PermaKent Permaculture Ideas of J. Kent Hastings

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The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia published the cheerful report, “Monsanto Runs Into Wall. Yes!!” in their “Why Permaculture/GMOs” website section.

Poor little Monsanto must be feeling the heat. They’ve got a Biotech-GMO cheerleading page online that essentially says organic customers and growers face no danger from them.

I’ve been listening to the Audible edition of chimp researcher and environmentalist Jane Goodall’s recent book about the global food situation, Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating.

Goodall catalogs a list of familiar problems with GMO food, including neighboring fields with heirloom varieties being contaminated and destroyed because of their supposed intellectual property infringement as if the organic grower wanted the Frankenfood strain. Another chapter deals with CAFOs (factory farms) in detail and Monsanto’s growth hormone troubles in passing. I especially enjoyed her saying this wasn’t just science fiction but actually happening now. Her description of factory farms reminded me of The Meatrix animations.

Michael Pollan was interviewed by Nicki Gostin on “Food Inc.” at Newsweek’s Pop Vox blog and had this to say about Monsanto’s biggest threat:

The movie talks a lot about Monsanto. Can you explain this?
It’s a company that genetically modifies seeds, and they sell a very high percentage of the seeds worldwide now, and they’re gradually consolidating their hold over the world’s seed supply. They don’t want farmers to save seeds. They are great believers in the fact [that] you should come to them every year, and so this age-old tradition of farmers saving a certain amount of seeds for the next year, they’re determined to stamp it out. Now they have the law on their side.

In a recent SALT talk, which you can hear here, Pollan added another intellectual property complaint about GM crops. They can’t be tested for safety and effectiveness without the reports being approved by the company (they’re supposed to increase yield and save the starving billions, recently shown in published field tests to be very wrong).

N. Stephan Kinsella’s footnoted, well reasoned 2008 monograph, Against Intellectual Property, costs $6 printed, but is available to us cheapskates free of charge for immediate download at, and this may surprise some of you, from my kind of anarchists who sometimes have a voice at Mises.org.

If you think law is license plates for bees on Tuesday, underwear having to be worn on the outside on Thursday, and exterminating all red haired, left handed Episcopalians on the Sabbath because the majority was persuaded to vote on those matters, then I think you have a problem.

Kinsella argues that intellectual property is a government created monopoly that can’t be justified on the natural moral law grounds used by some libertarians (for example, a position at odds with J. Neil Schulman’s natural moral law based Logoright essay) and that on economic grounds IP protects established businesses while stifling innovation.

Last year Kinsella addressed Neil’s logoright concept in a blog post.

“So as much as I disagree with Schulman’s justification for “logorights,” the term is a pretty good one–except that it is so arcane. A variation on it using more standard terms might be better: pattern rights, or perhaps innovation rights. Or, to make the label a bit less “neutral,” replace “rights” with “monopolies” or “privileges,” since that is what is being granted by the state. So we have “pattern monopolies” or “pattern privileges,” “innovation rights” or “innovation privileges.” I think I like “pattern monopolies” the best.”

Meanwhile, here are some copyright and patent stories, mostly from Ars Technica: Pirate political parties are celebrating election victories in Europe. And more free spectrum for everyone was proposed. Beyond electronics, data may become chemically processed: Look Ma, No Electricity Infochemistry. Academic source code in computer science is being dragged into the open source debate, because of the way science is supposed to be done. Researchers conclude piracy not stifling content. And finally, British music boss, “We should have embraced Napster.”

Wind Simplicity’s Windancer^TM
One objection to wind power is the ugliness of the turbines.

Even T. Boone Pickens said he wouldn’t have one of the turbines for his own Pickens Plan on his property for that reason.

If small wind systems became decorative and attractive, maybe homeowner associations (HOA) wouldn’t resist them so much, as is discussed in this Las Vegas Review Journal real estate column.

Thanks to a Twitter post, I saw this TreeHugger.com article, “Backyard Wind Turbine by Wind Simplicity Mirrors Art and Nature.” Some phrases caught my eye.

