Gifts for the chillens

Relatives have been asking what our children need for Christmas, so this post is for them. But nobody get trampled, now!

Alexis
Guitar case, Alexis is playing a lot lately and needs a better case for her guitar.

Guitar capo, Another item for Alexis' guitar playing.

Strings, players always wear them out.

Diabolo, since Connor got his diabolo (and is getting rather good), Alexis decided she really wanted one too.

Feltmaking kit, Alexis loves crafts and discovered this recently. She's been asking for a kit like the one called FELTMAKING KIT: INTRODUCTION a little down the page.

Tumbling mat, Alexis has been doing circus classes and could use a mat to practice her moves!

Gypsy skirt, and another, Lexie is becoming interested in looking pretty and likes earthy styles.


Connor

Connor has picked up mandolin playing, and so needs accessories like strings, instruction books, DVDs, and a music stand.

He loves camping gear, such as a mess kit, a quality sleeping pad, a pro backpack, a tiny stove.

He built a bow and arrow and has become interested in hunting. A youth bow would be an ecstatically welcomed gift.

He rides his bike everywhere and has asked for one of those bike computers (also called 'cyclocomputers').

He likes juggling and eye-hand tricks: Juggling balls

Many thanks to you all for your kindness and generosity. Merry Christmas, wish you were here.

Your IRA belongs to Uncle Sam

I once read an article by Gary North on tax-deferred retirement plans like IRAs or 401Ks. He said:

Want to know what I really think will happen? The worst-case scenario? A demagogue gets into office and pushes an emergency order (which Congress will not override) which deposits all these funds into the Social Security system, for everyone who has a net worth (not counting home ownership) of [$__________]. Fill in the blank with whatever the tyrant thinks he can get away with. We could see an envy-grab of the retirement programs of the upper middle class.
...
The time to start thinking about a premature liquidation is when a new President is elected on a radical platform, probably with a shift in Presidential political parties, and with both houses of the new Congress belonging to his party.

Wow, pretty good call Gary!

The demagoguery of IRAs has begun in the person of Teresa Ghilarducci, a wacked out professor who recommended to Congress that retirement accounts should be confiscated and replaced with Treasury bonds, "to spread the wealth" (she actually said that). This kind of behavior is not at all uncommon among governments. The government of Argentina has stolen its people's money at least twice, most recently when it confiscated all pension funds, to protect their value of course.

Any president coming into office in the midst of this economic chaos is certain to look at all possible ways to raise money, and higher taxes are a certainty. But the Obama administration has foreshadowed a particular willingness to squeeze the cash out of the people. For instance, they will probably attempt to pass a global warming tax, a debate I'll particularly enjoy since global warming is such a grand hoax. I think confiscating retirement accounts and freezing bank accounts are very likely too, so be prepared. It's going to get even weirder.

I feel sorry for my friends at Intuit who will probably have little choice but to watch the government take their 401K money. To get their money out of harm's way they would have to quit their job, rollover the plan into an IRA, and then liquidate. At this point, there's probably no time left for all that, even if they wanted to do it. The government may also attempt to make a confiscation law retroactive to the first of the year, a trick Bill Clinton successfully used when he raised taxes in 1993.

These are times to be very wary of one's money, people. Don't be afraid to make bold moves. The politicians certainly aren't.

What was Biden talking about?

On October 19th at a fundraiser in Seattle, Joe Biden had some very interesting things to say. Go to the source article and see for yourself:

• In the first six months after Obama's victory there will be an international crisis.
  
• It will be a "generated" crisis.
  
• Obama's response will be very unpopular with the American public and his approval ratings will plummet.
  
• His response will be different than what Americans want, because they are too stupid to know the right thing to do anyway.
  
• He ended his comments by saying he had said too much.
  

One might interpret these statements as the musings of an experienced politician, except for a few things: Why would Biden say the crisis will be "generated". That's certainly a weird thing to say, don't you think? Second, how does he know that Obama's ratings are going to plummet?

Knowing this crowd, I would advise you to prepare for the worst.

