individual wealth and power

A quote from David Holmgren's recent book:
Permaculture,
Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability

Because of the high-energy nature of the modern world, each person, especially in rich countries, has much greater power and impact on nature and society than any previous -- or probably, future -- generation. Estimates of the resources that a person in the rich world commands are in the order of 100 energy slaves. Even the majority of citizens of poor countries today have the equivalent of several energy slaves. During the lifetime of an American baby-boomer born in 1950 and dying in 2025, over half the conventional oil reserves of the United States (the second-richest oil nation after Saudi Arabia) will have been consumed. The relative power between individuals and groups within generations is naturally the focus of economics and politics. Thus we are constantly comparing ourselves to our peers, but we have many more abstract and vague concerns about future generations. Further the culture of growth assumes that future generations will be more powerful than we are.

Rapid energy descent means that our individual behaviour today may be more potent in determining the future than the behaviour of whole communities in that future.

Much of this power is expressed through our purchasing decisions in the monetary economy. In this way, it is the billion or so middle-class people around the world who are the engine of global destruction, rather than the numerically small elite, or the relatively self-reliant but increasingly destitute majority.

The rise of individualism in the modern world makes possible personal expression and action through lifestyle choice, even if few choose to do so in any more than superficial ways. This empowerment of the individual provides a unique opportunity for bottom-up change.

conspiracy theory

Things are bit busy at the moment, but given this is Saturday and I notice I get a lot of visitors over the weekend I thought you might enjoy these two items, that relate well. They are both reasonably lengthy and come at the same issue from different angles.


Paranoid shift by Michael Hasty

... I worked at the CIA myself as a low-level clerk as a teenager in the '60s. This was at the same time I was beginning to question the government's actions in Vietnam. In fact, my personal "paranoid shift" probably began with the disillusionment I felt when I realized that the story of American foreign policy was, at the very least, more complicated and darker than I had hitherto been led to believe.

But for most of the next 30 years, even though I was a radical, I nevertheless held faith in the basic integrity of a system where power ultimately resided in the people, and whereby if enough people got together and voted, real and fundamental change could happen.

What constitutes my personal paranoid shift is that I no longer believe this to be necessarily true.

In his book, "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower," William Blum warns of how the media will make anything that smacks of "conspiracy theory" an immediate "object of ridicule." This prevents the media from ever having to investigate the many strange interconnections among the ruling class-for example, the relationship between the boards of directors of media giants, and the energy, banking and defense industries. These unmentionable topics are usually treated with what Blum calls "the media's most effective tool-silence." But in case somebody's asking questions, all you have to do is say, "conspiracy theory," and any allegation instantly becomes too frivolous to merit serious attention. Read more

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Getting Free by James Herod
A sketch of an association of democratic, autonomous neighborhoods and how to create it

The main purpose of this book is to try to persuade revolutionaries to shift the sites of the anti-capitalist struggle, and to select new battlefields. I identify three strategic sites for fighting — neighborhoods, workplaces, and households — which I believe will not only enable us to defeat capitalists but also to build a new society in the process.

The advantage of shifting the battleground to the three strategic sites is that it is an offensive strategy, not merely a defensive one. That is, it is not merely our reacting to things we don't like and want to stop, not merely our resisting what they are doing to us, but rather our defending what we are doing to them through our new social creations. It means that we would begin to take the initiative to build the life we want, and then fight to defend this life, and defend our social creations from attacks by the ruling class. I think people will be much more willing to fight for something like this, than to fight to stop outrages of the ruling class elsewhere, which often seem remote from their everyday lives. But we should be quite clear that this will involve us in terrible fights. We will never be able to establish free associations on any of these sites without directly confronting ruling class power...

