Windpower in Iran
This headline was the title for my side of a debate (in the negative) on “Should the U.S. invade Iran” held at the Karl Hess Club on Monday, March 16. (Also, Jerome Tuccille’s humorous book, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, featured stories about the founding personalities of the modern libertarian movement.)
The gist […]
“They Sow the Wind, and Reap the Whirlwind”
– Hosea 8:1-14
There are some of you who held down steady jobs or ran businesses, paid your mortgage, invested in America and raised a family. Now you’re unemployed, your retirement investments went bust and your kids will live at home forever because their college money vanished too. Fools! […]
Crustacean publicity still,
courtesy of Irena Belle Films.
When I was cast as the bearded fat lady in Crustacean, the horror-comedy movie I’m editing, I thought it might be amusing to run a photo of me in a dress with a satirical Prop 108 [Update: I meant Prop 8] post about how “the fags are ruining marriage.” […]
Daily Mail pic detail
A “permaculture” Google Alert brought me a link to this Design Thinking blog post with a transcript of a brief excerpt from a recent BBC2 show, Natural World: A Farm for the Future.
There’s also a link to the programme (UK only, maybe someday they’ll make the program available to the world).
I was […]
Kurzweil AI post.
The supreme Chancellor says he loves democracy and will give power back to the Old Republic. Oh wait, this isn’t Star Wars, Sarah Connor, or Battlestar. This is real life.
Ray Kurzweil is the Chancellor of a new interdisciplinary college called Singularity University.
“The Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of […]
A Cory Doctorow Boing Boing post today describes a recent SALT talk by Dmitri Orlov comparing the impact on Russians of the fall of the Soviet Union with what the USA is about to endure. The talk’s title is “Social Collapse Best Practices.”
No doubt the podcast will appear at The Long Now Foundation site any […]
Mother Earth News reports that a DIY homebrew car, “MAX Wins 800-mile Race, without Gas.”
The challenge was to drive from Berkeley to Las Vegas without using petroleum based fuel, and without buying any fuel directly. This is a step in the MAX team’s attempt to win the $10 million automotive X-Prize for a 100 MPG […]
The Los Angeles Times Housing Scene column in their business section is warning readers about con artists selling “insider reports” about supposedly free real property under the Homestead Act. The article says the Homestead Act giveaways stopped over 30 years ago.
“The Homesteading Act of 1862 was repealed in 1976 because all the good agricultural land […]
“Greenpa” over at Little Blog In The Woods has lived off-grid for over 30 years now. He posted news about his homestead, called the Little House, including the following update:
“. . .the Little House has been approached by Nick Rosen; author of How to Live Off-Grid, for us to be one of the families he’ll […]
Two’s-day is when I post my interpersonal and political items for the week that aren’t directly related to alternative energy, organic gardening or off-grid living.
There were a couple of good reviews posted on the Interblogs about Alongside Night, a novel by J. Neil Schulman that brings agorist philosophy to life more directly than any other […]
I recently posted a comment against the shutting down of tax havens, proposed in an article headlined “Pin Striped Pirates” at the Australia Permaculture Research Institute site.
As the saying goes, “There would be no tax havens if there were no tax hells.” I’ve had my own personal tax troubles in the past, but not […]
Happy New Year! Welcome to all the new laws in effect now, giving me a flashback. I was probably the first victim of the cell phone restrictions in California back in July.
To put it in context, I live in Nevada and was driving to L.A. a day or two earlier, during the time when gas […]
Here’s a searchable directory of bike co-ops from bikecollectives.org. They even had an exhibit in Las Vegas at the bicycle industry’s trade show, Interbike.
One of the listings led me to the following about a Bike Over Borders conflict:
“. . .we learned first hand that the policies of “free trade” are made for corporations, not for […]
Fans of Silent Running will be interested in Art Carden’s latest article for the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, “Should We Be Recycling Paper or Building Battlestar Galactica?”
“Should we be recycling paper and preventing people from building parking lots to save trees? Or should we acknowledge that the planet will be destroyed sooner or later and […]
A Kurzweil AI post describes the rapid growth of off-grid households.
“Once the preserve of mavericks, hippies and survivalists, there are now approximately 200,000 off-grid households in the US, a figure that has been increasing by a third every year for the past decade.”
