Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I've posted the technology tiers concept to the Miiu wiki, in a
slightly more developed form. Thanks for the suggestion. 
  

    
Ok.  I'm back.  Didn't have much time since the trip was much more
difficult than anticipated.  The entire easter half of PA is flooded. 
A 3 hour trip took 12 on Wednesday.  On the positive side:  I drove on
a turnpike that had been turned into a fast moving stream.  Hadn't done
that before.  
  

    
Perhaps that experience will come in handy on some future occasion!

John, I've been reading along here with interest. I used to be a land
use planner, as well as a community development person, and I
subsequently moved into health care policy and strategic planning. One
of my areas of interest and research has been mass casualty event
preparedness, along with analysis of what went wrong in past events and
the responses thereto, which I referred to during those projects as
"worst practices". 

I have found the technical points in this discussion very interesting,
but I notice that neither the essence of community- relationships- nor
the value of skilled planners and organized emergency responders have
come up. 

I know that these are both deep and wide topics, but would you like to
speak to either or both? Thanks!
  

    
Javier's questions:

1)What would be the way for a western state's economic, political and
social systems to transition from their present state to a resilient,
open source form of organisation?

Here's the aggressive response: A crisis of capitalism swings the door
wide open.  At that point, there's nothing but innovation between us
and a dark age.  Nothing like a little pressure....

A more prosaic response:  economic failure yields opportunities to
bootstrap new economic systems.  Ideological blinders fall.  Politics
doesn't offer solutions.  Need to innovate rises.


2)What would be the way for a western state defense systems to
transition from their present state to a resilient, open source form of
organisation?

Not sure that the state defense systems will make the transition. 
They'll just shrink.  Some will take the "biggest gang" on the block
approach to keeping non-state rivals in line.

3)How can energy/wealth be harvested from the collapse of capitalism
and transformed into the input/fuel of the building/transformation
processes implied in 1 and 2?

Still working on that.  
  

    
vie e-mail:

Localism can be attractive for the ecologically concerned and the
xenophobic. The local-only fallacy is simply a macro-scale version of
the isolationist libertarian fantasy that Robb's "pitchfork factor"
rightfully skewers. It pays to be locally prepared, but relationships
cannot be ignored; outside of your family, or your immediate community.

However, the refrain here thus far has been on stationary communities;
this has been an artifact of modern life, and really ever since
agriculture. However, nomadic patterns are being examined once again,
and I'm curious as to whether this poses an unexplored possibility for
resilient living. In particularly, I've been reading A Thousand
Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari which touches on the
micro/macro scales of things, and the tensions between hierarchies and
"meshworks", but I think the blog post by Venkatesh Rao "On Being an
Illegible Person"
(http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/07/31/on-being-an-illegible-person/)
captures the notion even better. A selection:

When voluntarily chosen, nomadism is not a profession,  lifestyle, or
restless spiritual quest. It is a stable and restful state of mind
where constant movement is simply a default chosen behavior that frames
everything else. True nomads decide they like stable movement better
than rootedness, and then decide to fill their lives with activities
that go well with movement. How you are moving matters a lot more than
where you are, were, or will be. Why you are moving is an ill-posed
question.

This is not really as strangely backwards as it might seem. Rooted
people often decide to relocate somewhere based on a general sense of
opportunities and lifestyle possibilities, andthen figure out how
they’ll live their lives there. Smart rooted people usually target
regions first, jobs, activities and relationships second. Nomads pick a
pattern of movement first, and then figure out the possibilities of
that pattern later. While I haven’t found a sustainable pattern yet,
I’ve experienced several unsustainable ones.

As the benefits of large, immovable infrastructure begin to be
outweighed by their liabilities or insufficiencies, I can see something
of a new nomadism being a mode of existence for many; a migratory
life, with all the problems and conflicts that poses with extent
stationary populaces.

Related only somewhat, what think you of the more severe line of
thinking towards post-climate catastrophe resilience explored at The
Archdruid Report? <http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/>.
  

    
On a different note, I was recently asked to give a presentation on
technology, values and activism at a Christian anarchism conference in
Minneapolis hosted by Missio Dei and Jesus Radicals. Missio Dei is an
example of an urban "neo-monastic" community, with an emphasis on
enacting a community lifestyle that challenges the assumptions of
contemporary capitalism and defense. They have three communal homes in
the Twin Cities, and links to other communities across the U.S. and the
world, which resulted in the Community of Communities
(http://www.communityofcommunities.info/), and have urban garden plots
and community meals. Have you encountered other examples of these sorts
of communities in urban areas? I'm not a believer myself, but I find
the work these communities are doing and the mindsets they are
inculcating as invaluable going forward.
  