...While we’re on the question of terminology, I must warn the reader not to be turned off too quickly by the words I use. I choose words with care. It is not by accident or through carelessness that I say “ruling class”, for example. I do it deliberately. I believe this is the clearest way to talk about our situation. If you do not believe there is a ruling class perhaps you have been watching too much television or have taken too many sociology courses. Read more

The Fluoride Deception

Sitting at the beach yesterday, I listened to some debate about the possible health benefits and possible dangers of choosing to add flouride to people's diet, through tablets or flouridation of municipal water supplies. I decided to do some research for myself and while there was a volume of information in the form of articles and essays presenting it's pros and cons, I found this video was a most thorough explanation of the issue: Christopher Bryson, an award-winning journalist and former producer at the BBC, discusses the findings of his new book The Flouride Deception. EARLY REVIEW of The Fluoride Deception: "Bryson marshals an impressive amount of research to demonstrate fluoride's harmfulness, the ties between leading fluoride researchers and the corporations who funded and benefited from their research, and what he says is the duplicity with which fluoridation was sold to the people. The result is a compelling challenge to the reigning dental orthodoxy, which should provoke renewed scientific scrutiny and public debate."

In Donora, Pennsylvania, the most notorious air pollution disaster in US history implicated Flouride in 19 deaths. According to Bryson, this incident was largely responsible for the start of the environmental movement and yet the cover up was so thorough that this is an unknown event to most environmentalists.

capitalism 3.0

Here is a clear description of the commons, how they have been exploited, and the importance of reclaiming them as the common asset they are for us and future generations.

I first came across some background to this process which took it out of the abstract in an article by Derek J. Wilson.

From 1770 to 1830 some 3,280 enclosure bills were passed putting into private hands for private gain more than six million acres of commonly-held lands. By 1830 not a single county had more than three percent of its land open to public use.

According to historian George Sturt: “To the enclosure of the common more than to any other cause may be traced all the changes which have subsequently passed over the village. It was like knocking the keystone out of an arch.” (Kirkpatrick Sale. Rebels Against the Future, 1995.)

Review of Capitalism 3.0 by Peter Montague of Rachel's Weekly

Books full of new ideas are rare, but here's one worth chewing on: Peter Barnes's Capitalism 3.0. The book is original, readable and provocative. It will definitely hold your attention.

But let's get one thing straight. Despite the title of his book, Peter Barnes is no radical. He is an entrepreneur and investor who co-founded Working Assets, the telephone company. He says, "As a businessman and investor, I've benefited personally from the primacy of capital and am not keen to end it." (pg. 24) On the other hand, he recognizes that, "Capitalism as we know it is devouring creation. It's living off nature's capital and calling it growth."(pg. 26) So, "to save capitalism from itself," (pg. 66) the book offers a whole slew of new ideas. the goal of which is to give capitalism a "software upgrade" to fix what Barnes sees as the system's three major flaws:

(1) its disregard for nature;
(2) its disregard for future generations; and
(3) its disregard for the poor.

Barnes's analysis of the problem is succinct: the history of capitalism reveals two threads: the decline of "the commons" and the rise of the corporation. These two threads are linked because corporations make money largely by taking things from "the commons" (or dumping wastes into the commons) without paying compensation to its owners (all of us).

By "the commons" Barnes means "all the things we inherit or create together," which none of us owns individually. The commons is like a river with three forks:

1. Nature, which includes air, water, DNA, photosynthesis, seeds, topsoil, airwaves, minerals, animals, plants, antibiotics, oceans, fisheries, aquifers, quiet, wetlands, forests, rivers, lakes, solar energy, wind energy... and so on;
2. Community: streets, playgrounds, the calendar, holidays, universities, libraries, museums, social insurance [e.g., social security], law, money, accounting standards, capital markets, political institutions, farmers' markets, flea markets, craigslist... etc.;
3. Culture: language, philosophy, religion, physics, chemistry, musical instruments, classical music, jazz, ballet, hip-hop, astronomy, electronics, the Internet, broadcast spectrum, medicine, biology, mathematics, open-source software... and so forth. (pg. 5)

The commons is a set of assets that have two characteristics: they're all gifts, and they're all shared. (pg. 5) Taken together, all the assets in the commons are our "common wealth." Furthermore, the commons are essential and indispensable; they provide sustenance for everyone. If we fail to protect them, we're sunk.

Read on...

life-based pursuits

Life-based activities are things we can do because we are alive. They include, for example, appreciation, empathy, friendship, love, art, music, dance, sport, parenting, looking, listening, smelling, touching, tasting, thinking, meditating, scholarship, service, etc.