“. . .aesthetically pleasing and still functional. . .copper colored, 8 bladed. . .particularly in areas with low wind speeds. . .”

I expect a commercial with some old codger saying “More blades! More Fun!”

Paraphrasing Wind Simplicity’s latest press release, “Windancer™ was selected from 769 projects submitted from 111 nations to win a prestigious Canadian National Energy Globe Award for 2009.”

Windancer looks to old style windmills and the patriotic Canadian maple leaf for design inspiration and also achieves high efficiency in low or high wind speeds, runs quietly, and is compact thus easy to install. But the downside for such elegance might be the price, according to the Globe and Mail article linked from the TreeHugger article:

“. . .available in sizes from 3 kilowatts to 23 kilowatts. But power and design come at a price. They range from $27,000 to $69,000, not including the tower.”

The cheap alternatives listed are still over $10,000.

Here are my cheap wind power alternatives. Prices range from cheap (a few hundred bucks for parts, some assembly required) to free (the plans, that is).

ABC (Australia) Rural reports, “Group that started permaculture holds its last meeting“.

And here’s a couple of random Mound-day items. First, a Boing Boing post describing goat towers is worth reading and has cute photos. That goats are curious and like to climb on things was confirmed for me when I found goats on top of my car while visiting a friend living at what later became a Crustacean movie set location.

While the front page of the online Financial Times discusses green shoots withering due to pessimistic investors, inside there’s an article titled “Seeds of discontent,” a review of three new books about seeds and the history of plant genetics. Weird times these are, hmm?

“There seems to be something innocent about Burbank’s lifelong work of plant breeding, summed up by the chef and Slow Food guru Alice Waters: “There’s nothing wrong with improving plants. Luther Burbank … did that. But he didn’t violate nature doing it.” To put it another way, it’s hard to imagine that Burbank would breed varieties designed to look good and last for ever but that taste of practically nothing, like those that fill so many supermarket shelves.”

MAGENN AIR ROTOR SYSTEM
Helium tethered generator
A Wired News article, “High-Altitude Wind Machines Could Power New York City,” is also displayed at the CNN Tech section.

“The very best ground-based wind sites have a wind-power density of less than 1 kilowatt per square meter of area swept. Up near the jet stream above New York, the wind power density can reach 16 kilowatts per square meter.”

The Magenn Power, Inc. site claims even more energy potential than just for the Big Apple.

“There is enough energy in high altitude winds to power civilization 100 times over; and sooner or later, we’re going to learn to tap into the power of winds and use it to run civilization.” Says Ken Caldeira, Professor of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science. (Discovery Channel, Project Earth, Infinite Winds episode)

Ground-based wind turbines may still make sense as lowly investments we can make individually that will keep lights and other devices powered, even in an uncertain economy. Thus some analysts describe home solar and wind systems as good retirement assets. In the Wired News story, the first scientific assessment of high altitude wind potential is described.

“The resource is really, really phenomenal,” said Cristina Archer of Cal State University-Chico, who co-authored a paper on the work published in the open-access journal Energies.”There is a lot of energy up there, but it’s not as steady as we thought. It’s not going to be the silver bullet that will solve all of our energy problems, but it will have a role.”

The Energies article contains a link to a large PDF titled, “Atlas of high altitude wind power,” with maps of wind power density organized by altitude.

Just read an article by “Permabear” and Crash Proof author at Mises.org, “Why the Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One”. Jon Stewart’s interview with Schiff is also linked on the site (and here too, now).

I’m listening to the Crash Proof audio book now, and the picture it paints of the growing, decades long corporate and government fraud and cover-up that got us here is sobering.

Published in 2006, Crash Proof foretold the bad things that have happened to the U.S. economy. The real estate bubble bursting as adjustable rates went up, the bank failures from derivatives, and the stock market collapse all came true as predicted, seemingly on schedule. Those would be good correctives, the author suggests, compared to expanding the stimulus and bailout insanity.

Hyperinflation and food riots are coming if our economic path doesn’t change. “Peak Money” (to borrow a green term) will be very unpleasant. What was fiction in 1979 (J. Neil Schulman’s prophetic novel Alongside Night is available as a free download from the author) is becoming fact in 2009.

