09/12/2007
Villageblog has moved
It's time for a change.
Click here to check out the spanking new Villageblog site and please update your bookmarks and hyperlinks.
Thank you for flying with us.
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08/13/2007
Holographic Universe
This is more Ran’s territory than mine but here, via Free Range Organic Human is a fascinating article about how the universe is a hologram.
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The article has a myriad of links and upon following one of them I discovered that it had a New Zealand based domain. Out of curiosity I went to the homepage and discovered this Indigenous Weather Modification site. Until the advent of the internet there really was nothing else that could deliver this degree of ‘unusualness’ to my life.
The operator of the site claims to be able to modify the weather using unspecified techniques that seem to be based on traditional Maori knowledge. It would also seem that the universe-as-hologram theory could be used to understand how it might work.
Delving further into the site I discovered something that had a fantastic only-in-New Zealand quality to it:
A Maori Sovereignty group had wanted to fly the Maori Independence flag on the Auckland Harbour Bridge on Waitangi day, New Zealand’s National day. The body that overseas the bridge, Transit New Zealand, had refused permission and upset a great number of Maori including the person running this website.
Shortly after this hit the headlines Transit New Zealand received an email from John Porter, weather modification consultant, telling them that he was going to teach them a lesson to the tune of $100 million dollars of weather related damage to New Zealand roads.
I can only guess at the reaction of the staff of Transit New Zealand at the arrival of this email – or at their reaction at the arrival of subsequent emails toting up the costs after every piece of bad weather we’ve had this winter.
I know this isn’t usual Village Blog fare and I can’t verify any of it except that the storms did in fact happen but I just love a good story.
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08/03/2007
How to build an inuit dog sled
It's always interesting to check the stats for this site to see where people are coming from and in the last day or so someone came to Villageblog via a search engine and the following keywords; inuit dog sled how built.
Amusingly they would have been directed to this page with a story about how someone once made an inuit dog sled. It's such a good story I'll post it again.
[I was listening to a talk] by a guy called Wade Davis who was hunting around the tip of Baffin Island and met an individual (whose name wasn't clear in the recording) who told a story about his grandfather who refused to go into one of the Inuit settlements;
"His family took away his tools and implements, hoping that it would oblige him to go into the settlement. Did it work? No. He simply stepped out into the arctic night and in the darkness, pulled down his trousers and defecated into his hand. As the faeces froze he shaped it into a blade. He put a spray of saliva along the edge and as the shit-knife took form he butchered a dog. He skinned the dog with it and made a harness, he took the rib cage of the dog and made a sled and harnessing the sled to an adjacent dog he took off over the iceflows"
I wonder if they decided to use this technique or not?
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07/26/2007
Teeth
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…
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07/04/2007
A minor success
As part of our bedtime routine for our children we usually get them to clean up their toys, which by days end seem to cover all available floor space in our living room. To start with, getting our eldest to do this was easy but it soon turned into an ugly daily event where we were using the full gamut of coercion and punishment to get her to 'clean up her mess'.
Eventually, as you might expect, we figured out that approach was waaaaay too destructive for all parties involved. Aside from the nasty atmosphere it created and aside from the people this was turning us in to and aside from the lifelong dislike of tidying-up this would produce in our daughter we also realised that for the most part the issue of tidyness was a matter of taste and that it wasn't our daughter's fault that she didn't share either our taste or our ability to focus on tidying for long periods either.
So we decided to stop the whole thing and to try modelling the tidying process instead. This was quite some time ago and it often looked like our hope that she would eventually follow our lead was not going to be fulfilled. I tryed to remind myself that it didn't matter and that the most important thing was that we'd removed this ugly thing from our lives.
In actual fact that was the most important thing and to be perfectly honest we were still trying to make her do what we wanted - just through a much more subtle means.
We certainly didn't deserve to have our wish granted but nonethless (and many, many months later) for the last two nights our eldest has enthusiastically volunteered her services for cleaning up at the end of the day.
It came as a great surprise and despite my wariness of our motives I'm really happy to see evidence, in my own life, of the idea that children can do the right thing without the 'encouragement' of threats and coercion. I also see it as evidence that they will 'naturally' act to enhance family life as opposed to being hell bent on it's destruction.
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06/24/2007
So what do you think?
How's this; this blog has Village in it's title because it's supposed to be about starting up a village but instead of any postings about how that might be happening it's mostly been about coping with not being in a village. And most of that stuff has been about coping with not living in a village while we raise our children.
I've recently come to the conclusion that at this stage of our lives we just don't have the energy to do something like starting an ecovillage - even if it would be a better place for us in the long run. Taking on non-coecive parenting in a world that has no time for it and no models of how you might do it seems to be even harder than the usual nuclear family situation that most people are struggling with (probably because we don't really know what we're doing!)
At the moment (as previously mentioned) we'd just like to be able to find families doing homeschooling so that our five year old has someone to play with, and my most ambitious dream is to do something farmlet style with one other homeschooling family either on the same piece of land or right next door.
Even that is looking quite difficult to acheive though, there's only a couple of families that we know who would be candidates, only one of them is up here in Northland where we're looking at property and they aren't in a position to do anything about it right now for financial reasons.
So we're contemplating starting something by ourselves and getting people on later but we may not have enough money to do that and stay debt free. Plus I am discovering that I can't stand being isolated.
While Karen could live in the middle of the wops with no one else visible I find that I prefer to be in a busier setting. I don't mean a city though, just a small place like Raglan (pop 3000) where we have been for the last couple of years. Failing that though I could probably handle living in a rural area if there were plenty of people going by and I could see a number of farms down a valley. I really am very civilised:-)
I also have a real hankering to be able to see the sea but even in the far north of New Zealand we may not be able to afford that. In fact the problem is that most people in New Zealand live near the coast and it is that land that has really skyrocketed in price in the last few years.
There is also the issue of post crash security to think about. I heard a story last night of a cow being butchered on a farm in the dead of the night nera here, with only the intestines left in the field for the farmer to find the next day. If that's already happening then there will be good cause to be hidden away in the coming years. How people will cope around here will be partially dependant on the speed of the crash but really it's crystal ball gazing and I don't want to have to bet the house on what will happen.
So, since I have no one to bounce ideas of in my physical world I thought I'd ask you guys in my virutal community (what an apalling phrase) what your thoughts are and what you are doing or trying to do about this issue? And if there are any Kiwis reading at the moment I'd especially be interested to hear from you.
