PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

Financial Industry as Organized Crime: A new documentary film “Inside Job”, demonstrates that the recent hijacking and sinking of the global economy was a deliberate criminal conspiracy by the financial industry. The collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by the takeover of their economies by organized crime. It appears the criminals in the US couldn’t be bothered to wait for the collapse of that country’s society. Salon interviews the film’s writer/director.

Here Comes the Rage: Ilargi argues that Obama has now shown total inability as a leader in all three of the key crisis areas facing us in the decades to come: economy (bailouts), energy (offshore drilling), and ecology (BP disaster). Unfortunately, this will just make most people look for another leader to take his place, instead of realizing that no one can solve these problems for us.

Closing the Barn Door: Sharon Astyk explains why political solutions are always designed to “fix” yesterday’s crises, not to avert future ones. “Now we’re concerned about everything.” Too late, my brother, too late, but never mind.

The Anti-Psychiatry Movement: Last month Toronto hosted an international meeting of “victims” and “survivors” of psychiatry. Speakers and attendees argued it is a pseudo-science whose fraudulent practitioners work in concert with Big Pharma to pathologize and profit from the perfectly understandable anxieties we all feel in this horrifically overcrowded, crisis-riven, violent global society. They claim, persuasively, that it is our culture, not us, that is sick and needs to be fixed. Of course the political and corporate powers were outraged and are lobbying to prevent public funds being used for such exposes in future.

ADHD Linked to Pesticides; Cancer Linked to Chemicals; Slaughterhouse Work Linked to Crime: New studies suggest that industrial chemicals in our air, water and food are not only poisoning our bodies, they are damaging our brains, and that they are a major cause of cancers. Thanks to Tree for the links. In the same vein, Prad links us to an article showing that industrial slaughterhouse workers not only become desensitized and deranged by their work, they are also prone to commit crimes in their communities.

Immigration’s Generation Gap: I argued last year that two of the biggest social issues of the coming decade would be immigration and the right to die. A new study suggests that boomers, who tend to be progressive on most issues, are the opposite on immigration issues, and that the issue substantially pits the young against the old.

LIVING BETTER

Listening Posts: Quarterly meetings of reflective citizens, to see what is emerging as the consensus of what is really happening in the world. “A sharing of preoccupations and experiences.” Thanks to Amy Barnes for the link.

Consensus Decision-Making: A link by Jeff Patton to four articles by Laird Schaub (who I just met last week) on better decision-making through consensus. A good companion to Tree’s consensus articles.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Going Mainstream, Selling Out: What is it about fame, position and the spotlight of the mainstream media that makes courageous progressives turn into cowardly, don’t-rock-the-boat conformists? Keith Farnish calls out Joss Garman.

California, Going Broke: Sam Mills’ story shows how one state is abusing its citizens in its effort to cut costs.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Real-Time View of Ships in the Salish Sea, from fellow Bowen Islander Bob Ballantyne (not limited to the Salish Sea; you can see location and details of ships in all major shipping areas of the world). Note: Doesn’t work in Firefox.

Meetings, Bloody Meetings: A hilarious take from Ann Nichols on everyone’s least favourite activity. Add this blog to your blogroll. Thanks to Tree for the link.

The Secret Life of Plants, from the BBC (thanks to Dale Asberry for the link)

How Recipes Should Look, link from Jerry Michalski‘s amazing Twitter feed (as are the two items that follow)

Real-Time Visualization on Steroids, from Britain’s Royal Society for the Arts

104 Cognitive Biases: A visual study guide

Civilization: “Are you tired of primitive living?” A great video satire. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

From Pamela Slim (via Gaping Void): You, less than, is a lie. Remember who you are.

From AV Flox (also via Gaping Void): A child would not hesitate to pack up a sleeping bag and sleep on a pier under the stars with you. (Thanks too to Hugh Macleod at Gaping Void for the cartoon at the top of this post).

From Imagine Alternatives (via Tree): Finding ways not to call the police.

From Rumi (via Panhala)

Let yourself be silently drawn
by the strange pull of what you really love.
It will not lead you astray.