Rather than diminishing with use, life-based activities tend to become stronger and more rewarding through use.

While industry is always eager to sell material accessories, life-based development tends not to require much material resources, and is not likely to inspire organized conflict. Quite the contrary. By developing human potentials, we increase our personal satisfaction and simultaneously reduce our territorial and material needs, thereby reducing the threat we might pose to others.

The more we develop our skills and abilities the more we can help others to do the same. Sports, music and other creative activities give pleasure to both participants and observers. As we develop our own inner calm, we can help others find calm in their lives. As we increase our understanding, we can help others to understand.

The satisfaction derived from life-based activities is far greater, proportional to the material required, than from inessential material consumption. The prospects for the future improve when we place more value on what we can do with our lives, rather than on the quantity of the goods we consume. If the material accessories can be avoided, a shift to life-based activities would go a long way to ease environmental distress and enable the restoration of ecosystems health.

Exerpt from: Life, Money and Illusion by Mike Nickerson

Note: If you are a NZ resident and would like a copy of this book,
please leave a comment here - as I hope to place a bulk order soon.

cracks in the cultural trance

In the prologue of David Kortens' new book he writes:

...the power of the institutions of economic and political domination depends on their ability to perpetuate a falsified and inauthentic cultural trance based on beliefs and values at odds with reality. Break the trance, replace the values of an inauthentic culture with values of an authentic culture grounded in a love of life rather than a love of money, and the people will realign their life energy and bring forth the life-serving institutions of a new era. The key is to change the stories by which we define ourselves.

This is the same trance that Richard Moore so eloquently detailed in his "Escaping the Matrix" that I reviewed back in February.

This week's NZ Herald World section offered a headline: "Coming Next: Fake news from the USA" - a wonderful expose of the Video News Clips being produced by government and big business which is being passed off as official news. See Orwell Rolls in His Grave for George Orwell's insight into this process.

In the same paper was a funny-if-it-wasn't-so-sad description of a new marketing tool being used to sell homes in America. The vendors employ actors to play out the perfect suburban husband wife and two kids scenario that some prospective buyers, while knowing it is an illusion, are so moved they want to buy the home - buy the illusion!

The illusion is delicious, consoling, comforting, and beguiling, but it keeps us in a trance. Let's learn the truth and then we can tell each other a different story - one about a culture with a different set of values. Values of love, nurturing, support, the arts, creativity, sharing, partnership. This is a culture that existed before, and which we must surely return to if we are to enjoy a future on this fragile planet we call earth.

The Great Turning

The day started well, and got better.

A book by David C. Korten and subtitled: From Empire to Earth Community was delivered by my friendly courier this morning while talking with Laurence about creative means of increasing our ability to care for our land and use it with greater sensitivity and wisdom. I went out into the sunny afternoon and dived in - it was deeper than I could have hoped for.

The opening of the book has a seemingly endless stream of praise and a small number of the names I recognise are amongst my most respected thinkers. That was before I got to the author's acknowledgements, which lets you know, in no uncertain terms, the extent of the research and the breadth of diverse opinions which have informed his writing.

I'll leave you with the opening page of the Foreword, preceded as it is by a quote attributed to Joanna Macy, then you decide whether this is one for your local library.

Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transistion we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they well call this the time of the Great Turning.

- Joanna Macy -

By what name will our children and our children's children call our time? Will they speak in anger and frustration of the time of the Great Unravelling, when profligate consumption led to an accelerating wave of collapsing environmental system, violent competition for what remained of the planets resources, a dramatic dieback of the Human population, and a fragmentation of those who remained into warring fiefdoms ruled by ruthless local lords?

Or will they look back in joyful celebration on the noble time of the Great Turning, when their forebears turned crisis into opportunity, embraced the higher-order potential of their human nature, learned to live in creative partnership with one another and the living Earth, and brought forth a new era of human possibility?