The story of selling our house

We saw the financial chaos coming when we were living in Dallas, Texas. The housing bubble had already started to pop a year before, though gently at first and only for areas that had the most dramatic rises, but we knew it would make its way to Dallas (and everywhere) soon. One reason for our certainty came from the frequent walks I took around our neighborhood. I liked to walk to work off the frustrations from my wage slave job, and after walking down one block after another, seeing house after identical house helped convince me that the suburbs are doomed. What an unnatural way to live! We knew that these endless tracts of suburban houses would drop substantially in value, but we also anticipated other problems like wide-spread layoffs and even interruptions in the supply of food, and we began to feel like remaining in our suburban house was a trap of sorts. So, we decided to sell it.

We put our house on the market in early 2007, and--because we were in a race with time--each month that went by we lowered our price by $10,000! (This caused some big arguments in our household, I should add.) We didn't have many showings, but after two months we received an offer, although it was so low-ball we refused it. Apparently, these buyers thought we were desperate, but we weren't desperate--just determined. Eventually, this person came up to our (low) price and so bought our house.

We sold at the last possible moment because immediately afterwards the housing market began to fall in earnest. When the press gave the phenomenon a lot of attention house sales plummeted. At the time of our closing we felt we were cheating ourselves of profits, but when we walked away from it and we were completely out of debt for the first time in many years, it felt good. And it still feels good!

Debt-free is the correct posture to be in for the period of economic chaos we are entering. If you do have money it is a good idea to put it into REAL things like land that can support a big garden and skills and tools that will help you make a living during hard times. We are entering a period of chaos that will be unlike anything any of us has ever experienced. You should try to join or build a local community of friends and family who will hang together. That's certainly what we are doing.

Zoning is a problem for communities

One reason there are not more intentional communities are zoning laws (true grammarians won't like that sentence--sorry). These were set up to control how land is used and they have their place much of the time. Who wants to live next to a cement factory, for example?

But zoning laws make it illegal for groups of people to live together on a piece of land. This presumably “keeps property values high” and it ensures more tax money to the government. (Notice how the money system lies beneath every official rule.) Unfortunately, it means that friends and families who come together to form a community must do so illegally.

The above picture shows a typical situation where land is subdivided, and each parcel is owned by a different person. Each property must have a clearing within it for a house. Each property must have its own well drilled, its own driveway, and of course each property must be patrolled by a large, noisy carnivore to make sure no wild creatures come near (sorry you dog lovers). You probably couldn't dream up a more damaging system to the local ecology than this.

And on each property sits a single, solitary family.

They are called “homesteaders” and they are some of the busiest people around. This is because living out in the country is a ton of work. Nothing happens automatically like in a city, so hauling trash, chopping wood, clearing and patching roads, and endless trips to town are a basic fact of life. Then throw in all the things that people who move to the country want to do, like raising chickens and goats and horses, growing herbs and vegetables, raising honeybees, building outbuildings, etc., and you are occupied full time. To make matters worse, most homesteaders have to leave their property to earn money to support the whole affair. This means, basically, that the average homesteader is working two jobs: the money-earning one, and maintaining the homestead itself!

In a community, of course, these tasks would be shared among the members, which gives rise to the old saying, "Many hands make light work". The search to find a part of the country where zoning laws allow a community to form and grow unhindered led the Dancing Rabbit folks to move to the hinterlands of Missouri, which certainly wouldn't be my first choice of places to live.

We have found that sometimes homesteaders are agreeable to having cool people live on their land to help them with their property, providing work in exchange for rent. There are also farmers who need help with growing their crops, packing vegetables into boxes, and selling at markets. Sometimes a property owner needs help with a specific project, such as constructing a new building. Some of these situations are very short term, and sometimes long. I have to say that most of the people doing work trade are young, twenty-somethings, but often a family can be accommodated and sometimes a family is specifically advertised for. Here are some websites where such matches are made.

http://attrainternships.ncat.org/

http://www.wwoof.org/

http://www.organicvolunteers.com/

Zoning laws derive from a model of property ownership that was invented by the banking industry. Owning one's own land is a highly appealing idea, but this current system of one family per plot is an obstacle to a healthier way of living for humanity and the natural world. I see no hope that this system will change until industrial society slams into an ecological wall. I wish I saw a more hopeful path. In the meantime those of us who seek to form eco-communities will have to do so discretely in the hinterlands.