TriplePundit reports “Small Wind Beginning to Make a Big Difference.” For those of you concerned with U.S. trade balance, there’s good news:

“What’s even more encouraging is that U.S. manufacturers–such as Mariah Wind profiled here on 3P–accounted for about half of total worldwide small wind turbine sales.”

For the cheap DIY folks, while I am skeptical of all those Earth4Energy affiliates (operating under different, but similar names), there does seem to be enough real information on Layne Erikson’s (Autolayne) previous free YouTube videos (recently reposted) that his new ebook may be worth his $25 asking price.

The ebook describes how to make an improved wind power system that runs at slower wind speeds (five blades instead of three in his free design), has step by step organized instructions with photographs, and uses commonly available plumbing and used car parts. I just wish toxic PVC pipe could be avoided, but hey, maybe there’s no easy alternative. (Fishing for a comment to prove me wrong, please).

Of course, there’s always the free Instructables 1,000 watt wind turbine design.

Finally making some seedballs to practice what I preach at Seedball.com.

Remembering that red terra cotta clay was the largest proportion of materials, I left an art supply place in a fool’s paradise with a heavy box of modeling clay, not the dry powder needed to make seedballs. D’oh!!!

Searching around the interwebs, I found others who have gone to art supply stores without finding red clay powder, including a person at the Guerrilla Gardening.org community message board.

That frustrated powder seeker received a useful answer about sources in the L.A. area from user “rolypoly” at Los Angeles Guerrilla Gardening with info from their Tips & Tricks page.

Perhaps I should’ve paid closer attention to the Heavy Petal seedball page.

” *Dry red clay: Yes, this is the stuff that potters use. Commonly it comes pre-mixed, which you don’t want. You want the dry powder so it can be easily mixed. I’ve tried using grey clay from a riverbank - it doesn’t work so well.”

If all you can find is wet terra cotta modeling clay, someone else on the web wrote that air drying (not kiln firing) and taking a cheese grater to it when dry will produce good powder. But do the grating outside in good ventilation.

The LAGG group lists a source for free organic compost and some ideas for which seeds to plant. Making seedballs is a method of planting that can be done indoors, then dried and thrown on the ground months later. But you don’t have to wait that long.

How To Make Seedballs video at YouTube.

MTV movies blog
Sigal Ratner-arias reports that the Venezuelan Rain Forest Inspired ‘Up’, (the 2009 animated feature, not the 1976 Russ Meyer movie). Don’t get them confused when obtaining videos for family entertainment.

Friends remember the notorious weird Meyer film and say the new feature is great. Guess I’ll check it out soon. I won’t admit seeing Land of the Lost or the Vegas Hangover flick.

A not quite so guilty pleasure for me was the Sarah Connor Chronicles series on Fox, which has officially been canceled. The new Terminator movie was not enough to be the TV show’s Salvation.

Of course, Terminator seems to be official U.S. military policy, according to this article published today in The Register, forwarded to me by J. Neil Schulman.

“In any case, it seems plain that building a system focused on “high-level cognition” which can “participate in its own construction” will be fraught with difficulty. You might have a notion of what you’d like it to be, but it will have its own ideas. By definition, one would have no firm picture of just what would be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world at the end of the construction process - but you would know that it’d be potentially able to make more of itself, or indeed repair itself if it got damaged.”

DARPA’s Dr. Mike Cox calls the proposed system SELF, not the fictional Skynet.

As a fan of Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2006 Hugo Nominated novelette, “The Calorie Man” (read it free in PDF), I found it irresistable to watch this TED Talk on the TEDTalksDirector channel at YouTube about the Millennium Seed Bank.

“The Calorie Man” is a 1984 type of story about a future run by corporations owning all food crops (by patent definition creep) sold by the calorie energy unit and the desperate hungry underground that resists them.

Here’s the TEDTalksDirector’s description of the Millennium Seed Bank video:

“In this brief talk from TED U 2009, Jonathan Drori encourages us to save biodiversity — one seed at a time. Reminding us that plants support human life, he shares the vision of the Millennium Seed Bank, which has stored over 3 billion seeds to date from dwindling yet essential plant species.”

