“Hundreds of thousands of people in this country live “off the grid.” If the power fails, food runs short or drought hits, their families won’t be hurt. Their houses have solar panels and electric generators; their shelves are stocked with canned food and seeds. They have wells in their back yard so they’ll never go thirsty. Some are retreating into farms. Others are bringing the countryside into their homes…..”
Some excerpts:
Predicting and panicking won’t help you now.
You have to prepare.
Fortunately, it’s easier and there are fewer people doing it.
Your preparation consists essentially of one thing – becoming more independent……..
Another excerpt:
Reducing water usage is not only thrifty it’s good ecological practice and has a direct impact on energy consumption. A large chunk of energy is spent pumping and heating water.
Start storing things. Use solar panels to store natural energy from the sun. Store water in tanks so you don’t run short in a drought. Store organic seeds. Store computer parts and electronic goods. Store anything you think you need which might go up drastically in price.
A quick recap now:
* Store
* Live healthily
* Grow your own food
* Drive less
* Make your job portable
* Barter
* Exchange services
* Recycle/reuse “
Read the rest at Lew Rockwell. And here’s some advice on something I mention in the piece – square-foot gardening
“The average age of the world’s greatest democratic nations has been 200 years. Each has been through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith. From faith to great courage. From courage to liberty. From liberty to abundance. From abundance to complacency. From complacency to selfishness. From selfishness to apathy. From apathy to dependency. And from dependency back again into bondage.”
[Correction: I’m getting feedback that this quote exists in different versions and may not actually be from Tytler or may be attributed to him while being a pastiche from other individuals partly or wholely. No time to verify now, will be back later on this. My fault. I didn’t think to google it, as I’ve seen it quoted so extensively].
My Comment
Tytler misses a link here. Apathy leads to cowardice and then cowardice to.
dependency. Courage is a primary spiritual virtue – it’s part of effort or action.
You don’t have anything without courage. In religious teaching the opposite of love is never posited as hate, but fear.
Fear is the source of practically every evil that comes upon us. Selfishness stems from fear. Greed stems from fear….
We have become sheep because of fear.
That’s why I’m interested in trauma in childhood. That’s where we first learn fear and learn to hold it in rigid patterns in our bodies and minds. [Thanks to Kevin Duffy for the quote from Tytler]
Update: In response to a comment, I thought I’d add this here:
Most cyclical theories are simplistic in their broad outlines, but they’re useful when you look at them from a meta-theoretical level
By metatheory I mean the overarching narrative in which they are placed – i.e., what does the schematization of the theory say about the way that particular person or age reads history…
There’s Vico – Age of God, Age of Heroes, Age of Men.
There’s the Greek republic-democracy-tyranny
There are the mahayugas and yugas (great ages) in the Hindu cycles (which are cosmic, not political)
Ravi Batra, who was the first economist to write extensively about a coming great depression (late 1980s), I believe, has a new book out which includes his cycles – he has an age of acquisitors followed by an age of intellectuals (I forget the exact name) and then a golden age..and I think it’s based on the varna (caste) system – which originally was not socially pernicious.
Correction: Robert Prechter predicted a coming great depression early on, as well. I’ll verify the dates….
“After a nine-year investigation, a commission published a damning report Wednesday on decades of rapes, humiliation and beatings at Catholic Church-run reform schools for Ireland’s castaway children.
The 2,600-page report painted the most detailed and damning portrait yet of church-administered abuse in a country grown weary of revelations about child molestation by priests.
The investigation of the tax-supported schools uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s.
Wednesday’s five-volume report on the probe — which was resisted by Catholic religious orders — concluded that church officials shielded their orders’ pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.”
Last year, I posted the debate over Satya Sai Baba’s alleged pedophilia. I say alleged, because when I actually read through the charges and counter-charges, there weren’t as many documented ones as I’d originally believed and some of the accusers didn’t seem credible. But it’s impossible to judge sometimes, because wealthy patrons can blow smoke in your eyes by dragging things out, publishing misleading PR releases that pass for news, and intimidating witnesses.