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06/13/2007
For Sale: Used House Bus
Yes we're back from our summer road trip, we ended up taking 3 months longer than we originally planned because it seemed a bit crazy to screw up the whole experience by rushing everywhere. By the end though the strength of the cold and the rain meant we were looking forward to settling down again.
Actually we've been back a week and a half but the whole adjustment process has been far too weird for me to think about posting anything here right away. For the first 48 hours, every time (and I do mean every time) I thought of the bus I got a big emotional hit with a feeling in my chest that I can't describe. It wasn't nostalgia or anything else I recognise. Of course I'm not that great at feelings but really that just makes it all the more significant. I'm guessing the change in lifestyle must be pretty significant.
One thing we've really noticed is how much time can be wasted living in a big house (bigger than a bus anyway) simply keeping the whole thing operating and just shuffling our material assets around.
I was going to call this post Last of the Summer Wine because I realised during the trip that this was probably one of our last chances to enjoy the travel aspect of living in civilisation. Never again will we be able to pack the facilities of a house into a self propelled carriage and move it up and down the countryside at will like this and I'm glad I had the chance to explore New Zealand before the opportunity dissapears.
For those who aren't aware New Zealand is a stunningly beautiful country and many's the night we would park up next to a beach (or on it) with a stunning piece of scenery waiting outside our window for the morning sun to bring it to life. I'm glad I did it.
The weirdness is set to continue though, I have no strong idea about how I am going to make a living and even where we we are going to live right now so - I'm feeling anything but settled but I'll save that for another post.
In the meantime can anyone tell me what happened to Casemeau? I'm going to miss not having his blog around.
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02/04/2007
Freedom Camping
There was a sign that said no camping but we figured we weren’t camping since we had no tents (the sign actually had a picture of a tent with a red line across it). Apparently there had been a similar number of vehicles the night before and no problems but this happy scene was disturbed at 7:45 am by the arrival of the Thames-Coromandel District Council ENFORCEMENT OFFICER. Dressed in semi-military clothing (his choice) and wielding a very large note pad he proceeded to wake up our fellow campers and tell them it was time to move on. Fortunately I was already awake taking photos so I grabbed the upper hand by approaching his vehicle and asking him what he was doing.
He was happy to do his good cop routine and say that he was going to turn a blind eye to everyone staying overnight but he wanted us to all move on now. I think there was a new council initiative or something – it didn’t really make any sense because we weren’t in danger of filling the carpark up and taking spaces from day visitors. I’m not sure if our details were taken down for future reference or not, maybe I should ring the council and find out.
Interestingly the middle aged surfer dude (van behind ours) was not awoken by the enforcement officer. A veteran of avoiding ‘citations’ from the stricter enforcement officers on the Oregon coast he had left his van open and empty-looking with no curtains and the officer had been fooled into thinking there was no one sleeping there.
Our bus is equipped with a ‘self containment’ certificate which is supposed to be an assurance that we won’t make a mess where ever we stay but the officer said that that was irrelevant as far as he was concerned. The whole district had been bristling with signs saying no camping and later that day when we had just got back from an evening walk on the beach (in a popular holiday town further down the coast) a different enforcement officer approached us again to ask us to not camp where we were currently parked. We were polite but kind of fed-up with it as well.
The problem is that the area we have just been in is a popular holiday area for wealthy people from Auckland and itinerants, even relatively rich ones with $200,000 buses (not us) are not welcome. This was made clear to us a couple of days earlier when we were having dinner in another pretty spot by the ocean when a women from a nearby house drove down to make sure we had seen the sign prohibiting overnight camping.
We plan to visit poorer more remote areas shortly but these tend to have the opposite problem that white visitors displaying their conspicuous wealth are not that welcome either – and we have heard that their ‘enforcement’ is not nearly so polite. Our bus doesn’t look especially flash and New Zealand is not like the US in terms of racial problems but we will be careful where we park.
Postscript: A few days later and we entered a new council area that had specifically set aside areas for motor homes with self-containment certificates so it’s not all bad.
Postscript 2: It’s been a week since I wrote the main post and we’re finally found an internet café in Gisborne. Things continue to vary, the latest council has a kind of instituted freedom camping system where there are designated sites by the beach. It costs $10 for 10 days and the cost is mostly to cover rubbish disposal.
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01/19/2007
the road away from hell
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01/18/2007
the straight line is the road to hell
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01/06/2007
Spirits Bay
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12/16/2006
Gone
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11/15/2006
Preconquest Consciousness
A couple of weeks back I posted a lengthy quote from 'Preconquest Consciousness' by E Richard Sorensen about a tribe that 'fell' out of a pre conquest state into a civilised mind set in the space of a week. The actual article is much longer and Dan is now hosting the entire piece here in the writings section of his site - which is a much place than this site to host it.
I can't reccomend is highly enough. As a parent using The Continuum Concept as an inspiration and a guide with my family the Sorensen essay has been particualrly effective at placing the preconquest consciousness in context. I never thought I'd raise children to be like Yequanna children (or wanted to) but now I can see how profoundly a different mindset we civilised beings have.
The best metaphor I can come up with (as someone who rarely remembers his dreams) is that the difference between the pre and post conscious state is like the difference between dreaming and reality. It's almost impossible to comprehend the dream state from the 'reality' state and no one in the reality state knows how to get back to the dream state either.
Thanks also to the reader who originally emailed the piece to me (if you're still visiting)
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11/05/2006
weird blog stuff
Ran says his email spam has been doing unusual things while over here I've recently discovered I'm getting a lot of referrals from porn sites, - and 4 of my pages have been getting all of the attention too, I've looked at them to see if there is anything different but I can't see anything.
The other weird thing that happens is that some of the comment spam arrives without me being notified, I don't know how they disable this feature of my blog software but occaisionally when I look at the list of comments there a bunch of new ones and they all have a 'T' sitting next to them.
If anyone out there knows what this is all about - especially why I get referrals from porn sites, by all means let me know.