Yahoo News reports a nationwide trend, Crisis spurs spike in ’suburban survivalists’:

“From teachers to real estate agents, these budding emergency gurus say the dismal economy has made them prepare for financial collapse as if it were an oncoming Category 5 hurricane. They worry about rampant inflation, runs on banks, bare grocery shelves and widespread power failures that could make taps run dry.”

And an excerpt from a blog post, Dorothy Barnett: WINDPOWER in the “windy city”, from an attendee at the Windpower conference in Chicago:

“. . .AWEA’s annual WINDPOWER Conference & Exhibition brought together over 22,000 people to visit over 12,000 exhibitors. . .”

AlongsideNight.com

The headline says it all. Congressman Ron Paul, a recent U.S. Presidential candidate and popular leader of the Campaign For Liberty, just endorsed Neil’s agorist novel, Alongside Night. Says Neil, “We just received the following endorsement on Alongside Night via Ron Paul’s aide, Norman Singleton.”

“J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night may be even more relevant today than it was in 1979. Hopefully, the special thirtieth anniversary edition of this landmark work of libertarian science fiction will inspire a new generation of readers to learn more about the ideas of liberty and become active in the freedom movement.”

–Congressman Ron Paul

Neil was interviewed on video by the Motorhome Diaries team as was Ron Paul.

Kurzweil AI links to a NY Times story about Scribd giving authors 80% royalties for works uploaded to the web for eventual distribution to Kindle and iPhone apps.

After working at Pulpless.com, I believe moving media bits electronically is greener than transporting physical plastic drink coasters and dead tree editions.

I’ve blogged about Google’s energy use recently and Virtual Book Tours not so recently.

Quoting myself again:

“. . .Virtual Book Tours remove the need for authors to jet around to various cities and also eliminates readers having to drive to the bookstore for the signing event. It’s more convenient for everyone, more lucrative for the author to reach a global audience. . .”

After catching up on an old Eco-Tech episode on my DVR, I was inspired to link to new media clips about the “Garbage Into Gold” company TerraCycle.

Products include Worm Poop fertilizer and eco friendly Fire Logs from a biodiesel process byproduct, some garbage, with each log wrapped in used newspapers as part of the packaging.

The radical yet still profitable TerraCycle was recently featured “on Good Morning America, Oprah, and CNN” according to the DeanVideos channel at YouTube.

Credit: Paul Spooner.
Who lives in a platform on top of the sea? Maybe you, if the Seasteading Institute has its way.

In an email message to Seastead Institute supporters, Director of Operations James Hogan announced “a forum thread describing many of the options we’re looking at for an accelerated strategy.”

Our current timeline & strategy describe modest achievements — a prototype seastead built, a successful ocean-based business operating — by the end of 2010. We’ve been thinking in recent weeks that we can, and want to, do better. And we’ve heard from you, our community, that you’d love to see tangible results faster.

Here’s a fly-by video of the computer model at the ClubStead page.

An ARS Technica article titled “Google: 15,000 searches = 1 cheeseburger (hold the fries)” discusses the problems of Google’s analysis of the energy used to produce its internet search results, but otherwise praises the educational value of its Clean Energy information page.

“Early this year, a newspaper story made the rounds when, after extrapolating from some energy use estimates made by an academic, it claimed that two searches on Google would burn enough energy to heat water for a cup of tea.”

My interest in this topic dates back to reading Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave in 1980 while working at a data center in San Francisco. I quoted a passage from that work in an article about the internet I wrote for Agorist Quarterly #1, published in 1995. Since Reagan was elected in 1980, it seems fitting to say, “There I go again.”

As Alvin Toffler predicted back in the odd-even days of 1979 gas shortages:

While gasoline and other transport costs (including the cost of mass-transit alternatives to the auto) are soaring everywhere, the price of telecommunications is shrinking spectacularly. At some point, the curves must cross.

Quoting from a study by Jack Nilles and a team sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Toffler illustrates the difference in energy usage.