Alice Miller has written movingly about the abuse of children (she referred to a much broader category of abuse, not sexual abuse or beating, but things like verbal intimidation, humiliation, and the use of children to fulfill adult emotional needs that haven’t been met). For her it is the foundational trauma on which all adult wrong-doing is built. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but we should pay a lot more attention to how we treat children. If this had been done to prisoners, there would be have been an international outcry, and human rights groups would be descending en masse,
But when it’s done to children it just doesn’t seem the same thing..
But my interest here is in propaganda and mind control, not cruelty per se. I want to knowhow these sorts of things go on for so long (sixty years) without a public outcry.
Thirty thousand children went through this system. These were well-funded institutions, in which most of the funds were used by the members of the orders and very little went to the children. Does this sound a lot like the behavior of states?
Churches, states, and corporations – when organizations become too large, their main thrust is self-perpetuation. And the people whom they were set up to serve (followers, citizens, consumers) become fodder in that process.
Add to that a powerful ideology and you understand how criticism can be hobbled and monstrous injustices committed without a word of protest.
On a personal note, I attended a Catholic college in India for my undergraduate studies. The nuns came from all over the south. Perhaps because the young women who attended were from relatively well-to-do backgrounds (running from middle-class professionals to wealthy business families and land owners), I don’t recall coming across anything like this. There was one rather unstable young woman who developed a crush on a nun and gushed about her interminably in purple prose, while the rest of us were trying to get through our reading for the night. But it was hilarious more than anything else.
Among the nuns I knew, the one who struck me as truly good through and through was young and rather child-like and simple in her ways. There was not an ounce of anything abusive, mean, or narrow-minded in her. She laughed all the time, I recall, and her chubby cheeks and round eyes could have been those of a small child. Whenever I was ill or having problems, she’d make me up a little soup, as she did for everyone. When she wasn’t working in the nursery, she worked a lot in the garden. She lived among flowers and children and music. She died in her twenties, a few years after I left.
Robert Wenzel over at Economic Policy Journal points out that the new head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is Gary Gensler, who spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs as co-head of finance.
He also has a nice hat-tip to me for spotting Roubini’s insider status first. Well, I did spot it first, but it wasn’t hard to do. His bio on wiki has the links. You’d just need to think of looking at it. What are the chances that policy wonks who go to the same schools, attend the same conferences, live in the same neighborhood and work at the same places are going to to be “independent”?
From Wenzel:
More and more the picture that is emerging of Roubini is that of a major insider. Writes The New Republic: He has a
…swelling portfolio of clients–the World Bank, IMF, 50 central banks,and 30-odd finance ministries among them….”
But it’s my view that the dollar holding up was not about risk aversion as such, although it probably included a component of it. (Actually, recently, you can’t really say it has shown any strength – it’s been struggling bravely). The dollar’s rally was about deleveraging – which is not the same thing at all. Investors might think that sentiment is getting better but that doesn’t mean that positions don’t still have to be unwound and debts paid back.
But right now, it’s a giddy party again. The Indian Sensex went up 17% in one minute on May 18 on the unexpected news that the incumbent Congress party and the liberalizing PM Manmohan Singh had been reelected. But notice that the spike also involved some hasty short-covering. And it was helped by Sri Lanka declaring that the 25 year war with the rebel (or terrorist, depending on your persepctive) Tamil Tigers was officially over. The Sensex led the world financial bounce with an upsurge of 48%.
Jill Bolte Taylor on rebuilding your own mind (thanks to NonE from Sunni Maravillosa’s blog):
My Comment
Ignore the canned laughter. How amazingly similar this is to the religious experiences of neti-neti (not this, not this) and samadhi... (back with more later)
“Multifamily construction plunged 46.1 percent to an annual rate of 90,000 units after a 23 percent fall in March. Permits for multifamily construction dropped 19.9 percent to 121,000 units. Analysts said apartment construction is being hurt by a glut of condominiums on the market and by tightening credit conditions for commercial real estate.”
My Comment
Oh, my. This made my day. Condo flippers and developers are in big trouble.
Overlook the opening of this article, with that plaintive reference to a ” modest rebound in single-family home construction in April” that “raised hopes.”
Hopes should notbe raised. That’s pretty clear by now. Not unless you’re being paid to pump houses for some rash developer who ran out of buyers for his pet eye-sore. We can think of a number of things that should be raised – black flags, eyebrows, interest rates…..but not hopes.