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10/25/2006
Dopamine
This from an article linked from Ran's site
This suggests that the longer one uses [heroin], the more fierce the psychological addiction, yet we also assume that psychological factors—childhood trauma, history of family dependency, unhealthy living situations, poverty, etc.—make some of us more vulnerable in the first place. A chicken or the egg sort of cycle. Some research indicates that people who get addicted to opiates may already have a deficiency of dopamine in their brains, which predisposes them to addiction to substances like heroin. But whether you’re predisposed or not, if you use heroin with any regularity, you will get addicted because heroin takes over a natural function of brain chemistry: it replaces dopamine. When the heroin stops, no dopamine, your nerves are screaming. Physical addiction is simple. If you don’t do it, you experience pain; since you did it in the first place to alleviate or avoid pain, you just do it again.
And via Regaining Soil and Sanity an Guardian newspaper article on the lack of Omega 3 in our diet and what happens to our brain when the body uses Omega 6 in it's place:
Communication between the nerve cells depends on neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and dopamine, docking with receptors in the nerve cell membrane.
Omega-3 DHA is very long and highly flexible. When it is incorporated into the nerve cell membrane it helps make the membrane itself elastic and fluid so that signals pass through it efficiently. But if the wrong fatty acids are incorporated into the membrane, the neurotransmitters can't dock properly. We know from many other studies what happens when the neurotransmitter systems don't work efficiently. Low serotonin levels are known to predict an increased risk of suicide, depression and violent and impulsive behaviour. And dopamine is what controls the reward processes in the brain...
There is also evidence that deficiencies in DHA/EPA at times when the brain is developing rapidly - in the womb, in the first 5 years of life and at puberty - can affect its architecture permanently. Animal studies have shown that those deprived of omega-3 fatty acids over two generations have offspring who cannot release dopamine and serotonin so effectively.
I'm not intending to draw in conclusions but the cross pollination of these two articles is kind of interesting.
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10/01/2006
Sneaky Sneaks
A while back I wrote a post on a PR firm called Netvocates whose mission was to post fake messages on blogs and chat rooms supporting the point of view of their paying client. The post was piggy backing on the work of other bloggers and my only contribution to the debate was the idea that even though Netvocates presented a professional appearance and had codes of conduct that they were nonetheless engaged in acts of deception and were essentially contributing to the massive avalanche of propaganda that we are all buried under.
This appearance is in fact part of the deception and disguises the sneakiness of their behaviour. Happily a netvocate has recently visited this site and beautifully illustrated this point.
A few days ago a comment was posted to my previous Netvocate posting by someone referring to themselves as Cowicide. It read:
Someone needs to make a website that will start keeping track of all these guys and thier polictical/corporate motives, etc. Hopefully, if the site is done well enough and becomes a popular clearinghouse for this, it'll pop up on Google searches and more people can start to become aware of these scumbag activities online and align against them. They are the caustic, artificial sweetener of the blogoshere.
Certainly seems to agree with what I am saying but below it was a link to a Netvocate web page defending the Netvocate position and in case you failed to take that opportunity the name Cowicide also linked to the same page. Sneaky indeed, typically in our society if a child behaved like this it would be sent to it’s room.
Generally speaking, I figure if what you are doing is above board and honest there shouldn’t be any need to sneak about the place pretending to be something you’re not. I’m just glad I was never so short of cash that I had to get involved in something like Public Relations.
Lastly, I’m sure I’ve seen the name Cowicide somewhere before, perhaps as a commenter on Deconsumption but if anyone can remember where, it would be interesting to look back at what they have had to say.
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08/21/2006
Sustainable Living Month
Just a quick skite about the town I live in, Raglan (pop. 3000). This month is Sustainable Living Month, organised by the local environment centre, there is a constant stream of activities going on, including weekend courses on permaculture, compost toileting and earth building along with evening or half-day courses on ethical cooking, herb knowledge, composting, fermentation and tours of sustainable businesses, alternative energy and organic farming and video evenings about Cuba, Peak Oil, the Future of Food, One Straw Revolution, plus a public talk with Joe Polaischer and a forum to discuss how our catchment can continue moving in a sustainable direction.
And there's more I didn't list.
Pretty good for a town of only 3000 people. Apart from two of the weekend courses all the teaching knowledge is locally based too.
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07/22/2006
What?
I see from my site stats that I've had a link from a site called www.disney.com. Normally I get links from Ran Prieur or Deconsumption but not from monstrous corporate portals. If anyone can explain this, or even better is the person who followed the link, I'd love to hear from you. Maybe Disney is developing a new anti-civilisation critique, who knows.
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07/05/2006
Slacker
In general things are going to go pretty slack around here for a while. I'm pretty focused on another project at the momentand since I'm not very good at multi-tasking this blog will be taking a back seat for a while.
In case you're wondering the project is a video I'm editing - it has nothing whatsoever to do with this blog or any of the political or media activity that I have been involved with for the last few years - what a relief!
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06/09/2006
Ran Prieur Interview
Despite various technical hassles yesterday I recorded an interview with Ran Prieur yesterday. It can be downloaded here.
The community radio station that I'm involved with can't afford an internet connection and has a toll bar on the phone so I had to rig up a complicated system at home involving my computer as a very expensive telephone and my mp3 player as the recording device. Despite, or probably because of, several practice runs the battery in my mp3 player ran dry 11 minutes into the interview. Ran waited patiently on one side of the world while I scrambled to find a new battery on this side.
Fortunately the interview was no worse off for the chaos - I managed to ask some sensible questions and Ran gave some typicaly insightful answers. I deliberately went for a civilisation-for-beginners approach in the interview because it's mostly going to heard by people unfamiliar with the anti-civ analysis, regular readers of Ran's writing may not learn anything new except perhaps what his voice sounds like.
I've uploaded an 18MB 64 kbps file. It has not been set up to stream but if there are any people on dial up out there who want me to set one up at about 24kpbs (low enough quality to fit down the pipe but not so bad that you can't understand it) please let me know.
One last thing, because of various technical issues, especically the compression on the internet phone system there is a little bit of hiss in the bacground. People listening on cheap computer speakers won't notice a thing but if you run it through your hifi system it will be apparent, although no where bad enough to make it unintelligible.
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06/07/2006
I'm a lazy, disorganised so and so
Apologies for the slow posting, my attention has been diverted by a DVD that I'm editing at the moment and there's nothing like video editing to eat up your time I tell you. I'm also going away for a couple of weeks starting next week so I'll probably have no readers left by the end of that. I'm going to take that calender thing off (top right of the screen) because it's starting to look embarrassing.
I will hopefully have one good offering before I go though so stay tuned.