“. . .Nilles calculated that the relative energy consumption advantage of telecommuting over commuting. . .is at least 29:1 when the private automobile is used. . .had even as little as 12 to 14 percent of urban commuting been replaced by telecommuting, the United States would have saved 75 million barrels of gasoline–and would have completely eliminated the need to import any gasoline from abroad.”

A recent video from Google shows you how to search more efficiently. It’s safe to say that will use less energy than buying a new SUV.

Nothing combines the concepts of water and power like Hoover Dam.

The electricity generating turbines at Hoover (a.k.a. Boulder) Dam spin due to the pressure exerted by the water in man made Lake Mead.

According to Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder, in an article published by GOOD magazine, the water level has fallen 100 feet in Lake Mead since 2000.

Mark describes the profligate use of water despite a declared drought. Such careless use is even more absurd given the historic dryness of the area. Glad there’s water in the well here in Pahrump.

Don’t laugh, Southern California, Hoover Dam powers the pumps that send Colorado River water to you. Prepare to dry.

Lake Mead is like a martini glass—wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. That 10 percent dip represents a loss of half Lake Mead’s water supply in nine years, from 96 percent capacity to 43 percent.

Alongside Night author J. Neil Schulman was interviewed by paranormal researcher William H. Kennedy on the Sphinx Radio internet show.

Neil spoke about writing the novel during the mid 1970s, getting the endorsement for his prophetic work of a collapsed America by Nobel winning economist Milton Friedman, and the radical agorist philosophy behind the novel.

Unlike other dystopian literature, Alongside Night provides a workable example of how to operate when the system collapses, say due to commercial real estate going bust and the derivatives used to back the loans unraveling, taking all the banks down.

Another top down bailout may not stop the resulting collapse.

Of particular interest is Neil’s mention of this site and of the concept of permafacture, the best example being the work of Open Farm Tech.

Listen to the complete interview right here:

MP3 33 minutes

LifeHacker has a story about Kamal Meattle’s TED talk video on three common houseplants that clean indoor air.

Some wit remarked at the YouTube video page that a simpler way is to open the window. But seriously, if you’re in the bowels of a high rise cube farm, there ain’t no stinkin’ window.

And at a place I visit frequently in the L.A. area, I can open up windows and the private patio screen door, but the outside air brings in road dust and car exhaust.

So it’s a HEPA filter or these plants for clean indoor air.

Boing Boing reported progress on fighting fat formation with a link to a story, White tea contains anti-obesity substances.

One of the comments at LifeHacker mentioned Tulsi being used to clean the air at the Taj Mahal. According to Wikipedia:

“Tulsi has been used for thousands of years in Ayurveda for its diverse healing properties. It is mentioned by Charaka in the Charaka Samhita, an ancient Ayurvedic text. Tulsi is considered to be an adaptogen, balancing different processes in the body, and helpful for adapting to stress. Marked by its strong aroma and astringent taste, it is regarded in Ayurveda as a kind of “elixir of life” and believed to promote longevity.”

“Tulsi’s extracts are used in ayurvedic remedies for common colds, headaches, stomach disorders, inflammation, heart disease, various forms of poisoning, and malaria. Traditionally, tulsi is taken in many forms: as herbal tea, dried powder, fresh leaf, or mixed with ghee. Essential oil extracted from Karpoora Tulsi is mostly used for medicinal purposes and in herbal cosmetics, and is widely used in skin preparations due to its anti-bacterial activity. For centuries, the dried leaves of Tulsi have been mixed with stored grains to repel insects.”

Wikipedia continues with citations of scientific studies to back up these claims. And speaking of controlling pests, Mother Earth News teased readers with a report about a plant that fights mosquitoes, Beautyberry Banishes Bad Biting Bugs

“Researches are finding evidence that beautyberry, long used as a folk remedy, really does deter bugs such as ants, ticks and others.”

Xeni Jardin asked Clay Shirky to debunk a WSJ piece about “bloggers for hire” in this Boing Boing article.

“When half of ad-supported blogs generate less than $200 a year, it only takes one blogger making $350,000 (the highest number reported to Technorati) to drag the average far away from anything remotely resembling the normal case.”