I’ve been checking condo prices all over the world and it’s the same news. From Panama to Kuala Lumpur, from Miami to Baltimore. Commercial developers are in trouble.
If that doesn’t warm the cockles of your heart and put a smile on your face, I don’t know what will. These wretched companies drove up housing by 100-300% (and more) in some cities and literally chased people on small or fixed incomes out of places they’d been living for years.
And don’t tell me they added any real value.
In New York. construction in one building was so shoddy, the Buildings Department had to intervene. I personally inspected a condo where, when the owner kicked the wall, her foot went right through. Many of them were aesthetic monstrosities that ruined the skyline, polluted the air, and destroyed the architectural beauty of the places where they metastasized.
Now there’s a glut and the developers are losing their shirts.
Miami’s condo king, Jorge Perez, is sitting on top of a market with the biggest glut in the country. Since 2003, nearly 23000 condos were added to downtown Miami, and 33% of them remain unsold. The financial hurricane hit just when Perez, the “tropical Trump,” had opened his newest project, Icon Brickell, a boutique hotel combined with over 1,640 luxury apartments and squeezed into three towers. Only 18 units have sold so far. Perez (once estimated to have a net worth of $1.3 billion) is in big money trouble. His company, Related Group, lost $1 billion in 2008 and ran up debt of $2 billion, $700 million from Icon Brickell alone.
As you might have noticed, we’ve been hearing happy talk about the economy since March, with a spate of optimism around the time of the bank stress tests.
Now comes an expert to tell us the recession is all over. The expert is Robert Gordon, a professor at North-Western, a famous macro-economist, and one of the seven members of the elite Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Analysis. Those are the people who officially date these things for the history book.
And what might be the reasoning behind this cheery thumbs up? Gordon says that in every recession since 1974, jobless claims peaked within weeks of the bottom of the recession,and that, says he, happenedinearly Aprilthis year. He also says that both in absolute terms (the total number of claims) and in relative terms (proportion of claims to the total work force) we haven’t exceeded the previous peak from the 1981-82 recession. In fact, in relative terms, we have just a bit over half of the jobless claims that were reported then.
If ever there were a suspect bit of reasoning in economics, this must be it.
How can anyone put such a burden on just one indicator?
And even that indicator is feeble, as it stands. The American economy bears a burden of debt far far greater than any in the early 1980s. The depth of the credit implosion has no precedent and the financial industry makes up a much greater proportion of the economy than it did then. The country was not involved in the 1980s in any war of the scale of the Iraq war. Nor was our spending on other things at the astronomic level it is today.
But even if you go along with this indicator, how can Dr. Gordon know for sure that jobless claims won’t make another peak? Because of patterns he sees in the chart, he says.
Am I reading something wrong here? Even your average garden astrologer has to come up with more patterns than that to make a claim.
Astrologers? Heck, even tea-leaf readers usually take a second or third squint at the muck at the bottom of the cup.
The ruling Congress partyswept to a resounding victory Saturday in India’s mammoth national elections, defying expectations as it brushed aside the Hindu nationalist opposition and a legion of ambitious smaller parties.
The strong showing by the party, which is dominated by the powerful Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, laid to rest fears of an unstable, shaky coalition heading the South Asian giant at a time when many of it neighbors are plagued by instability, civil war and rising extremism.
My Comment
I quoted this news item not so much for its newsworthiness (since that’s not our business here) but because of the language it uses. A coalition or federation of assorted smaller parties representing more interests (and more diverse interests) is assumed to be less reliable than a single strong incumbent party. Why? Because it’s a time of instability and extremism in neighboring states (Pakistan, especially).
I am not going to argue one way or other about the case at hand, India arnd Pakistan. The situation and the players are too complex for that. But the language merits thinking over, since language is at the root of our problems. The reasoning is that looser federations deliberate more, act less cohesively and less effectively and that they can be manipulated or split apart and made ineffective. The inference from this is that a more centralized, more monolithic, more decisive central government is always a better leader in difficult times. From there it’s only a step to arguing for a despotic executive and emergency authority to clamp down.