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05/22/2006
Good news for once
From The Times Online comes this article
Margot Sunderland, director of education at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London, says the practice, known as “co-sleeping”, makes children more likely to grow up as calm, healthy adults.
Isn't that a nice surprise?
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05/06/2006
technical half wit
I must offer an apology for people who view this site with Microsoft Explorer (about half according to the stats). I usually view it with Mozilla Firefox and so I often forget that Blogspirit, which has it's own technical deficiencies with the way it sets the gaps between paragraphs, doesn't play well with Explorer. This of course explains the bits of html code that keep popping up between paragraphs. I've just gone through and cleaned up a bunch of postings but I imagine it will happen again in the future - I'm sure that everyone has noticed that proofreading is not my strong point!
And can I suggest to users of Explorer that they move to Firefox. This site will load faster, you'll have less problems surfing the net and your life will generally be more excellent wth one less microsoft application in it.
As to why I'm on Blogspirit. Well, after looking at all the options available I found it gave me the level of control over the site design that I wanted. It's probably more than I can handle but I'm sure I'll get all the glitches sorted one day soon.
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04/05/2006
Grip Loosening
People keep saying that you know it’s all over when mainstream media finally get round to reporting on the issues and I’d have to say that there is increasing evidence of that. Here’s a blurb for a TV documentary just shown here:
INSIDE NEW ZEALAND
Thursday 30 March 8:30pm
We cling to the notion that we live in a pristine country - New Zealand is clean and green, but research shows this may not be the case, find out on Inside New Zealand: Our Dirty Little Secret, screening Thursday, March 30 at 8:30pm.
Conducting our own scientific tests and drawing heavily on the most up-to-date research, we discover that New Zealanders are actually exposed to a myriad of harmful pollutants - chemicals now dominate all areas of our life, the air we breathe is killing us, toxins now rule the beach and waterway ecosystems, bacteria and viruses lurk submerged and as a people we are now amongst the worst polluters on the planet.
25 million cigarette butts wash into our foreshores each year... 80 tonnes of pollutants enter Auckland's harbours over the same period... and we hide our dirty little secret by telling the world we're 100% Pure.
And yesterday morning the front page of the ludicrously conservative New Zealand Herald had this article* about how it’s almost over for our central North Island lakes – they’re suffering from toxic overload.
Add to this is the fact that our leading current affairs TV host at the moment is a guy (John Campbell) who is so left wing that his employers have asked him not to state publicly who he votes for (we have proportional representation here so there are what you’d call genuine left wing options available). He also reads Chomsky and about 10 years ago, along with Nicky Hagar climbed security fences at the NSA controlled Waihopai spy base in order to film through the windows to see what was going on.
How he got to such a powerful position in our media is anyone’s guess. It’s great he’s there but it can’t be a good sign that they haven’t tried to shoot him down. Lately he’s been doing a few shows on peak oil and most recently one on the genetically engineered terminator genes which made a big splash with the ‘man on the street’.
Maybe I should interview him.
* If the link doesn't work go to www.nzherald.co.nz and type 'toxic heritage' into the search option. The photo you see took up most of the top half of the front page.
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03/25/2006
bits and pieces
Our 1 year old chose today to reveal that her spoken vocabulary is actually about 3 times as large as we had thought, all of a sudden she started trying out new words. She also decided to start experimenting with walking with her eyes closed! These are the things that I love about being a parent. Kids from the age of about 1 through to 3 years old are absolutely riveting - and hilarious too. You'll often find a room full of adults goes totally quiet while all eyes focus on the toddler as they do, well, as the do nothing in particular.
I've noticed that everywhere I go on the net lately people are saying how they wish they could find people in their area who were into the same things. Be it parents practicing alternative methods of parenting or the crowd at Anthropik looking to form tribes the theme is the same. We're certainly feeling the same thing here in Raglan. There is one other couple here who parent like us and they're moving away for a few months. We'll cope but it won't be the same.
Incidentally, where I have been today is checking out some of the blogs by young mothers. I always find myself drawn to mothers of young children, as a group they impress me more than any other in my culture. I've been through a fairly intense few years the last 5 years and I've had to change to survive. I don't want to get into the details but one of the results is that I seem to be much more interested in talking to women than men, who, apart from a few exceptions, seem to mostly talk about kind of boring inconsequential stuff. I wonder if this is how women generally see men?
The latest topic of discussion at our place has been about home schooling. We've read some of John Taylor Gatto's articles and we've poured over The Teenage Liberation Handbook, now we just need to figure out how we are going to do it here. One of our biggest problems is trying to enourage other people around us to homeschool as well so that there are friends around for our kids to play with. My big fear is that our kids will want to go to school just to be with their mates. I'm sure that's what I would have been like in the same situation. We're also worried that it will be hard work - based on the fact that it is hard work right now with a 3 yo and a 1 yo. This is not necessarily very logical. The problem is we don't know people in our area who home school yet (there we go again). So we've decide we'll order one of John Holt's books from Amazon, sign up with Growing Without Schooling magazine and then put an add in the local paper in order to hook up with a few hopefully like-minded people. Once again I figure this would be less of a problem if we were in a village. And yes, I'm starting to sound like a stuck record with that comment 'n all.
Damn, I've just discovered that GWS magazine stopped back in 2001. I wonder if there are any websites or blogs that are doing a similar job these days?
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03/23/2006
GE Hearing
We had our GE hearing yesterday. I haven’t yet heard which way the council went but I’m not overly hopeful. Although I was surprised at just how well our presentation came together we had one more or less tedious presenter who irritated the councillors and despite our belief that the facts should decide the outcome this slip may have been enough for them to decide they didn’t like us. They mayor revealed himself to be boorish and arrogant by telling the presenter to hurry up since he was ‘bored as hell’ - I felt like leaping up and giving him a good slap. I’m sure that’s not how his mother raised him to behave.
Just before the hearing I received a posting from Joy with some good advice on how to deal with a council composed mostly of retired farmers.
…appeal to farmers' repressed frustration with the current system; appeal to their memory of life before it; appeal to modern examples of success - small sustainable farms that are turning a profit and rebuilding their communities.
I didn’t have time to rewrite my presentation so I just tried to carry the attitude with me while I spoke but I was delighted when the speaker after me, an organic farmer, spoke about exactly this issue. His was a great presentation. He emphasised how with organic farming the farms are able to support a larger number of families and help to bring people back into the rural areas.