This story inspired me to compile readership stats on a number of websites from “Compete” as displayed in the WhoIs program from a free account I signed up for at http://www.domaintools.com.

These figures are volatile and your mileage may vary.

YouTube video of SolTrekker RV tour in Portland, Oregon on Earth Day, 2009, according to the video description at the creator’s channel.

The green SolTrekker RV uses photovoltaics, contains no PVC, burns biodiesel but no petroleum or propane, and of particular interest on Thirst Day, collects rainwater and has a super insulated solar water heating system.

I’m still on a road trip, which started with my participation at the Xanadu convention in Las Vegas. I spoke there about “All Things Ecological” and “Indie Filmmaking.”

I took a break from the convention to be interviewed, along with Alongside Night author J. Neil Schulman, by the Motorhome Diaries team, who met with us and a coven of local Vegas anarchists at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Maryland Parkway. Since then I’ve continued driving to visit friends and family in Vegas, San Francisco and Chico, California. There will be pictures, videos and thoughts about all that upon my return.

While packing before the trip I heard an NPR story broadcast on April 15 about a New Jersey group spreading seedballs to beautify untended landscapes neglected due to the economy. You can listen to audio of the story too.

NPR mentioned Masanoba Fukuoka and a 2003 incident where police thought seedballs were terrorist weapons. There was that annual U.S. tax deadline that may have distracted you that day.

I’ve got the seedball.com domain currently embedding a YouTube video by Jim Bones demonstrating how to make seedballs. The site also lists the recipe in text form and has links to related pages.

Antonio & Alexia Cardenas
“The Realtors In Motion”
With all due respect to certain realtors who may be able to squeeze buyers into properties they can afford (while said buyers still have business or job income), in general, real estate is down while gardening and old fashioned maritime piracy are up.

From a Mises Daily article by Doug French, “The Real Estate Bust Is Far From Over”:

“The residential market has hit the ditch and continues to sink lower, but now the commercial property market is rolling over and will take many lenders down the drain with it.”

And let’s not forget the widely predicted bust of the derivatives bubble to come, which will take down even more financial institutions. For example, there’s this from a recent Forbes item:

“There is, in fact, a rising risk of a global L-shaped depression that would be even worse than the current, painful U-shaped global recession.”

Mississippi’s Vicksburg Post In the Garden with Miriam Jabour latest column, “Hard times punch up vegetable gardening” describes a trend reversal in favor of gardens:

“Vegetable gardens have lost popularity over the years because the public has had access to fruits and vegetables at grocery stores. The tide seems to be turning during our present economic downturn, and the experts are telling us that 6 million more Americans will grow vegetables this year than last.”

Speaking of gardening, a popular subject this time of year, LifeHacker published a detailed, illustrated article, “Grow 100 lbs. of Potatoes in 4 Square Feet”.

Democracy Now! reports that Pittsboro, North Carolina and other towns are printing their own currency.

“We take a look at how one North Carolina town is trying to become more self-sufficient by moving toward being able to feed, fuel and finance itself.”

Remembering my job to defend the Kaiser against defamation for the German War Guilt office, I recalled researching the post WWI hyperinflation in Germany. At that time (November 20, 1923 on the Cologne exchange), the exchange rate was 11 quadrillion, 700 trillion German Marks for 1 U.S. Dollar. The savings of the entire nation in 1913 couldn’t buy a postage stamp ten years later. According to a recent report, the world in 2009 has a derivatives exposure exceeding a quadrillion dollars.

Various German states issued their own currency based on commodities they had such as timber. With business failures and job losses in America today, communities are looking to this old solution in the current crisis.

Controversial left libertarian author Kevin Carson takes on the cheerleaders for the “Green Revolution” in a magazine length article at C4SS, “The Green Revolution Saved Lives? A Killer Meme That Just Won’t Die.”

“Recently, in honor of Norman Borlaug’s 95th birthday, Ron Bailey of Reason Magazine posted a quote from his 2000 interview with Borlaug. For those unfamiliar with him, Borlaug was the most famous pioneer of the “Green Revolution” seeds of the 1960s, credited with a drastic expansion in food production. The claim that Borlaug saved a billion people from starvation is a persistent meme on the Internet.”