It is the premise of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community that we humans stand at a defining moment that presents us with an irrevocable choice. Our collective response will determine how our time is remembered for so long as the human species survives. In the days now at hand, we must each be clear that every individual and collective choice we make is a vote for the future we of this time will bequeath to the generations that follow. The Great Turning is not a prophecy; it is a possibility.

Another excellent review

converging paths

The Healing Wisdom of Africa
Finding Life Purpose Through Nature, Ritual, and Community
by Malidoma Patrice Some

Today, while most people in the West enjoy material affluence, villagers in Africa suffer hunger and poverty. But here, perhaps, is a case where the material and the spiritual are working independently toward the same end.

Africa's material scarcity may be symptomatic of a deeper global problem pertaining to soul and Spirit.

While the Third world is experiencing the immediacy of the people's need for healing in the area of physical hunger, the West is awakening to a spiritual hunger so dramatic as to be almost frightening. Like the famished cows in the Pharoah's dream, the modern psyche dangles and zig zags this way and that with a mighty intent to devour anything that smells ancient and spiritual.

The converging paths of these two worlds may ultimately enable material abundance to silence the Third World's cries for nourishment and the cries of the Westerner's hungering soul.

escaping the matrix - review

I have a small basket of the most valuable tools and books that I refer back to and share with others who are looking to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. Escaping The Matrix is my newest addition, for which I am most grateful to the author Richard Moore.

Once I read the first page and sensed the pace wasn't slowing, I drank it down in big gulps. I was delighted by the clarity and rapid fire presentation of information, and his linking of the pieces to make the point - that we live in a world quite different from the one suggested to us by the corporate dominated media machine.

I can't praise highly enough, the synthesis of knowledge about the development of our human history and what we can now reasonably assume (based on present wisdom, research, and widely accepted facts) is the real world. That our society is being manipulated and managed by a few elite rulers is a hard pill to swallow when we are deeply embedded in the Matrix view, but we are stepped through the facts until it's obviousness is undeniable. The bibliography and list of resources at the back of the book, offers a plethora of excellent material to help you if you doubt this proposition. And understanding it is a helpful pre-requisite to the second half of the book which deals with some possible responses and discusses how we might become part of the solution - now that the problem is overwhelmingly clear.

If not as thrilling and liberating as peeling away the layers of illusion about the situation we are presently in, the second part has prompted me to go and search out more information, and some of what I have found excites me. In these latter chapters, Richard describes processes and tools, and proceeds to offer ideas about how these might be engaged to transform our society, from the grass roots on up. He paints a picture of a time when large numbers of people might come to that most valued, harmonious and hopeful disposition of "we the people."

While offering a few examples to whet our appetite, perhaps the examples we so desperately need are the ones that will be demonstrated by us.

escaping the matrix

Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
by Richard Moore

Richard Moore seems like an interesting fellow, and very well read! I may be biased just because I recognise a number of titles in the book's bibliography, but from the first few pages in this gem of a book I can see the research has been worth it. And I suggest the many years of dialogue via his cyberjournal have paid off in the clarity of the writing.

He wastes no time throwing the reader into numberless descriptions of the dichotomy between the benign versions of historic and present events that we are used to hearing (the Matrix), and the descriptions of those events and how they have impacted on the various populations, primarily in the third world (the real world).

The details come thick and fast but the message comes through loud and clear, things are changing and since the direction they are going is presently in the hands of a few ruling elite, we probably will not like the direction they are taking.

When I read the following news in today's email, in the context of having completed Chapter one, I felt sobered to realise that the strategys for responding to a Bird Flu epidemic (accidental or allowed), may include considerable military involvement.

09 Feb 2006 Lt Col Kimberly Robinson, Department of Defense; Taha A. Kass-Hout, MD, MS, Northrop Grumman CDC Programs; and Lauren C. Thompson, The MTIRE Corporation are joining the Bird Flu Summit taking place on 27th-28th February in Washington D.C. However The Bird Flu Summit agenda has not yet listed the above participants on their website. Citizens For Legitimate Government has obtained this information.

Why is the Department of Defense, Northrop Gumman ('Battle Management' specialists), and The MITRE Corporation ('Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I)s' for the Department of Defense) attending a *Bird Flu Summit?*