From Melissa Moore: On the Eve of Turning 12

the BP Oil Spill, as seen from space (NASA)

I have received a lot of questions from readers this past month, most of which fall into three categories:

1. Why have I not written about the BP oil spill?
2. Why do I not participate more in the comments threads on my blog, or respond to most of the e-mails people send?
3. What’s up with me these days, anyway? Why am I not getting on with what I have so publicly intended?

For the past few weeks I have been keeping a diary, offline. It’s a record of a personal crisis of belief I’ve been going through, which the last few blog posts (and the dearth of blog posts this year) have hinted at. I’m going to try to capture some of what I wrote there in this post, to try to address these questions without the full sturm und drang of the diary. Beware — considerable rambling ahead.

.     .     .     .     .

Last year I wrote, in a poem:

i do my best these days to still my mind and listen, sense and give attention,
not to think of what it means or represents,
or feel the grief of gaia’s loss that haunts me everywhere:
but just to sit and be here, now.

though i cannot.

you’ll always be a part of me, and i of you, my land, my love, my teacher too.
we’re so alike: untidy, neither natural nor civilized, a little sad, a little wild,
a little worn, untamed and proud
and every year
a bit more silent.

thank you for your voice, your gentleness with me,
the other creatures that are part of you
and all you’ve showed me of adapting and of wisdom.

i understand at last the message you’ve proclaimed
for all who dare to hear, since life began a billion years ago:
a whisper in the wind, a rustle in the rain,
a baby’s peep, a robin’s song, the turtle’s ancient swim to spawn,
the senses’ spell, the cry of love and joy
and being one with all,
and welcome always,
everywhere.

This is how I feel. These feelings seem different from the feelings most people have. They need no consolation. They need no words. To most people who share my company they are disconcerting, because they seem socially disengaged, impersonal. They are “present with gaia” feelings. They are profound, roiling, and when people get too close they can be hurtful, since they are connected to a deeper and more intense mix of grief, anger, restlessness, helplessness, guilt, self-pity, rage, impatience and self-loathing that is tied to my awareness of how we humans have fucked up this world, with the best of intentions, and all the suffering that is causing. It is what I call my “unbearable grief for gaia” and probably why I have sublimated my emotions so much for most of my life.

When they burn themselves out, these feelings have, in past, most often led to periods of dark depression. In good times, and especially more recently, when I have been free of the anxieties of day-to-day life, these feelings soften and dissipate, leaving me exhausted and then unfeeling, detached, disconnected. This beats depression but it is the antithesis of the reconnection I claim to be seeking.

So I’ve been going through these annoying cycles of connection, emotion, and detachment. They are getting me nowhere, and are very difficult for others to have to put up with, since the connection to gaia is impersonal, quiet, wordless, leaving the people who are with me feeling shut out, and then the subsequent emotion drives me to want to be alone so I don’t hurt anyone with the overflow of anger and emotion. This is what has been behind my silence on this blog for much of this year, after last winter’s burst of enthusiastic intention.

.     .     .     .     .

cartoon by hugh macleod

One of my readers has (indirectly) described my writing as arrogant “doomer porn” — a wallowing in hopelessness, a presumption of knowing more than I do, and an excuse for inaction. This is an articulation of what many have said to me throughout much of my adult life, though it has less and less effect on me as I get older. I think that is why my readership, and my zeal for blogging, have both tailed off of late. People tell me to “get real”, to shut up and do something. But I think we pessimists are the real realists, and it is the optimists, the light greens, the technophiles, the new-age’ers, the “global consciousness raising” believers, who are the unrealistic idealists. I am tired of debating with them, because the debate is futile. We have evolved incompatible worldviews.

I have been spending more and more time in what might be called ‘alternative’ culture over the last two years. It is refreshing — progressive, open, vulnerable, experimental, and relatively informed. But it is no more my culture than the mainstream culture I masqueraded as belonging to from adolescence until 2008. My culture is an idealized one that doesn’t exist, and perhaps never will. I belong to the land, as part of all-life-on-Earth, but I am misanthropically alone.

I appreciate the importance of embodying and living what we believe, because all our feelings will not make the world a better place. At the moment, however, I don’t even want to embody what I believe most needs to be done. I don’t want to work hard to organize, to protest, to blockade, to create something difficult that will take years to realize. If I could find collaborators who care about the same things I do, and they were willing to do this ‘hard work’ I would be pleased to help in areas where I have something valuable to contribute and where I have passion.