Carson bristles at Borlaug’s dismissal of organic farming. I think Borlaug’s attitude is ridiculous given the urban organic gardening Dervaes family living off a tenth of an acre and other examples such as “Permaculture Productivity 8 Times USDA Possible.”

Here’s a significant excerpt about the “Green Revolution” itself:

“The very claim that Borlaug “saved a billion lives” starts from a false assumption: that the main cause of Third World starvation was economic, rather than political. It assumes that starvation resulted mainly from insufficient production, from a lack of land, or from the inadequacy of farming techniques. In fact, the main cause of Third World starvation was what Franz Oppenheimer called “political appropriation of the land”: great landlords and landed oligarchs holding fertile land out of cultivation altogether, or tractoring off peasant smallholders so the land could be used to grow cash crops for export. The real source of starvation is the hundreds of millions of people living in shantytowns who might otherwise be supporting themselves on their own land, but who now can’t afford the “more efficient” crops produced on their former land at any price, because they don’t have any money.”

Also worth reading are the insightful comments following Carson’s article, trying to keep him from becoming a total Luddite. Good stuff.

I guess the blog publishing technology “Screen Revolution” is saving a billion readers.

ARS Technica had some rare good news about the state of the sea in an article titled Ocean conservation success stories.

“(Some) good news does exist, though, which is important for those working in the field, according to Dr Nancy Knowlton, one of the session’s moderators. As Knowlton put it, students aren’t interested in “writing ever-more extensive obituaries” on the oceans, so being able to point to successes ought to draw people into the field.”

NORML online item Hemp Bill in Congress, noticed thanks to a Xeni Jardin Boing Boing post featuring the WW2 wartime short film, “Hemp For Victory.” Excerpt from the Google Video description:

“All American farmers were required to see the film, sign a paper saying that they had viewed the film, and read a booklet on the matter. Farmers who agreed were waived from serving in the military, and all their family members were also exempt. They received farm equipment at a discounted price, and sometimes for free. However, before and after the war — the same plant was considered “demon weed” and the killer of the same kids that were pressed into service to grow it during the war. Furthermore, the USDA and Library of Congress denied the creation or existence of such a film until 2 copies were found and sent in to the Library of Congress. Talk about hypocrisy.”

A Google Alert for “off grid” led me to a report about a couple living in a solar powered house in my old home town, “Off-Grid In Paradise.”

Columns surrounding that story linked to a moving story, “Angels in the Classroom,” about massive help from church volunteers in Chico, California adopting a local school with a high level of poverty.

The doomsayers have been discredited. Not only has prosperity emerged from around the corner, it arrived in style today as the Dow broke several historic records in heavy trading, ending the day at 20,145, almost 12,000 points over yesterday’s average in the popular stock index.

Experts from every school of economic theory and from all across the political spectrum agreed that the President’s trip to see the Queen of England about forging a global New, New Deal was the last straw against the reactionary forces of monetary foot dragging.

Another lucky break was the surprising news that global warming was also solved today by using reflective coal dust as aviation fuel to reflect the sun’s rays back into space. Petrocompany share values led the rally to today’s stunning stock market recovery. Real estate sale prices and employment figures also surged to record highs on the happy news.

Thanks to yesterday’s big science breakthrough in laser fusion energy production, it is no longer necessary to go “off-grid” or to worry our pretty little heads about “food security” or “preparedness” in general. Co-operation and brotherhood, not selfish autonomy, has proved to be the supreme virtue in this triumphant world of interdependent social enterprises.

We can depend once more upon our nation’s reliable industry to provide each and every citizen with the Four Freedoms guaranteed in the New Testament and the Constitution.

God Bless The Earth Union and Its Humble American Province.

Another food contamination scare is in the news–this time it’s pistachio nuts. Wikipedia describes the heart health benefits of pistachios.

“One or two handfuls of the nuts can make a big enough difference to lower the risk of heart disease, say scientists. Volunteers who ate three ounces of pistachios a day for one month lowered their total blood cholesterol by 8.4 per cent.

