugar off by all means but don't panic about it. Also fruit sugars are more complex than refined sugars

 

6.  Enamel is made of Calcium and Phosphate and it can rebuild if we are consuming enough of those minerals - which we currently do not - and I clearly am not.

 

7. Taking calcium pills and monosodium phosphate pills is one way of strengthening your teeth. Presumably there are foods that will do the same so I'm open to suggestions. Perhaps permaculturists can help us make sure we have the right minerals in the soil to ensure healthy teeth.

 

8. Vitamin D delivers calcium to the site - so go out and sunbathe! Actually the guy suggested more pills.

 

9. Brush your teeth with regular bar soap!  Sounds gross I know but this guy insists it's a good idea. He says soap is anti bacterial and only takes 2 rinses to wash off. On the other hand normal toothpaste leaves glycerine on your teeth, because it takes 20 rinses to get off, and will prevent re-enamalisation from taking place,   Someone on a forum suggested tooth soap which I had never heard of but it might be a more palatable option. Just check the ingrediants first. My 2 year old has experimented with brushing with soap but I have to admit to feeling strangely reluctant.

 

10. Avoid flouride, it's a heavily negative chemical (visit the site for a slightly lengthier explanation). 

 

11. My teeth still feel funny after my visit to the dentist and it's been a week 

 

Ran's latest posting on this subject has a couple more links one of which confirms some of this and also adds:

 

12. Don't brush straight after eating because the enamel will be soft and you'll brush some of it away. 

 

It's ridiculous that I knew none of this information before I started looking. I'm going to try it out (not sure about the soap though) and see how it goes. I could hardly do any worse. If you want to add to this or argue please feel free, I'm keen to learn more. 

There’s an interesting post over at Cryptogon where Kevin is warning people of the potential dangers of post collapse living, talking about militias, warlords and armed children and teenagers. I don’t disagree that this is one of the potential outcomes of a crash but I do disagree that it is the only way things will turn out.

 

It’s really important not to go into the crash thinking that it’s going to be mayhem and that you’ll need to be heavily armed to survive. It might be mayhem and you might need to be heavily armed but it would be profoundly stupid to be prepared for only this eventuality.  What terrifies me most about that approach is the self-fulfilling prophesy aspect of it. I want to know where all the people are who think like this so I can go somewhere else.

 

Don’t get me wrong I think the point of view Kevin presents is useful and well argued, and I also think that people who are getting a bit starry-eyed about the re-birth of community should definitely take it on board but I think he also sets up a straw man by referring to new-age gatherings and charkas and auras as the counter to his argument.

 

Reading M Scott Peck recently he pointed out that real truths have a paradoxical quality about them and that misleading ‘truths’ are very one-sided. This definitely looks like one of those cases. I think it’s bad advice to offer people a single vision, no matter how well worked out.

 

If you want advice on what the future may hold and you only want to read one essay then Ran’s Fall Down Six Times  is the place to go – it contains 6 different predictions and the reader is left with a much more complex understanding of what the future may hold and knows that they will have to use their judgement (which is now much better informed) to survive. If you’ve only got one side of the story, as seductive as it may be, it can be a bit prescriptive and you’ll be left clinging to a plan of the future that goes one way while reality goes another.

 

Anyway, in an attempt to paint a big picture I’m going to provide some links to stories of how people pulled together, in a very old fashioned way, in time of disaster. It’s the way people always have, and the way they always, will respond in times of crisis. AND here’s the main point again, these are not predictions of the future – they are stories that will inform your ability to cope with and plan for the future. It’s wide open baby.

 

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Here’s some of the text of an interview I did with Joe Polasicher. Joe is an Austrian born, New Zealand based permaculturist who was a child in Austria after WW2. He talks about that but also about a visit to a shantytown in South America where he discovered people feeding themselves from very small but highly complex stacked systems in tiny courtyards. It also has other useful links including to the original radio interview and this other posting about the same stories. 

 

Here’s a radio interview of Geoff Lawton, another permaculturist. 

 

He went to Iraq a couple of years back and discovered a town where the local people were keeping their infrastructure running by means of their own ingenuity. Again, I’m not saying the stories of mayhem in Iraq are somehow misleading, only that both chaos and community are happening as a response to their problems. Here also, are links to a Ran Prieur essay, scroll to the bottom to find some text about this interview.

 

Here’s something else I wrote about the issue of post-crash strategy that I just rediscovered. 

 

Here’s Ran’s lesson’s learned from Katrina.

 

Here’s what I think is the best article about the untold story of Hurricane Katrina. But also: how people comandeered a bus, how people formed into tribes,   and how soldiers threw bottles at people during the crisis in New Orleans.

 

And lastly, in Ran’s archives, a guest post from Patricia. I don’t know how to link halfway down a page so go there and scroll down to November 22. Here’s the first paragraph though;

 

So, I was following links around, and I see this conversation about survival in the suburbs -- and it made me depressed. What's wrong with these people? Not one of them is thinking about working on having a local community in place now, so that in the event of any trouble, the people in your neighborhood will work together and help and protect one another. Not one of them!

 

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The last thing I want to say is that instead of trying to create security with the end of a gun the best way to protect your food is to make so much food that you can afford to give it away.  It’s a great way to make friends who will help look after you later on if it comes to that. It’s a big ask to try to get your entire district set up to produce an abundance of food but it’s my aim around here. I’ m not sure how much I can achieve but anything will be an improvement on sitting here with my tins of spam and boxes of ammo. So here’s the last link – to a town in Ireland that is setting the pace in community-wide preparedness. 