I think that’s highly unlikely however. The “doers” of this world are not like me — they are practical people with patience and perseverance. I am, as many have said, a dreamer. My gift is imagining what’s possible, not realizing it.

I probably should be more modest, therefore, in my intentions, at least publicly. I am so tired of letting people down (which ultimately comes back to letting myself down, and that whole self-loathing thing). I am so tired, period. I just want to do what I do well and have passion for, and be who I am. Why in this world is that so hard?

Perhaps I am just meant to be an artist and not an activist. I recognize that the world probably doesn’t need more artists, and desperately needs people who are activists; fewer dreamers, more “doers”.

Or maybe not.

As much as our education system extols activism and self-sacrifice in the public interest (without it, we are taught, there would still be rampant slavery and women would be even more subjugated than they are, and Hitler would have imposed his dreadful solution on us all), I am not so sure now. From 37 years in the corporate world, for example, I have learned that many corporations do enormous and relentless damage, but also that what they do is the sum total of what their poor clueless loser employees believe in and do, with the best of intentions, and has almost nothing to do with what the poor sick sociopaths at the top believe or want to do.

cartoon by signe wilkinson, from gocomics.com

The ghastly BP oil spill is not the fault of a small group of evil people, nor would it have been averted if the leader(s) of BP and the other organizations now playing the blame game, cared more about the environment. I am beginning to believe the same is true of all social organizations. The importance of leadership, and of change initiatives, I think, are vastly overrated. We are, each of us, just the space through which stuff passes. No one is that important, or consequential, and no one is in control.

That is why I have written nothing about the oil spill, or about the thousands of other ecological (and economic, and political, and social, and technological, and military, and educational, and health) atrocities that are occurring every day. There is no one to blame, no “root cause” other than human nature itself, and no “solution”, so what is the point of writing about it? This is just who we are, collectively, doing our best and discovering that we can do no better than bring about the sixth known great extinction of life on this planet. I applaud activists (at least the ones who know what they are doing), and their energy, their passion, their dedication, their patience and relentless perseverance. I wish I had what it takes to be one of them.

Perhaps then, for those of us who do not have what it takes to be an activist, it is enough to be an artist. To imagine what’s possible. To re-create. To express ourselves. To reflect what we see and what we feel.

And what we care about.

.     .     .     .     .

Artwork “In Deep Conversation” by Irish artist Pam O’Connell

Some readers have expressed annoyance that I do not join in the conversation in the comments threads on my blog, or by replying to most e-mails. As I’ve said before, this blog is, first and foremost, my device for talking/thinking out loud, more like graffiti than conversation. I’m sorry that this makes some readers feel invisible or not cared about.

I’m coming to believe that we don’t really know other people, and the connection and understanding we think we have with people, especially online, is largely delusional. We imagine who other people are, and imagine their context for saying what we think they think they’re saying, so we believe we know what they intend to say, what they mean, when we don’t know at all. We cannot.

I am weary of conversation, and of, as GB Shaw said, the illusion that communication has occurred. Language is a clumsy and often dangerous tool. So I am choosing to converse less, not because I don’t care about the feelings and views of those who want to talk, but because I can no longer pretend to understand what those I converse with really mean, and really feel, so the whole conversation seems like a mix of con-game and self-delusion. Ultimately, as the Paul Simon song says, we hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.

At the same time (and this may seem to be a contradiction of what I have just said), I suspect that what each of us says (through writing, art, music, speech) is more important than we might believe, because our ideas and knowledge and insights have viral power; they influence others who pass them on to others so that we will never know how substantial their impact is, even after we’re gone. Unfortunately, we will probably also never know how exactly they took our writing or our art. This is the paradox and power of poetry, and of art, and graffiti, and even of well-done rhetoric. What the reader or listener precisely understands or feels as a result of what has been written or said is not important, and may not even be predictable. What is important is that with words, we move people. To think differently. To believe differently. To see things with new perspectives and insights. We writers and artists are just agents, precipitators of viral change that will occur over decades and generations and centuries. The direction of that change is something we cannot predict or control.