He was rewarded with a question from the oldest of the retired farmers about weed management under an organic regime. Our farmer gave us a better answer to this question after the hearing than he gave at the time. Apparently a lot of the weeds are dealt with by reclassification. That is, organic farmers view many weeds as beneficial to care of the land and care of the animals.
It sounds good, although I’m also aware from the US how there is a huge growth in Industrial scale organic farms but I have hope that down here we’ll be a little more immune to it.
Oh yes, I've just remembered, there were two unknown gentlemen sitting in the back of the hearing who I mistakenly though were supporters but actually turned out to be lawyers who work for the big agricultural research institute (Agresearch) that operates in our area. Since Agresearch's opposition to our position consisted of a brief letter to the hearing I presume they didn't take us very seriously and that their lawyers probably got a bit of a fright at how thorough we were. Either that or they already have the whole thing sewn up via back room deals.
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03/16/2006
lately
On my radio show today and for reasons that I can’t adequately explain (but have to do with how terribly serious it’s been getting lately) I played only pop music from the 80s between my talks and interviews.
This lead me to be probably the only person to have ever played Wham’s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go in the middle of a bring-down-civilisation talk by Derrick Jensen. It caused one listener to ring up to see if there was a computer malfunction and also to some questioning about my choice in music from my wife when I got home.
At the end of the talk I played ‘Message in a Bottle’ by The Police and the sparse lonely sense in that song seem to fit much better with Derrick’s rather sober message. I tell you, 80’s pop music has a lot of uses.
‘It made me laugh, it made me cry’ is a hell of a cliché but I’m willing to use it just this once to describe my reaction to Ran’s new essay (mostly because there is some truth to it). As I mentioned earlier I’ve been getting a bit sick of how serious everything has been for me lately, I mean just read this blog and you’ll see what I mean (my radio show is just as bad :-). Ran has an ability to not get bogged down with worries and it seems to leave him with access to a good reservoir of hope. It also gives him a very broad view of whatever issue he is dealing with – possibly the broadest view of anyone I have read. A sense of perspective and a sense of hope was just what I needed today – I’ve been in a better mood since I read Fall down Six Times. Hmm, Ran’s essays are mood enhancing.
This broad and creative perspective he has makes his ideas so good and so original that I feel like giving up my comparatively feeble attempts at a blog. Ironically I have a better imagination that most people I know but this new essay leaves me feeling like a creative desert (the dry sandy thing, not the sweet yummy thing that makes you sick. There is nothing more I can say that would add to what he has already written so people should just go read it .
I’ve been a bit preoccupied with things lately so posting has been a bit light. The family has been sick and I am trying to prepare for a submission to our local council about GE. Our group of ‘long haired freaks and other trouble makers’ is presenting to council next week. The council is dominated by conservative retired farmers so I assume I am going to find it a frustrating experience.
Whilst other’s in our group are preparing masterful technical arguments I am focusing almost solely on the more superficial aspects of the presentation. I got a haircut earlier this week and I’ve asked my father to supply me with a suitably conservative tie. In my brief talk I am to present myself as a businessman (it’s the truth, just not the whole truth) and will talk about sensible things like the economy and how the release of GMOs will damage our export markets and cause destitute farmers to band together and sue organisations like the district council.
I have no doubt that the councillors would like to marginalise our views (in their own minds) by writing us off as mis-guided radicals. If they can do this no amount of sensible argument will sway them so I intend to cast myself as one of their ‘type’ and pull that particular rug out from under their feet.
Incidentally this is the one area where I beg to differ with Ran. The science of genetic engineering is currently operating at a level of such incompetence that there is no hope of his vision coming to pass – at least not for our generation. The best they can currently do are malfunctioning plants that are probably behind the recent doubling of food allergies and possibly also contribute to cancer as well.
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03/06/2006
Mother Anarchy
Sick of hearing me (only a father) talk about parenting like I'm really working hard? Well, here's the real thing from a blog I just found called Mother Anarchy.
"I'm the least mainstream mother I know" says the author
Good! I'm putting Mother Anarchy in my links.
incidentally from Mother Anarchy I also found this interview about another individual who has spent time living in the wild.
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02/24/2006
Tui Ecovillage
In my last post I referred to an article about Tui Ecovillage based here in New Zealand. It's been a while since I last read the article and I'm reminded of how good it is. It's written by Robina McCurdy who was the instigator of the village back in 1984 - the article was written in 1996. I've met and interviewed Robina and she is a living testament to the personal growth that occurs in successful villages. Here's some choice quotes:
I believe that the greatest test of a community’s spiritual alignment is how they deal with the financial realm. ... It is my opinion that for a community to function wholistically on all levels, an essential ingredient is to have a form of income earning that ties people together. Of necessity this keeps people having to move forward as a group, as their "food source" is bound in with evolving sustainable relationships.
and
Conflict does and will happen in any group, so learning ways to deal with it is vital to the life of a group. It arises because of lack of honesty, differences in habits, lifestyle and values, projections and reflections, and inappropriate structures to meet the needs of a particular group. Providing ways to deal with these areas, significantly minimises conflict. If the group does not have agreed mechanisms to deal with conflict, the tension that builds up, spoken or unspoken, inevitably brings about distancing. The imploded energy created by denial is likely to destroy the group eventually. In my observations and experience, groups which have not upheld personal growth as a prerequisite for group growth and prosperity, have ultimately destroyed themselves
All prospective members and members of Tui make a commitment not to walk away from conflict. If requested, a member, small group, or, if necessary, the whole community, can be supportive in conflict resolution.
and especially this
A "Tuki" is an oratory "heart-sharing-circle" process, which we have adopted and adapted from the Maori whaikorero and American Indian tribal council. Its purpose is to go deeper into the family / cultural / historical conditioning & values which underlie emotional/attitudinal blocks, to us as a group, making aligned decisions and defining collective direction. It also serves to renew inspiration and therefore commitment. Tuki are usually held when we get "stuck" in a way which hinders our positive progress as a group - when mistrust/ misunderstandings build, when differences create separation, when we lose sight of loving over divisive community issues.
A Tuki generally happens for two days, including the evening in between.
It is important that everyone is present, as it is almost unavoidable that the group will have a "paradigm shift", and it is difficult for a person being left behind to be later integrated.
and lastly
Well known author Scott Peck has defined that to get in touch with true community we go through the stages of pseudo-community, and then chaos. We at Tui have surely done that - and we are richly awarded.