End of summer 2008

I've not posted a lot lately because I've been busy living a life in the country and typing our latest doings into the internet has seemed less important.

But this week I've had a couple of experiences that encourage me to pick this blog thread back up. Two different people--friends I haven't yet met--contacted me to tell me how helpful they've found my postings, something I still find extraordinary...and very encouraging. Breaking away from the dominant system has been a huge leap for us and it remains my hope that others come along after us. Only when enough people abandon it can the dominant system falter.

Since January we have been living on the homestead of some new friends, paying our rent through work trade. This isn't an official "intentional community", but we find we've been doing all of the things we wanted to do, and we are all happy, so here we remain. If you'd asked me a year ago if I wanted to be living in a forest, growing my own food, learning how to recognize wild medicinal plants, building cob houses, and playing my guitar I'd give an enthusiastic yes! We've been busy raising vegetables, learning natural building, and meeting other good folk around the countryside.

For the last couple weeks we've helped with the workshop that built this cob house. People came from all over the place to learn how to build a house made of cob. This was a pretty big structure, and the temperatures spiked right at the beginning of the workshop, so we all worked pretty hard. I'm pooped.

It's also that time of year around here that the blackberries are ripening. We were invited to pick on one of the many local wineries, which we are happy to do because these berries get lots of water and so they are fat and juicy! Now that the workshop is over we'll spend a couple days gathering pounds of them and then we'll can them.

So that's what we're up to lately. Next month we'll go back to Texas and Missouri to see la familia.

Summer projects

We've been spending our summer learning a lot of new things. For instance, I strung up some hummingbird feeders. The thing that attracts hummers is the red cap. The bottles are filled with sugar water (1 part sugar to 4 parts water). And no, the sugar will not make their beeks rot off! Turns out this mixture is not too different from their natural energy drink: nectar.

I helped put the roofing on this pole-frame building. Some friends are doing a lot of building out here in the country and sometimes hire me to help out. I'm fascinated by all forms of building so I'm happy to help and learn.





I also recently helped a friend put in a cob bread oven. This is the third oven I've worked on. She lives in a very rural setting and patiently--over months--dug away the hillside to make space for her oven. We used the excavated clay to build the oven itself, but there was almost no sand. This means the clay will crack, so she'll have to seal the combustion chamber initially, and it's possible the whole thing will collapse. The good news is all the material can be re-used if need be.

Connor spent a week near Mt. Shasta at a wilderness camp. This was a hard one for us, to let our Connor go away for a week. But, now that he's back it's all good. He was one of the younger boys in the group, but as the instructor said, "he was the heart of the group". He learned a lot about camping, outdoor craft, and people, and refers to the course frequently.

More on gardening soon...

Solar Water Heater

I built a solar water heater. It is perhaps the simplest style of solar water heater in that the heating part and the water containing part are together in one unit.

I stripped a water heater down to just the tank, painted it black, put it in an insulated box also painted black inside, and covered the box with glass.

The first picture shows the box during construction where I packed insulation in between the box framing. This insulation came from the original water heater and so did the sheet metal I sealed it in with. The wood was mostly scrap laying around the place, so everything was free!

The second picture shows the box with insulation in place, and the
third picture shows the inside of the box painted black.

The picture missing here (because it's still in my camera which I forgot because we left for town in a hurry and so much for casual, stress-free life in the country, but anyway...) shows the completed heater sitting out in the open under the sun warming up our shower water for free.

Just painting a tank black would provide hot water. Placing it in an insulated box will keep the water hot overnight, and will extend the season well into the autumn.

Capitalism American Style

This Bear Stearns thing has me upset because once again the people got screwed and the perps made colossal fortunes.