We write, we draw, we speak, we sculpt, we sing, we decorate our homes and our bodies, we do what we do, because we can’t not. We do what we must. It is in our deepest natures to self-express, and we each do it our own way.

So I’m sorry if you feel I’m not hearing you, not participating in the conversations my blog posts spark. I read you, I hear you, and I do care. But my job, my calling, is to write, and I think I’m reasonably good at that. I am neither as competent at nor as passionate about conversation. So each time I have the inspiration and the time to read or write or converse, to attempt what TS Eliot called “a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate, with shabby equipment always deteriorating, in the general mess of imprecision of feeling”, most often that passion expresses itself in a new article rather than a conversation about something I have already written.

I hope you understand.

.     .     .     .     .

Thanks to my readers, and especially thanks to Tree, Cheryl and Vera, for helping me think all this through, and for your patience as this blog continues to evolve to be what it is meant to be.

Quite often first-time readers of this blog, or who hear that I have a blog called “How to Save the World” ask me to sum up, in one sentence, the answer to the question implied by this blog’s name. My response has generally been to smile and shrug off the question, and then explain what this blog is about:

• Understanding how the world really works (not the oversimplified crap the education system, corporatists, politicians, and mainstream media feed us, but not a conspiracy either — it’s very complex, evolved as it has for understandable and well-intentioned reasons, and no one is in control), and
• Exploring models of better ways to live and make a living, both in the short-term (through experiments like the Transition, Permaculture, Intentional Community, Gift/Generosity/Relationship Economy, and Unschooling movements) and more fully in the longer term, when our civilization collapses, which I believe will occur through a protracted series of cascading crises, in this century.

And of course, if we’re going to “save the world” we need to build our own connections, capacities and competencies, and we need to work to undermine and defeat the worst aspects of industrial civilization.

So I didn’t expect I’d ever be able to provide a one-line answer to “how to save the world”.

But I was re-reading some of my recent creative works (since I intend to do more poetry, short story, speculative fiction, music and art composition this year) and I came across this line in a recent story I’d written:

The hard part is finding people who care.

And I thought: That’s what I should say when people ask me “how to save the world”. For a whole series of reasons:

1. In our individualistic western society, we try to do far too much alone. We need to organize, to cooperate, to collaborate. But we’re all so busy, so distracted, we don’t (most of us) have time or energy to learn what needs to be done, or to help get that work done. Finding others who can help, and know and care to do so, is even harder.
2. Enthusiasm drives a huge proportion of human endeavour. If we don’t really care, we will be hesitant to act, and we’ll give up easily in the face of adversity.
3. In my book Finding the Sweet Spot two of my key points are: (a) never start an enterprise alone; first find partners who share your passion and have complementary skills, and (b) the work you’re meant to do lies at the intersection of what you do uniquely well, what is needed in the world that no one else is precisely meeting, and what you have passion for.
4. We all need love to keep us going. Finding love is all about finding people who care.
5. Before we can care about something, we need to know about it. The important issues in the world today are complex, and it takes a lot of work to really know about them. So finding people who know, and who also care, is really hard.

I have no answer to “How do we find people who care?” and so, I admit, answering the question “How do we save the world” by saying “The hard part is finding people who care” is kinda like answering a question with a question. But I think it’s an honest answer, and one that can lead to a very important conversation on the huge challenges we face connecting, organizing, adapting, and collaborating to address the daunting and intractable problems of our time, problems which have us wondering “how to save the world”.

While I have no answers on how to find people who care, I have a few thoughts:

First, perhaps instead of asking people we’ve just met what they “do” (usually “for a living”), we should ask them what they care about. What keeps them awake at night. What they would die for. And likewise when others ask us what we “do” we should deflect the question and instead tell them what we really care about. If there’s an obvious disconnect between what we/they do and what we/they care about, that in itself should be the basis for an interesting and soul-searching conversation: Why the disconnect, and what can we do about it? And if the conversation resolves that you and the other(s) you’re speaking with care about the same things, then so much more will have been accomplished than in you had merely exchanged data on your current employment.