Levels of “bad” cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (LDL), fell by 11.6 per cent.

Kevin Carson critically analyzes heavy handed legislation that disproportionately impacts small scale growers in his thoughtful article, “Cost-Plus Markup and Mandatory Overhead.”

“The primary offenders in the food contamination scares of recent years have been large-scale agribusiness operations and large-scale food processors, whether in California or in China. The spinach e. coli deaths associated with “organic farming,” for example, actually occurred at a nominally organic factory farming operation producing for Earthbound Farms, where crops were contaminated by fecal runoff from the grain-fed cattle at yet another factory farming operation nearby.”

We should resist bureaucratic threats to whatever ability to subsist we can carve out of our collapsing system. With businesses failing, unemployment increasing and relief budgets stretched, misguided attempts by politicians to “protect” us may threaten our survival.

The Simpsons Movie
Abby Cohn at Berkeley Innovations describes a test by the City of San Francisco to convert brown grease, which normally plugs up sewer pipes, into biodiesel in an item titled From Bacon To Biofuel.

Innovations is the website of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, hence the plugs for its alumni in the article.

” “For the city, it’s going to be a win-win situation,” says Domènec Jolis (Ph.D.’92 CEE), a senior engineer at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and the project’s co-principal investigator. The effort could potentially prevent messy and costly sewer backups and at the same time generate fuel for city vehicles and equipment as well as energy to run the sewage plant itself. Serving as the project’s manager is SFPUC principal engineer Jon Loiacono (B.S.’72 CEE).”

You probably expect me to quote The Simpsons line “Mmm. Hog fat.” from the “Lisa’s First Word” episode.

“Homer and Marge visit Stinking Fish Realty. But they have problems finding a proper house — or the proper neighborhood. The first one is too violent. The second house is located next to a rendering plant. (”Mmm…hog fat”). {The third one is Captain McAllister’s houseboat, where the good Captain’s sales pitch is interrupted while he wrestles a Great White.} And the fourth is full of cats.”

For more of this vital information, check out Homer’s Mmmm Lines.

You might expect Mound-Day items to appear on Monday, but who says I’m tied to your planet’s orbital idiosyncrasies, Earthling?

An excerpt from a Chicago Tribune story last week about Michelle Obama’s kitchen garden:

“Friday’s activities are the culmination of a campaign to turn the 16 acres of White House grounds into an ‘edible landscape’. ”

This kind of Food Not Lawns project hasn’t been done at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden in WW2. It seems to be another hint that the economy may not be recovering any time soon. Food security on the very local level (your yard) may become officially encouraged even more if the fuel supply gets interrupted due to hyperinflation.

On that theme, an audio podcast at AgroInnovations with Marcin Jakubowski, a founder of Open Source Ecology describes a radical 30 acre project in Missouri that you might wish to support or join.

“We are farmer scientists - working to develop a world class research center for decentralization technologies using open source permaculture and technology to work together for providing basic needs and self replicating the entire operation at the cost of scrap metal.”

Here’s a CNN video report about Obama’s “kitchen garden” at YouTube. [Update: Taken Down!] Fine. Here’s YouTube video from Associated Press.

The Albany Democrat-Herald in Oregon published a story about Grease Lightning Delivery, a business that uses biodiesel and recycled vegetable oil as fuel.

“John Knox thinks his 1982 Mazda Truck with a modified engine that runs on biofuel can provide businesses with an economical and environmentally sound means of delivery.”

Small scale recycling of waste vegetable oil or growing of one’s own dedicated fuel crop may be the only reliable vehicle fuel sources in a collapsed economic and political system.

Petroleum may become expensive again due to reduced purchasing power thanks to the hyperinflation that may result from desperate bailouts.

But for now, large scale biofuel plants face depressed petroleum price competition and foreign protectionism denies American biodiesel producers access to the world biofuel market.

“The duties would begin March 13 and remain in place for up to six months when the Commission must then decide whether to propose “definitive” duties which normally last for five years.”

The U.S. may become energy independent by short term economic necessity.