On March 12th, Bear Stearns' CEO scoffed at rumors of liquidity problems at the bank:

"Schwartz also denied rumors that the company's liquidity is under threat. Bear Stearns still has a $17 billion cushion against losses, he said.

"Our balance sheet has not weakened at all," he said. "We don't see any pressure on our liquidity."

The day before Mr. Schwarz's appearance on CNBC, somebody made an enormous purchase of put contracts on Bear Stearns stock. A put contract is a bet the stock price will fall. These put contracts were an extremely risky purchase as they would make money only if Bear Stearns stock lost HALF its value within TEN days. The size of this purchase was over 55,000 contracts at an average price of 15 cents a contract at $30 strike.

Of course, if the purchaser was an insider they knew what was going to happen and that there was no risk at all, and they won the lottery, because...

The following weekend on March 16th Sunday, a day when the stock market is closed and shareholders could do nothing but watch, JP Morgan announces they are buying Bear Stearns at pennies on the dollar. Not only that, there is very little risk to them as the deal is "guaranteed" by the Fed.

In just days Bear Stearns stock had fallen from $60 to $2.

Jim Rogers had this to say about the bailout:

You know the reason they did it this way was because, if Bear Stearns had to declare bankruptcy, you'd realize that Bear Stearns paid out billions of dollars in bonuses in January - six weeks ago. If he let them go into bankruptcy, they all would have had to send back their bonuses.

This is what they're doing, they're doing it so they don't have to give back their bonuses. That's why they didn't put them into bankruptcy. Jamie Dimon has gotten a great deal because the Federal Reserve is paying for it. The Federal Reserve is using taxpayer money to buy a bunch of Bear Stearns traders' Mazeratis.

As if this weren't bad enough here's what one of the Bear Stearns executives demanded of his new boss, JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon:

"How will you make me whole?"

How about them apples? If this were the exception to an otherwise honest system that would be one thing, but it isn't. This is capitalism American style.

Illegal maneuverings of this type come to light all the time. For another example, remember the California power crises in early 2001, which it was later revealed were caused by Enron restricting power supplies to make colossal profits? Here is a transcript where an Enron employee asks a utility employee to do something "interesting" and cause a power outage.

POWER PLANT WORKER: Las Vegas Co-Gen, this is Rich.

ENRON EMPLOYEE: Hey, Rich, this is Bill up at Enron.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Bill.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: How you doin’, man?
POWER PLANT WORKER: Junior or Senior?
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Heh, heh, the Third.
POWER PLANT WORKER: The Third! What’s happening, Bill the Third?
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Not much, man. I’m giving you a call. We’ve got some issues for tomorrow.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Are you ready for some issues? You’re just about out of there, aren’t you?
POWER PLANT WORKER: I got a couple more hours, I ain’t going anywhere. All right, shoot. I’ve got pen and paper.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: All right man. I’m not—this is going to be a word-of-mouth kind of thing.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Tonight, when you finish your normal QF, so for hour ending 1, which will actually be tomorrow—
POWER PLANT WORKER: Right.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: We want you guys to get a little creative—
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay.
ENRON EMPLOYEE:—and come up with a reason to go down.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Anything you want to do over there? Any cleaning, anything like that?
POWER PLANT WORKER: Yeah. Yeah. There’s some stuff that we could be doing tonight.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: That’s good.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Yeah, we need to do some—we need to come down and inspect this switch on the steam turbine, this one switch on this induction steam valve that’s been failing us, and we need to be down in order to pull the switch and adjust it.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: No sh-–?
POWER PLANT WORKER: Yeah.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: I like that. And, I don’t know, I guess around 11:00 for hour ending 11—
POWER PLANT WORKER: Right.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: You got to go back—we need you to go back down.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay, shut back down for hour ending 11?
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Yeah.
POWER PLANT WORKER: So, we’ll do our normal afternoon shutdown tomorrow.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Yep.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: But we’re not wanting to have it prescheduled.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Right.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: It’s supposed to be, you know, kinda one of those things.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay, so we’re just coming down for some maintenance, like a forced outage type thing.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Right.
POWER PLANT WORKER: And that’s cool?
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Hopefully.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Because the schedule I just got over here, well, you know what it says.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Yep, I’m looking right at it.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay, it’s the new schedule.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: You just got a new one?
POWER PLANT WORKER: It says “new schedule” on the bottom. It’s showing 52 all day.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Oh, right, and so that’s the one you’re going to want to ignore.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Exactly.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: I knew I could count on you.
POWER PLANT WORKER: No problem. I’m sure I’ll have a good time.