My sense is that many of us are so disconnected from our feelings and so busy doing what we must that we don’t really know what we care about ourselves. So perhaps our ‘homework’ before seeking people who care about the same things we do is to explore inside and outside ourselves to discover what we really care about. Not what we’ve been told we should care about, not what we’ve imagined we would care about, but, when we really know ourselves, intellectually, emotionally, erotically, intuitively, sensually, somatically, what we really care about, at heart.

Another realization I’m coming to is that in order to discover if someone cares about the things you do, you first must establish a relationship with them, to give them context to understand what the issues are you care about, and why, and vice versa, and to establish a basis of trust, since talking about what you really care about isn’t something you’re going to do comfortably and easily with strangers. This investment in relationship building is expensive — it requires a major investment of time.

Most of us try to “filter” the people in our lives to hone in on those who care about the same things we do. But those filters (especially the online ones, including our blogs and other social networking media) are pretty rough, and they can filter out the wrong people. Perhaps instead of looking so far afield, casting a global net, we should instead be looking closer to home, looking in the place that, for whatever reason, we have selected as our “place”, to see if the people who care about the same things we care about have been drawn to this “place” for the same reasons we have. Perhaps the “filter” of chosen place to live is a better, simpler one than the ones our online social networks employ? And while the anonymity of the web is a safer, more comfortable place from which to assess possible partners for projects of passion, for relationships and collaborations that matter, maybe we need to put ourselves out there, raw, in the physical place in which we’ve chosen to live, and dare to tell the people right there what we care about, and why, if we really want to find the people who care about those things, too.

The people we’re meant to love, and live with, and make a living with. The people we’d give our lives for.

Since I’ve retired I’ve been spending more time meeting with people in, and learning more about, six movements that are proposing, and working to implement, models of a better way to live. My motivation for this is simple: I believe our industrial civilization is going to collapse (in cascading spasms) in this century, and I want my grandchildren to have the tools and knowledge to deal with the crash and, if they survive it, to create a more sustainable society in its aftermath.

The six movements are:

1. The Transition Movement: Originally developed to allow communities to prepare for the End of Oil and make the transition to a low-energy, renewable-energy future, this movement has now expanded its scope to encompass preparations to adapt to the effects of inevitable dramatic climate change in the coming decades.
2. The Permaculture / Cradle-to-Cradle Sustainability Movements: Although the term “permaculture” is being generalized to include anything and everything related to economic and ecological sustainability, at its core it is about natural, sustainable food production and local food self-sufficiency. The Cradle-to-Cradle movement is the analogous (to permaculture) approach for production of other goods, with everything reused and restorable so there is no waste, no loss of value, ever.
3. The Intentional Communities Movement: This movement is principally about encouraging cooperative and collective housing, though it extends to helping people find others with common values and helping them build on these values, and deal with the challenges of communal living, such as achieving consensus and resolving conflicts.
4. The Unschooling Movement: This movement offers a model of self-directed learning, guided by mentors in the community, to replace the industrial education system. It appreciates that we are all born with the capacity for and love of learning, and that by practicing we learn how to learn, and if we trust children to follow their passions they will learn what they need to learn to thrive, better than any institutional system can teach them.
5. Holistic / Well-Being Movements: There are many movements looking to improve upon the industrial health-care systems of the world, but they tend to have these qualities in common: (a) they believe preventing illness and injury is preferable to treating them, (b) they treat the patient and caregivers as equal partners and believe patients are perfectly capable of self-diagnosing and self-treating many illnesses and injuries, and (c) they appreciate that the body is a complex interrelated organism that must be cared for holistically, not like a machine with independent parts.
6. The Gift/ Generosity/ Relationship Economy Movement: This cooperative movement recognizes that the industrial economy is built on manufactured scarcity and manufactured needs, and that this is unsustainable, unhealthy, and anti-social. It stresses the value of relationships, collaborative effort, filling real human needs, and passion and voluntary energy over the dubious and manipulated “market” value of “stuff”. It can operate without money or other medium of exchange, at a time when currencies have become fragile, volatile, and inequitable.