Through life at Tui, I am rediscovering what I believe to be a natural social pattern encoded within our genes as basic as an animal’s instinct - this pattern is overlaid by conditioning generated from fear of intimacy, and lack of bonding with our Earth Mother.
There are essential patterns in leaves and water-flow, so it is feasible that there are God-given blueprints for human settlement, regardless of how sophisticated we think we have become. It is simply a matter of removing the clutter.
The only thing that I would want to add to this is more specifics about raising children. That said though, a group of people focused on dealing with their own problems the way Tui has have done most of the work toward getting that right anyway.
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02/21/2006
Run for the hills
I’ve just deleted one of the ‘Related Sites’ links. I won’t make it personal by saying which blog it was but I hadn’t been there for a while and when I visited recently I was hit by this great big advertisement for Bird Flu preparation. Please.
I feel like Bird Flu is the biggest (and most obvious) con I’ve ever seen – maybe I’m missing something. Anyway most everything you need to know about it can be read at Ran’s Crashwatch page. Like he says, I’ll believe it when I see it.
Except...
An article I've read (which I can’t find online) points out that if they decide to make a specific vaccine against bird flu, the first thing scientists will have to do it make a human strain! They have to make a human strain of the flu because without it they can’t make a human-specific vaccine. One of the many, many problems with vaccines is that they actually spread the disease they are meant to prevent, especially if it’s a live vaccine, so this would amount to an act of extreme stupidity the likes of which, well, the likes of which we have seen often before unfortunately.
As is usually the case there will be no need for a conspiracy to spread bird flu – just stupid humans, devoted to their hierarchy and going about their normal business.
Run for the hills!!!!!!!!!!
I was already going off this site anyway as is it was treating ecovillages mostly as a peak oil solution. Maybe for some people it will work out but I’m predicting that a village that has too many people in it who are primarily there to escape the crash is going to have terminal problems.
Being in a village to escape civilisation is fine, that’s the main reason to go into one but being in it to escape the crash of civilisation is another thing entirely. With the first option it’s possible for the community to have a common vision but with survivalist villagers there will be a very diverse range of visions including those who don’t actually want to escape civilisation and will want to recreate it wherever they are.
90% of Ecovillage have failed in the past and the main reason has been disagreement over vision. Often the disagreement lurks in the background and no one is even aware of them – they just find they're having lot’s of disagreements. Just imagine a survivalist ecovillage. Scary. Actually they already exist – run for the city!!!
03:05 Posted in Crash , General | Permalink | Comments (11) | Email this
02/17/2006
Zebra Tomatoes
Check these out - they're Zebra Tomatoes. Karen started our first serious garden this year and these are an old heritage variety that someone gave us. Not only do they look groovy but they taste great and have been disease free unlike a hybrid variety we tried previously.
Specifically they taste like, well, they taste like tomatoes. What I mean is they really taste like tomatoes - unlike those insipid monochromatic things I've been getting from supermarkets all my life. It feels like I have been eating a ghost all this time - I guess that the nutrional value has been pretty ghost-like as well.
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modern tribe
One of the things I'm interested in discussing on this blog is how to go about setting up tribes in our modern environment - as usual though, while the men talk the women just get on with it so here's a posting made by Kerryn to the Continuum Concept email list which describes her tribe:
Four families got together at a home, only the mums (except for the work from home dad), combined there was 26 children aged from 4 mo twins to a 14 yo daughter. The mums cooked, did some jobs to help the mum of the house, picked up others' babies, directed children in their efforts to help, and talked a lot. The children came and went from the house into the yard. The bigger ones often had the babies in their arms, comforting and encouraging, helping to feed, and bringing them back to their mum for feeding. There was not one fight or even minor altercation the whole 8 hours we were together. The older two women encouraged the younger women, and I remember writing in my journal that night how satisfying the day was.
We get to do this very often, in homes or local parks, at the beach or even going shopping. It is possible to form these kinds of groups/tribes in our mainstream environment.
Also see this previous posting about another mother's experiences with grouping families together. Not entirely coincidentally my wife is also in the process of setting up similar supportive arrangments with her friends. . The nuclear family approach must have such a stranglehold on our society because most parents have experienced how parenting is much easier even itheir child just has a single friend over to play, yet we almost never move to change how we live.
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01/29/2006
A Correction
I have been in the habit of quoting something I recall Geoff Lawton saying to me in an interview along the lines that with permaculture we would only need 2% of the current arable land to feed the world. I have written this here and here. Most people tend to conclude from that statement that we only need 2% of the land to produce the same tonnage of food. By my own admission this seems pretty astounding so I emailed him for a clarification and he said that in fact we can "produce the same amount of nutrition on 2% of the equivalent area now used by the global industrial agricultural system".
This is a crucial difference and makes a lot more sense- especially when you consider the many over-fed but under nourished members of western civilisation.
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01/28/2006
Joe Polaischer interview
I interviewed Joe Polaischer this week (on my radio show). He is a permaculturist, born in Austria but living in New Zealand where he and his wife have created a model permaculture small farm with low tech solutions. There’s an article here that’s worth reading, or you can listen to the interview here. Joe has travelled widely and experienced many difficult 3rd world situations before settling in New Zealand and building Rainbow Valley Farm. He’s one of the people who figured out where things were headed a generation ago and started working on the problem back then. Anyway, I promised to get him to retell the story of a visit to a shanty town in Peru so here’s the transcript of that part of the interview.
I had this experience in 73 in Lima [Peru] where a person from this shantytown invited me and I said; ‘Yes, what is your address’ and he said ‘What address? We don’t have any street numbers or house numbers, I will actually have to get you from the edge of town – you can not enter the place where I live because people will rob you and kill you. You have to be walking with me – or you wouldn’t find me’
It was an experience for me. So I waited on the edge of the city and this person picked me up and we walked through this shanty town – you know what they look like with all sort of things built – houses out of cardboard and driftwood and corrugated iron and bits and pieces, And no sewers, with water and urine and faeces everywhere. You know, really contaminated. Children everywhere and the animals – it’s an experience!.
This person who invited me he said you’re invited for a family dinner so I thought; ‘Bring them something, they’re probably short of food’. So I went to the supermarket and made up a little food parcel under my arm and we walked up these steep hills there and we ended up in a little shack and guess what I saw. The table was full of food so I felt really awkward with my food parcel and I actually just made it disappear under the table.