Quite by coincidence, when Ran’s new posting about his teeth appeared I was sitting here with a numb face having just got back from getting 5 new fillings in my teeth. There’s no holistic dentist near here so I went to the local one and asked for the white fillings thanks.

To be honest I despair about my teeth, when I left school I had no fillings but ever since then I can’t go to the dentist without getting more put in. This time I set a new record. Five in one go, in a marathon 2 hour session. The dentist shook my hand at the end.

For some reason I had this powerful sense of dread before going, which is why I had put it off for so long, the feeling gradually subsided while I was there but it didn’t help matters at the start. To make matters worse my jaw seized up at one point and I could barely open it. I was trying hard to focus on something else (I was estimating the length of my finger nails by sense of touch at the time) and had my eyes closed, when I realised that the dentist and his assistant were laughing, I became aware that my mouth had closed up and the assistant couldn’t get the sucker thing out. I hadn’t noticed previously because my entire mouth was numb and I couldn’t feel what she was doing. I could only hear the tool clattering against my teeth.

I’ve decided to fast today in an attempt to mitigate against the mercury that has no doubt flooded through my body since they removed an old amalgam filling in the process. I’m not sure how effective it will be but the whole family is away today so it’s an ideal time anyway.

As for what’s going to happen when lights turn out and the dentist can’t get painkillers any more I hate to think. To be honest this is probably my biggest fear of post-crash life. I know there is a native plant called Kawakawa which Maori used as a painkiller plus there is the option of getting bombed out of my tree before going for post apocalypse dental care but really I would prefer to just have good teeth.

And yes, I know about the Palaeolithic diet. Weston Price came to New Zealand, collected up a bunch of Maori skulls (don’t ask me how) and worked out that pre-European Maori had dental cavities at a rate of one in one thousand. I'm pretty sure I could live with that.

I congratulate people who have made this change to their life and I’d love to hear from anyone who has successfully put an end to dental problems this way, but I have a young family and other priorities. Making any kind of change is difficult but one like this is near impossible, especially as I doubt that I could convince the others to give up grain-based foods and I know we couldn’t afford it.

Additionally, food is a comfort device – some would say a necessary comfort for civilisation - and I imagine that until the temptation is removed there will be minimal chance of this happening for us.

Damn, I can still feel them aching…

This has been on my mind ever since I started this blog but somehow I’ve never got to it until now. A Thursday a while back I had two interviews lined up on my radio show. The first was of a member of the NZ Green party and the second was of regular interviewee Jon Eisen (editor of Uncensored magazine). The first interview was my big splash, first time coverage of peak oil intended to bring an IMPORTANT SUBJECT to the attention of my listeners.

 

So I did that and then came Jon. I think the interview was supposed to be about free energy but Jon soon got on to rusbbishing Peakniks for being a bunch of unwitting suckers in a conspiracy to raise oil prices. I was a bit pissed about having my show hijacked and Jon is from New York so we were soon involved in a heated debate at the end of which I ended up saying something along the lines of; so we’ll probably never know whether peak oil is a scam or not but either we it’s going to happen to us.

 

Jon rounded it off by telling everyone to go to their computer and google ‘abiotic oil’. I myself found several sites, (including Ran’s, so it was definitely worth it!). Of specific interest were the Campaign for an Informed America run by a guy called Dave who had intersting stuff but who kept going off on tangents about a fued he was having with Mike Ruppert, leading me worry a bit about his judgement.

 

Far more credible was this site by J F Kenney who explained in great detail that the abiotic oil theory had been developed by the Russians a few decades ago and that the science had gone through a long periof of debate and was now considered to be accepted fact in the Russian scientific community. He also said that they had been drilling for oil very successfully using this theory for some time. My problem with this site was that it was very heavy on the science and I just didn’t have the time to wade through it all.

 

Now if you mention that you’ve been reading about abiotic oil to peak oilers they’re inclined to laugh at you in the same way that a rationalist will if you admit to believing in god. I’ve seen people’s entire credibility destroyed on peak oil lists with the simple but devastating “…but then he believes in abiotic oil”. Typical of the rebuttals of abiotic oil is this one by Richard Heinberg where he claims that only a small proportion of Russian scientists support the abiotic oil theory, he makes no attempt to explain how he came by this information, nor does he appear to speak Russian (unlike JF Kenney) so I'm kind of concerned about his biases too.

  This is all a bit worrying, there seems far too much expectant excitement amongst peak oilers at the prospect of consumer culture and it’s consumers getting what they deserve. Aside from the dubious nature of this excitement it also seems to blind people to other things that are going on.

 

I’ve seen people rattling off lists of all the countries whose oil production is in the process of peaking without the slightest sign of awareness that the odds of that are actually quite small and that the peak refers to a global peak only and that it won’t necessarily coincide with any one country or field’s peak.

 

Coinciding with this first coincidence however we also have two more peaks. One in world wide natural gas production and another in world wide food production. Yes, that’s right; peak food.

On top of all that it would also appear that the US economy is also being being deliberately driven over a cliff by an apparently blind and incompetent  US administration.

 

I don’t claim expertise in any of these specific areas, and I'm open to having my mind changed but I do wonder just how unlikely the coincidences are and I especially wonder why hardly anyone is prepared to say it our loud. The only site I’ve noticed asking questions about what might be behind this is Cryptogon. Peakoilers are kind of scary, sometimes I even find them more scary than peak oil itself.