These movements don’t have heads, gurus, controlling organizations or centralized management. That’s why I describe them as movements. They are organic and largely self-organized. And all six movements are fundamentally community-based, and may not scale particularly well. Their practitioners share stories and practices of what has worked and what has not, and respect that each community is different and must therefore ‘realize’ the principles of the movement differently.

I’m fascinated by all six of these movements, and by the struggles each is having getting traction in our teetering industrial society. It’s heartening to see that their members are starting to talk with each other. The next meeting of the Fellowship for Intentional Communities has a session on the Transition Movement, for example, and the Village Building Convergence, an ambitious and well-established “make our city more livable” program in Portland has a whole workshop on the Transition Movement this year. (By the way, I’ll be attending both events later this month in Portland — let me know if you’re going, or if you’ll be at the Unschooling event in neighbouring Vancouver WA also taking place at the end of the month.)

It seems to me that all six of these movements offer a piece of the puzzle of how to live better than our current industrial society/civilization currently allows. I thought it might be useful to see if we could fit all six pieces of the puzzle into an integrated model.

Here’s what each of the six movements could bring to such a model:

1. The Transition Movement:
   • A sense of urgency and specific common purpose (the need to prepare for impending energy, ecological and perhaps economic collapse), as well as momentum and cellular organization experience
2. The Permaculture / Cradle-to-Cradle Sustainability Movement:
   • A practical method for achieving community-based sustainable production of food and manufactured goods
3. The Intentional Communities Movement
   • Methods that can enable real communities to form, self-organize, achieve social and political objectives collaboratively and deal with conflict peacefully
4. The Unschooling Movement
   • A process for learning that can be used when the institutional, industrial education system collapses, or before
5. Holistic / Well-Being Movements
   • A process for optimizing community well-being that can be used when the institutional, industrial “health care” system collapses, or before
6. The Gift/Generosity/Relationship Economy Movement
   • A means for organizing economic activity that is not based on scarcity, money, competition or coercive exchange, but rather on our natural generosity, love, trust, and passion to solve problems and meet real needs cooperatively

I see the Transition Movement as the umbrella “adaptive change” movement, since I think it can and must broaden itself to accommodate adaptation to economic collapse, and with it the collapse of health care, education and other institutions. I see the Gift/Generosity/Relationship Economy Movement as the natural community-based economic model, the one that will work sustainably when trade, currencies and centralized globalized corporations collapse. I see the Intentional Communities Movement as the social and political model, the one that will show us how to live together peacefully and cooperatively once more in community, instead of under large inflexible centralized governments and the tyranny of lawyers and law-enforcers, since most governments are likely to go bankrupt and simply cease operating when civilizational collapse begins.

I’ve tried to depict this in the diagram above, but I have a number of concerns with it:

• It’s missing a lot of the subtlety, the nuance, the context for when/how the various institutions and systems in our civilization are likely to collapse, and how they are so totally interdependent. Perhaps I need a story to show how each of the integrated movement’s “parts” would fit into the new model. It’s hard to show an organic system with a bunch of boxes, and I can’t see how to show the interdependence of the system’s parts in a diagram.
• Essential to many or all “parts” of the Natural Society Model are (in addition to community): love, conversation, story-telling, trust, natural enterprise, responsibility, passion, and stewardship, but I don’t know how to represent them on the diagram.

I’d welcome any thoughts on how to pull this all together and present/represent it better. Is there a better name than “Natural Society”? How might this be pitched to the hard-working people in each of the movements in a way that is constructive, inviting, and collaborative, rather than appearing to subsume or layer more responsibility onto them? Or is this attempt to integrate them a waste of time and energy — will they find ways to work together naturally when they recognize the advantages of doing so?

the six selves — a model of reconnection with ourselves and with all-life-on-Earth that I’ve recently developed (more on this in an upcoming post)

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

This Sucker’s Going Down…: Two of my most informed sources on the economy are warning that our overwrought, overstimulated and fundamentally ruined economic system is now teetering, and it’s time, if you are still invested in equities or worse, to head quickly for the exits. Jim Kunstler notes in a blog post ominously called “A Still Moment”:

This sucker is going down because the train of bankruptcies underway has a remorseless self-reinforcing power to provoke more and more bankruptcies at every stop along the line as every promise to pay is welshed on. The mortgages will not be paid and securities will not pay their investors and the banks will choke on the bad paper promises in their vaults and the pension funds will not pay their beneficiaries and the states and counties and municipalities will go broke and not pay their employees and creditors, and the federal government will not be able to “print” new money in sufficient quantities fast enough to compensate for all the money not being paid up-and-down the line… and one morning we will wake up and discover that all those promises to pay were sham promises based on no productive activity whatsoever… and that will be a sad day…

So many forces are roiling around ‘out there’ now that it’s hard to believe that the authorities in government and banking can keep the illusion of normality going a whole lot longer. The possible litigation against Goldman Sachs-style frauds by a thousand aggrieved victims is enough to paralyze the system. Meanwhile, trillions in credit default swaps are ticking away like dirty bombs. Greece is going down, with Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and the UK standing by to go next. Nobody can pay their bills. Before long, the old folks won’t get their checks. Then the poor folks.

…And Automatic Earth Gears Up for the Fallout: In an equally ominous development, Stoneleigh has quit her job to help transform her blog (with Ilargi) into a full-time multi-faceted information centre to help the millions of victims of the coming economic collapse to prepare and build resilience to deal with it.

Unschooling Debate Heats Up: You probably know I’m a huge fan of radical unschooling and in particular PS Pirro’s unschooling manifesto. What I haven’t talked about is that when the collapse of the three E’s (economy, energy, ecology) comes, there will be no money for public education, and probably not enough to keep private schools going either. So we’re going to have to work in partnership with other parents in our communities to homeschool and/or unschool the community’s children. As an average, disengaged student who came late to unschooling and was transformed by it into a scholar and a competent writer, I’ve come to believe that, with patience and the freedom to make mistakes, every child can thrive in a self-directed unschooling environment, even with little or no parental guidance. So I was surprised when the brilliant and informed Sharon Astyk took a shot at unschooling enthusiasts, saying it was no panacea and wasn’t for everyone. Of course I passed this on to PS, who has written a very smart response. Please read both posts — it’s an important debate.

The Bright Side of Doomers: Vera Bradova, who has labeled us post-civilization bloggers and back-to-the-land types predicting the end of our civilization in this century “doomers”, has two good things to say about us: (i) we’re past denial, and awake to ho the world really works, and (ii) we’re doing interesting, useful and contagious things to address the challenges, not just complaining. “The main point of their stance is sound: moving out of the infantilized, catered and untenable modern lifestyle and into one that is based on self-reliance, sanity, community. They are the resilience pioneers.” Right on.

LIVING BETTER

Living the Generosity Economy: Interview with a Melbourne Australia restaurant whose menu has no prices. Thanks to Tree for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

The Trillion Dollar Fraud: John Talbott in Salon explains why the Fed, which is not a government agency and which is, quite overtly and deliberately, controlled entirely by the banking industry, is so fiercely opposed to being audited.

Billions Spent on Psych Drugs — With No Net Benefit to Patients: A new book Anatomy of an Epidemic by award-winning journalist Robert Whitaker concludes that psychiatrists and Big Pharma have been working together for decades to conceal evidence that both “industries” fail to improve the mental health of most patients. Excerpt from a Salon interview:

The problem is that psychiatry, starting in 1980 with the publication of the DSM-III, decided to tell the public that psychiatric disorders were biological ailments, and that its drugs were safe and effective treatments for those ailments. If it suddenly announces to the public that a long-term NIMH-funded study found that the 15-year recovery rate for schizophrenia patients was 40 percent for those off meds and 5 percent for those on meds, then that story begins to fall apart. By not reporting the results, psychiatry maintains the image of its drugs in the public mind, and the value of psychiatrists in today’s therapy marketplace.

Joe Bageant Takes on the Media: Joe lashes out at Anderson Cooper and the rest of the overpaid celeb entertainment media cabal. Excerpt:

We’re gonna “develop” and “stimulus” our way out of what is happening now — which is that we are fast becoming a slave labor workhouse planet. Now let me see here — hmmm — who is in charge of development? Oh yeah, the global financiers.