The post links to a New Scientist story, How To Unplug From The […]
A Boing Boing post by Mark Frauenfelder links to this instructables article titled “Imitation Alka Seltzer For A Fraction Of The Cost.”
To be precise, the make at home version is probably higher than the manufacturing cost (not including packaging and distribution to markets). But the price of the ingredients is much less than any store […]
Following up the Coffee to Biodiesel story, it seems to me if you could grow your own coffee, as described at home coffee roasting supplier Sweet Maria’s, that would be great. Yeah.
Supposedly, a percentage of already processed (but not roasted) beans can become viable sprouts. After a couple of years a coffee tree can become […]
There are advocates of hemp for biofuel, just as there are for tobacco.
That’s my excuse for including this anti-drug-war item on a permaculture blog. I’m also sick of seeing COPS style reality shows which glorify the destruction of our freedom. The latest atrocity is a new show called Heimatschutzministerium, or to translate from the […]
This Oregonian article about Ty Adams describes his conversion of a recreational vehicle into a sustainability demonstration.
“It runs on biodiesel, has solar panels for its electricity and hot water, a composting toilet and channels to catch rainwater.”
See Ty’s website at SolTrekker.org or watch his SolTrekker Intro video (also embedded below) and see the Portland TV […]
After reading an article about a new Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) initiative, I thought back to the off-grid Seasteading project, started by one of PayPal’s founders.
In their new book in progress, Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas, by Patri Friedman, Wayne Gramlich, and Andrew House, under a section called “Technological […]
I inherited a “Huffy” bicycle about as rusty as my riding skills, and the rear tire is flat. Otherwise, it seems sturdy enough to carry my weight and has convenient storage that easily fits a six pack. Which of course would only be for green tea or something eco friendly.
Instead of America’s nouveau poor going […]
If you have “attention surplus disorder,” watch one of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, discuss his new novel, Anathem, and his earlier work in this YouTube video of a Google Talk he gave in September.
From the YouTube video description:
“Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for […]
Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder linked to a Marijuana Policy Project chart showing that 9 out of 10 marijuana decriminalization initiatives passed across the nation. The prison guards in California caused the only defeat, of Prop 5.
“Proposition 5: Expand the number of drug offenders diverted from prison into treatment and decriminalize the possession of up to […]
Geo. McCalip’s True American Century is a counter-neocon site with good energy and environmental positions and a plan to reduce our incarceration rate to the lowest in the world. The prison guard union isn’t going to like that!
The good ol’ neocons would have us shocking and awing forever to cement the world order for a […]
An AP news item at Philly.com that I saw linked from Fark (!) has the headline “Energy hogs: prisons now recycle, grow own food.”
Excerpt:
“LITTLEROCK, Wash. - Of all the things convicted murderer Robert Knowles has been called during his 13 years behind bars, recycler hasn’t been one of them.”
“But there he was one morning, pitchfork […]
Stefan Molyneux speech from 2006 with a libertarian take on pollution, energy and the like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j27XJ0vjr0Y
While looking for a Halloween themed drawing of Ayn Rand on a broom to scare you about the economic mess, I came across the news that Mises scholar Larry Sechrest died October 30.
Jeffrey Tucker wrote:
“Our dear friend Larry Sechrest, professor of economics at Sul Ross University, and a long-time writer and speaker for economic liberty, […]
Free-market libertarian (but Obama voter this election), J. Neil Schulman, used his patented retrocausality chronoresonator to record this news item from next week:
http://www.cnnbcvideo.com/index.html?nid=JHmzvz.moGf1gxqohLM1PDczNDY1OTg-&referred_by=12794030-fwzem5x
A Living Off The Grid article lists six schools with homesteading courses. The list includes Homesteading Heritage Center for Essential Education (Texas), Apple Family Farm (Indiana), Muller’s Lane Farm (Illinois), The Institute of Urban Homesteading (California), Pioneer School of Homesteading (Michigan), and Self-Reliance Resources (North Carolina).
The schools are reasonably described with web links to each […]
Boing Boing announcement by Mark Frauenfelder of the launch of H+: Humanity Plus, a new online magazine, helmed by veteran editor R.U. Sirius. The first issue is available as a free PDF download.
H+ “. . .covers the scientific, technological, and cultural developments that are challenging
and overcoming human limitations.”
One “mini interview” in the issue, by another […]
J. Kent Hastings
Record Your Own
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