The family said; ‘Sit down and eat with us, this is our food’, The table was full of delicious stuff and I said; ‘Where did you get this? You shouldn’t have spent your precious money on me’, and I felt really bad and they said; ‘What? This is our food – OUR food, we grow it’, and I said; ‘No way!’ and then they took me into the courtyard and showed me how they intensively grow food there.
You know they had these guinea pigs up in cages (and rabbits and pigeons), on the wall – their droppings were immediately going into containers like car tires [which were] full of vegetables – they had all sorts of climbers and beans and so on, squash, all over the place in the courtyard. And the whole courtyard was full of food - they even had fish – Filopia* – which is bit of pig in the water, this fish, but it tastes delicious and the chickens were on top of the 200-litre barrels of water and the chicken droppings went in there and the Filopia was eating it underneath. So a total cyclic system and these people were actually not hungry and I got a real good… ahh, learning there seeing how you can actually grow food in the city
Aaron How big was the courtyard?
Joe Not big if I recall rightly, perhaps maybe 30 square metres or so but every space was used for food growing – I didn’t see any ornamental - well maybe cacti, one or two – but even the cacti you can eat the flower. So most of the stuff that I saw there was edible and that’s what we do in permaculture, creating edible landscapes. Urban permaculture is really an urgency because when you look at New Zealand towns like Auckland with all the green area, full of lawns that need maintenance – fossil fuels to mow it, noisy, polluting - we should have edible landscape instead of ornamentals and grow a lot of food like some 3rd world cities do. You look at Nairobi, I lived in Kenya for a while, Nairobi grows up to 60% of food in the town ! – out of necessity out of poverty so there is hope – we can grow heaps of food right around us in containers, even on concrete or tar seal you can grow food, or up on a balcony. That’s what I teach in Urban permaculture.
Aaron So given this experience in Lima do you believe that Suburbia could be converted to be sustainable, self sufficient.
Joe Not completely of course with grain and so on – sure you can grow corn but to grow rice or wheat is really difficult. The research that has been done; to be self sufficient – if you’re a vegetarian its not too much of a problem you only need 100 square metres* in a temperate climate to grow all your food, and the grain included.
Aaron 100 sq metres?
Joe Yeah, 100 sq metres, this was done by John Jevons in the United States – the biointensive method. But I’m not a vegetarian so I would need a little more area, which is of course not an issue here in NZ with 4 million people with all the area that we have available.
Aaron So it’s interesting then, that at a pinch people with an average of 4 people per house needing 100 square metres - they probably have 400 square metres.
Joe A lot of people have and if they haven’t got it there is always the option of community gardens and community supported agriculture where you adopt nearby farms and growing areas and get into a barter and exchange system or a LETS system.
Joe also had this comment to add to a story I posted earlier about life in Austria after the war.
“The good thing was community, there as a real strong community feeling and we supported each other - and only when ‘afluenza’ crept in later on and we recovered. We became greedy again, and competitive. And envy came in again, but after the war people were very, very community minded, helpful and cooperative and I’m looking forward to this happening more…”
But he also said that we really need to build community BEFORE the trouble really starts; “Once you’re in survival mode you couldn’t care any more, then it’s not a question of protecting the environment – its survival that counts and I’ve been in many, many communities where that’s happened.”
And lastly this perspective from someone a generation older than myself.
“I’ve been to many places and I’ve found out one thing, I’ve been through 140 countries of the world and I don’t want to go back any more because where ever I go back to places that I have been to 30 years ago its all deterioration, its all downhill, I don’t want to see that.”
* For those that don’t know; one square metre is roughly the equivalent of 10 square feet.
* I have no idea how to spell the name of this fish – feel free to correct me.
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01/27/2006
Coincidence Theory
I've been very coincidence prone lately - here's the latest one.
Ran Prieur recently had this comment to make to make in reference to a discussion about permaculture and systems of control:
"Think like Satan here: how do I keep these people under my thumb even when they're growing their own food? How about by patenting all life, so they're required to pay huge fees to garden..."
And now I just had my wife come in to the room waving a book at me that says:
"The safest place for rare varieties is in the hands of gardeners...But in Britain and Europe, it is now illegal to grow or sell seed varieties that are no longer regisitered - a process that costs considerable amounts of money"
I've long thought seed-saving was a political act but but now it turns out it's also an act of rebellion!
BTW The book is "Successful Organic Gardening" by David Murray (pg 92) but I don't recommend it too highly - the author thinks Permaculture is dodgy but GE is OK.
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take it easy
When I joined the permaculture v primitive debate I was hoping to work toward a conclusion that answered the question of which approach would give greater survival chances in a post crash world. I think because the exponents of each approach were arguing their case so strongly it felt like I was going to have to figure out which one was correct. Even worse I worried that my future survival would depend on getting the answer right.
Not surprisingly it soon became apparent that a combination of the two might prove to be the best solution of all but what I wasn’t expecting was that it would turn out that both approaches already combine elements of the other to such an extent as to make the debate almost pointless. In fact, the opposing concepts of either being totally in charge of our food production or totally leaving food production to mother nature existed only in my head. In the real world it turns out that:
(a) Many of the cultures that we thought were hunter/gatherers were actively managing their environment to increase levels of natural food production and…
(b) The aim of permaculture is to create an environment where food can be ‘grazed’ at leisure.
Put like that I can barely tell the difference between the two and given the infinite continuum of possible combinations the only significant difference between the primitivist hunter/gatherer approach and permaculture may well be whether your tribe stays put or goes walkabout.
I’ve had another visitation from Toby Hemenway who left recommendations for further reading on the idea that indigenous cultures actively managed their environment. They are his own “Garden in the Jungle” and "1491” by Charles Mann, an article originally published in the Atlantic magazine.
'1491' suggests that large parts of the American continent has been shaped by a large population of Indian people 95% of whom were wiped out early by contact with European diseases. This sudden loss of people affected the ecology greatly and populations of previously hunted animals suddenly boomed which is why the main wave of settlers who arrived a hundred years later found astounding populations of buffalo and flocks of pigeons that blotted out the sun. It is from this period that most of the information about pre European life came from which could mean that the ‘untouched’ wilderness that environmentalists hanker for may have actually been the result of an ecosystem that was actually going through a period of great disruption.