Again, that’s an Enron employee asking a worker at a power plant in Las Vegas to take the plant offline. That same day energy supplies were so tight, Northern California experienced a stage three power emergency, and rolling blackouts hit as many as two million consumers.

It's too bad you can't listen to the conversation. Hearing these smirking chimps is something else. I have a recording, but this bloggin software won't let me upload it for you. Don't use Blogger. Google bad.

Endemic corruption like this might just cause a person to abandon the system and head for the hills, you know?

Early spring activities!

We've been busy this early spring. Here are some of the highlights:

We planted pine trees. Drier conditions are thinning out the Douglas Firs, so these little pine trees should do okay.







We have been building a cob oven. The foundation is shown first. This was one day's work filling bags with sand, filling the donut hole with rock and rubble. I'll post a detailed story on this oven later...so it will be a little hard to piece together what we did from just this.

A layer of bottles forms an insulation layer below the heating chamber. (burp!)







Next we built a sand dome and covered it with a "thermal layer" of clay and sand--no straw.










Once this thermal layer dries a little we cut the door opening and scoop out the sand.















Herb spiral

Just outside our kitchen I built an herb spiral so we can fetch a few fresh herbs for breakfast without getting our slippers wet!

Happy Birthday, Alexis!

Alexis turns 10 today. I can't believe how quickly my children are growing up, I say in cliche.

We had some very nice folks over to celebrate. One of Alexis' presents I was most impressed with was made by her friend Ariana. It is a shepherd made by her hand of natural materials. Pretty fantastic, eh?

Alexis had a great time and we all had fun too. Bless you all.

Weather Breaks
My last post spoke about the rather depressing blanket of winter that had fallen about this place. Well it broke this week, so we had the pleasure of resuming our gardening in full sun!

Snow!

One feature of the Oregon winter is its unpredictable nature. Sometimes it may snow once and melt right away. Other times it's like this one: intense!
For going on three weeks we have had snow and rain. We are warm and cozy, but are getting cabin fever.

Recall we are living entirely off our solar panels, and are nursing our batteries through this. Sometimes, like now, we escape to town and get on the wi-fi at a coffee shop.

Of course, all this snow is a winter paradise for the child within us (I'm pretty good with a snowball, and my young friend Julian is a good aim too). Here a snow ball fight is on-going.

Gardening in winter
One afternoon it was pleasant enough to mulch a bed in the garden. The garden has a lot of slope and we want water to flow evenly across the plants so we built the bed on contour, which we find using an A-frame. (It's surprising how deceptive the eyeball can be in these matters).

Once the contour line is found on the hillside, we carve a level bed, dump on a couple of inches of compost, and cover it with cardboard and then straw. From here we let mother nature do her thing with earth worms and microbes. We will plant directly through this mixture, and could even plant seeds in little soil pockets in the straw. Ideally, this would have been done last fall, but it's not too late to do it here in January.
We debated whether we should test the soil and add amendments, and in foregoing the expense of this step we join company with every other organic farmer we've met!



Circus Class
Connor and Alexis are taking "circus classes" where they learn silks, juggling, unicycle riding, and so on. Here Connor gets instruction on the trapeze.


Stay well everyone!

New home in Oregon!

Recall that we arrived in Oregon at autumn just as it was getting cold and this left us with a tough choice. Should we go south where it's warmer and risk not returning to the Pacific northwest? Or should we stay through the winter and experience Oregon in the springtime? Chant and Susanna at Trillium Farm made it easier to decide by letting us power our trailer off their electricity in exchange for work around their place, and so we stayed there from October to January. In fact, we spent Christmas day in their warm farm house while they went to Hawaii.