There is no way the world’s working people can win in the long run, which is getting pretty damned short, or even survive, except by joining the worker struggles, of China, Asia and Africa and India. The idea that American workers are the same as the Asian and Latin American and African working people goes down hard in American gullets… As a people, they’ll never ever accept that fact, because they’ll never know it for at least two reasons. (1) They are  too over worked and undereducated to find out for themselves, and (2) American corporate media machinery will never let them hear of it. Americans are screwed, blued and tattooed.

And for that I blame Anderson Cooper. That’s right, CNN’s boyishly good looking, sincere faced, Emmy Award winning Anderson Cooper. Let me explain.

Between the corporate and financial elites and the slobbering masses stands the American Information Class — the reporters, talking heads, news anchors and pundits. In short, the entire gaggle of meat puppets and journalism hacks who have been cultivated and bred to be clueless by the university industry and others serving our corporate empire. In other words, serving global capitalism, and the national fictions it maintains, including that sizable piece of corporate feudal turf known as America.

Former UN President Speaks Out: Father Miguel D’Escoto at the alternative People’s Congress on Climate Change and the Environment describes the UN as “The Subjugated Nations”, a dysfunctional dictatorship of the West (the security council), and lashes out at the US wars of occupation in the Mideast and the need for Latin America to plot a new course. Thanks to Tree for the link. and the one that follows.

What if the Tea Party Were Black?: “Imagine that hundreds of black protesters descended on DC armed with AK-47s. Would they be defended as patriotic Americans?”

The Future of Publishing: A great article in the New Yorker by Ken Auletta on the fight among Amazon, Apple and Google for publishing dominance, and what it means for a struggling publishing industry (books, magazines, newspapers and all other matter of intermediated information and entertainment). Highlights:

David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, says that his company is racing “to embed audio and video and other value-added features in e-books. It could be an author discussing his book, or a clip from a movie that touches on the book’s topic.” The other major publishers are working on similar projects, experimenting with music, video from news clips, and animation. Publishers hope that consumers will be willing to pay more for the added features. The iPad, Rosenthal says, “has opened up the possibility that we are no longer dealing with a static book. You have tremendous possibilities…” [now you're talking]

A close associate of [Amazon head Jeff] Bezos puts it more starkly: “What Amazon really wanted to do was make the price of e-books so low that people would no longer buy hardcover books. Then the next shoe to drop would be to cut publishers out and go right to authors.” Last year, according to several literary agents, a senior Amazon executive asked for suggestions about whom Amazon might hire as an acquisitions editor. Its Encore program has begun to publish books by self-published authors whose work attracts good reviews on Amazon.com. And in January it offered authors who sold electronic rights directly to Amazon a royalty of seventy per cent, provided they agreed to prices of between $2.99 and $9.99. The offer, one irate publisher said, was meant “to pit authors against publishers…”

Although critics argue that traditional book publishing takes too much money from authors, in reality the profits earned by the relatively small percentage of authors whose books make money essentially go to subsidizing less commercially successful writers. The system is inefficient, but it supports a class of professional writers, which might not otherwise exist.

THOUGHTS OF THE WEEK (POETIC EDITION)

From David Whyte (thanks to my new friend Dawn Smith for pointing me to the three poems/thoughts that follow):

SWEET DARKNESS

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize it own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

Also from David Whyte from his talk Being at the Frontier of Your Identity (available as a free podcast on iTunes):

You have to enunciate the exact nature of your exile…

find the ground of your own attentiveness to the rest of the world…

It is frightening to do this because as soon as that true presence makes itself known, enormous parts of you are going to disappear, die, fall away…

But at the same time, everything you are doing or not doing suddenly makes sense, [including an appreciation of] what is standing in the way of your real life…

You must turn towards your vulnerability…

And remember: There is no path that goes all the way.

From Mary Oliver (a partial excerpt):

WILD GEESE

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

From the free downloadable e-book Believe Me: A Storytelling Manifesto (thanks to Tree for the link):

We all want to look back at the story of our lives, and know that it made sense. — the author, Michael Margolis

If you’re going to have a story,  have a big story, or none at all. — Joseph Campbell

There is no greater burden than carrying an untold story. –  Maya Angelou

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives —the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change— truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.  —Salman Rushdie