I am worried that there is a kind of worship of the untouched wilderness concept. For some it does indeed seem to be a religion. Environmentalists have been bitterly opposed to the idea that indigenous people managed their environment because it might lend power to the arguments of our development-culture that we have the right to alter the ecology as we see fit.
It’s a very odd place here at the peak of our civilisation’s toxic and alienating existence. Our view of non-civilised cultures is hopelessly distorted by the distance of time and cultural disparity and for those of us who are desperate for some other way to latch onto I think there is a tendency to worship what we find – especially when what we know and understand of these other cultures is so vague that we can’t help but see what we want to see.
Christians tell me that people have been made to worship and that if we don’t worship God then we are destined to find something else to worship. I’m starting to think they might have a point because I definitely see in the environmental and anti-civilisation movements a tendency to worship the idea of untouched wilderness. I’m fully supportive of these movements but given the wanton destruction wrought by our current hands-on approach to planet management it is no surprise that people have taken their beliefs as far in the other direction.
As a comparison, and hopefully I can get away with referring to Christianity again, what I have noticed, coming from a country where the Christians are not nearly so prone to extreme fundamentalism is that the anti Christian feeling here is equally less extreme. From outside the U.S. it would appear that the fundamentalists, (who certainly appear to be bonkers) have so distorted the religious/spritual landscape that non-believers seem to have equally distorted and extreme views. Or maybe that’s just part and parcel of a culture that is subject to so many stresses. In either case I’m starting to wonder if many people haven't now entered into a religious worship of the concept of untouched wilderness. It’s reached the point that some people say that they are happy to see the demise of humanity so long as the planet survives. Now I know that humanity is to blame for the state the planet is in, no doubt there at all, but to wish for the demise of your own species is surely a strange thing and just one more example of the corruption of civilisation. (The loathing of humanity is probably an outward expression of personal self loathing but that’s another posting). I’ve already tried explaining how I feel about this and despite the newness of this blog I still managed to confuse at least one reader who thought that by saying I didn’t like the idea of putting the planet ahead of humanity I must want to put humanity ahead of the planet.
Firstly, I just assume that we’re all agreed the planet needs saving – anything else is ludicrous. What I was trying to say was the I want to save both humanity and the planet EQUALLY. I don’t have a hierarchy of who I think deserves saving the most, to me the application of hierarchy is the result of bringing civilised thinking to environmentalism and totally unnecessary.
The next level down from wanting to see humanity banished from the planet is the worship of ‘untouched’ wilderness where the only acceptable means of human habitation is the hunter/gatherer tribe that ‘allows’ nature to provide sustenance as it sees fit. OK, I’m probably over-simplifying but I still maintain that for some there is a semi-religious aura around this idea. Again, I don’t mean to belittle, I’m looking for something to hang my hat on too.
And to be totally fair I have noticed that when permaculturists talk about their first experience of permaculture it is often in the same terms that people would use for a religious conversion. Even this telling of my own experiences seem to have that air about it. Again, we shouldn’t be surprised that people are attracted to something that seems to provide a genuine alternative to our current lifestyle of squalid consumerism.
I think this desperation for a knew way (now heightened by the impending collapse) is behind the primitive v permaculture debate, a debate that I now feel is pointless. We never needed that 'V' in there.
I also think this is what is behind Aric McBay’s appalled response to Toby Hemenway’s Rural v Urban article. As previously noted I think the fact that he sniped around the edges attacking what was essentially a different political perspective whilst ignoring the central vision of the article was an attempt to stamp out an alternative ‘doctrine’. It’s interesting to note that Toby Hemenway has written a response where he removes any inadvertent political implications and just focuses on strengthening the vision – with some success too.
Personally I agreed with Aric McBay about many of the details because they ran contrary to my political beliefs too, but I didn’t think this made the vision any less worthwhile, probably because it didn’t run contrary to any of my other deeply held beliefs.
So what does this all mean?
Maybe we should just chill out a bit. Given that there appears to be no model upon which we can base a return to untouched, pristine wilderness and given that the earth is going to need our help to get there quickly, and given that the indigenous cultures who we are looking to for guidance often actively managed their wilderness AND given that we need to start repairing the earth now….umm, remind me again what the problem is?
As William Koetke reminds us what life needs is good quality soil, air and water, whether the ecosystem upon which these are based revives through the earth’s natural processes or whether it comes about because we have converted the world into a giant food forest probably doesn’t matter.
02:55 Posted in Crash , General | Permalink | Comments (4) | Email this
01/08/2006
The Cuba Diet
Once again a tipoff from Ran Prieur, The Cuba Diet - an article from Harpers charting the changes Cuba went through with the premature peak oil they underwent when financial support dissapeared with the demise of the Soviet Union.
The information is interesting but I don't agree with the political view point of the writer. They probably don't think they have a political view present in the article since it is pretty mainstream but the usuall US centric criticisms of Cuba are there lurking beneath the surface. Enough already.
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01/05/2006
An Undisciplined Psychiatrist
I’m reading an interview with Alice Miller who wrote ‘For Your Own Good’ and it has triggered off another connection with Jeff Schmidt’s book ‘Disciplined Minds’, which is about why a professional’s first duty is to maintaining the status quo.
I wrote a while back about other connections with Disciplined Minds and I’ll use the same quote here:
“People’s mental problem’s often appear as deviations from social or legal norms and therefore are problems for the status quo as well as the deviant individuals.
The problems of both would be solved if troubled individuals abided by the values of the status quo, and of course the mainstream mental health system more often that not works to alter behaviour in that direction. But attempting to adjust people to the unhealthy society that caused their problems in the first place may not be the healthiest approach for either the individual or society”
He goes on…
“Evidently it is not the place of clinicians to question the health of the society to which the patient must be adjusted. Their ‘legitimate’ professional concern is how best to bring about the adjustment. In this alone, they are expected to use their creativity. The few who do raise questions are seen as getting political…”
In the interview with Alice Miller she is talking about how her theories break away from traditional Freudian analysis, which attributes innate destructive drives to the child, and instead says that it is trauma inflicted on the child by the parents that causes behaviour problems. Naturally our abusive society does not want to hear this and so the professionals refute the idea – even though it makes complete sense to the layperson.
There must be something in this. The patient loves it but the psychiatrist hates it. We’re taught to respect th