We were able to learn some interesting things while we were at Trillium. We helped them build a bath house out of cordwood, where logs are "mudded" into a wall with a cement mixture (with an insulating layer in the middle). I helped Chant cut the hardibacker flooring before tiles went in and rough in his wood stove. Over the winter there was applesauce to be made, firewood to be cut, runs to the dump, and pottery to be spun. (Susanna is a talented artist and teaches art at the highschool). And of course, there was the special place called Trillum to experience and explore. Over the course of four months we had many dinners and good times together with Chant and Susanna and consider them to be of the highest calibre of awesome good people.

Since we were in one place for a while, mingling with locals, new opportunities came up. We were invited to move onto the land of a young family and work around their place in exchange for rent, "work trade" it's called. And so, that's where we are now. We have moved into their hobbit hut cob cabins and plan to stay here at least until October of this year.

Our main activity will be cultivating their vegetable gardens, and there will be many opportunities to learn how to build with cob, a mixture of clay, sand, and straw. We are off the electrical grid and so through the winter months with short days we have to watch our power use. We have a dial up internet connection which we're still getting used to, and we see our children less often now that they spend many hours playing in the woods with the other family's two children who are just about the same age.

So, here's where we'll be for a while. Stay tuned!

Review of the novel, "Island"

I just read the novel, "Island", by Aldous Huxley. This book came out in 1962 and tells the story of Pala, a mythical island where oil has recently been discovered. The protagonist of the story, Will Farnaby, is a British journalist and economic hitman who has been hired by corporate tycoons to negotiate with the island's royal elite for the right to extract the tiny country's oil wealth.

The job of the economic hitman is to bribe a country's leader to betray his people so that a western corporation can steal the nation's assets from them. Economic hitmen are very real and have been a major strategy of the United States to steal the wealth of the third world since Mossadegh--the democratically elected leader of Iran--was driven out of office by the CIA. For more read "Economic Hitman" by John Perkins.

During the course of his visit to Pala Will Farnaby entertains himself by taking a guided tour of the island and its remarkable culture. Pala is a utopia: its people are well-educated, well adjusted, superbly healthy in body and mind. It soon becomes obvious that Huxley's main purpose with the book is to wax on about his social theories for reasons that should be known to you, but sadly are probably not.

When one understands who Aldous Huxley is it should become clearer. Huxley was the son of T. H. Huxley, a British intellectual and member of The Royal Society. The entire Huxley family was active in British politics and policy and are, in fact, propagandists for the British empire. For example, Aldous' brother, Julian, was the first director of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) promoting world education congenial to empire. Aldous' role was to write books that introduced key ideas (memes) into society so that when they were later proposed as policy they would not seem shocking, a phenomenon called "predictive programming".

For example, he spends a lot of time in the book describing the education of Palanese youth who are given training in the hard sciences, but also in physical and emotional health, and Buddhist spirituality. They are selected, based on their abilities and personality type, for special instruction. This may sound appealing but in the end what is revealed is education of children for the benefit of society at the expense of individualism. And what Huxley doesn't share with us is that the country's leaders get to decide which behaviors are promoted and which are not.

I was very impressed with Huxley's intelligence and insight into human nature, as it is obvious upon reading him one is dealing with a superior mind, but there is a certain tragedy to the man that came through in this book particularly. His own education was, of course, British boarding school with the attendant alienation and estrangement from family and deep love. The character Will Farnaby is, I am certain, patterned after Huxley himself, and is a thoroughly unsympathetic character who exhibits all the traits of a psychopath. This is what he had to say about his girlfriend's attempts at pregnancy:

"He was not much interested in babies and had always been thankful for those repeated miscarriages which had frustrated all Molly's hopes and longings for a child."

The best propaganda buries the lies within a spoonful of sugar and "Island" does just that. It is fitting that Huxley writes himself into this story as an economic hitman because that is what he was in real life too.