    
John, I was wondering if you knew of anyone conducting "fire drills"
for short term resiliance education?  I spent a lot of time in the
shop today and discovered that the brace and bit set my father-in-law
gave me yesterday is the only thing in my house capable of drilling
holes without electricity.

While SWMBO would probably not be thrilled with my turning off the
main circuit breaker for a week, I am somewhat curious to see what
life would be like with an electrical supply similar to that in
countries without a stable grid.   Say, rolling dice every morning to
determine how many hours of electricity I have that day or some other
semi-random simulation of life somewhat-off-the-grid, almost like a
board game.   Draw two cards, the first tells you what resource is
offline and the second tells you how many hours it's off.  "Oh, hey,
today we don't have running water for 12 hours!"
  

    
Adding to the stuff listed at
<http://www.austinhsem.com/go/doc/3603/976339/>
I have those supplies (including enough MREs to last 2 people 6-8 days
but I'm planning on first eating the perishables, canned tuna,
sardines and crackers as long as those supplies last!), I bought a
small digital television with rechargeable batteries that served me
very well during Irene a couple weeks ago.  The small rabbit ears only
pull in a few of the 20-something local stations where I live, but all
the local stations were weather news all the time, so I found it very
useful when the power went off (also plays DVDs).  Cost me $66 on sale
at a local drug store and I have no buyer's regret whatsoever. Yes,
it's a luxury, but if you can afford one, I recommend looking into it.

Love my crank-powered AM/FM/SW, but I'm a TV-baby at heart.

Also, the Austin HSEM site mentions having some "cash and change" on
hand.  Boy howdy, I want to underline that.  When the power's out, your
credit and debit cards don't work.  A couple of dear friends of mine
and their two dogs evacuated New Orleans in late August 2005 and were
homeless for a couple of months and found out how difficult it was to
find a motel room or food without cash for a few days. 
  

    
Went to visit my parents (my mother's b-day party) this weekend.
Unfortunately for her, some terrorists made the day infamous. 

Ok.  ON to the questions.  Working from the most recent backwards.  

Jack, Would definitely underline what you said.  Also, take a look at
the bug out bag on MiiU.  Have a couple of recipes, including a low
cost one.

http://www.miiu.org/wiki/Bug_Out_Bag

Bug out bags are a must for getting through a short term disruption,
particularly those that involve an evacuation (many do).  

However, longer term crisis/disaster like a global economic
depression/financial crisis, some deeper thinking is needed.  In that
instance, you need to grow a local economy from the ground up.
  

    
Eric,

That's pretty interesting.  Haven't seen that type of game before. 
Makes sense though.

The goal is to get people thinking of not only enduring failures like
that, but finding ways to locally generate power (on a community
level).  There are ways to do that.  
  

    
Possibly stupid question -

When power fails, i guess gas stations have to use generators to pump
gas but failing that what do they do?
  

    
They don't pump gas, in my experience.  I've never seen a gas station
running a gennie, but I have seen some in middle-of-nowhere Louisiana
with old hand/crank pumps.
  

    
There isn't going to be gas for awhile. Count on it. 

I drive diesel for that reason. There are a lot of farm tanks out here
for the various tractors and other agricultural equipment, and maybe I
could make a deal. Also, it's good practice to maintain at least a
half tank of fuel in your vehicle at all times. If you have a safe way
to store fuel at home, you might want to put aside a couple jerry cans.
"Safe" in this context means you should have a proper fire-resistant
storage cabinet to put those cans in, however. 
  

    
and those cabinets aren't cheap.  When I see them used around here
they are at least $50 or so for a small one.

One of the deciding factors in the house we bought is that it's
walking/biking distance from everything we need.  It might be an
unpleasant, hour-long walk, but it is doable.
  

    
Jordan,

Much of the dynamism you see in nomadic tribes can currently be
replicated online.  No need to actually travel.  

However, if we do see resilient communities emerge within the context
of an economic depression and increasingly illegitimate governance at
the nation-state level, we'll see a considerable amount of diversity in
how RCs are governed.  
  

    
Always keep your gas tank near-full. I do, because I work in a city
that always gridlocks during an emergency.  When the early afternoon
snow hit last January and all the government workers were let go at the
same time, many people spent the night in their cars on I-66 and the
George Washington Pkwy just outside town, to name a couple evacuation
routes. Nearly the same thing happened Aug. 29, the day of the
earthquake.

One of the top reasons people didn't evacuate New Orleans before
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the Hurricane Ivan fiasco of 2004. Many
people did evacuate before Ivan (which didn't hit New Orleans after
all) and got stuck on I-10 & I-55 when cars ahead of them ran out of
gas, and then they did too.  There was a "never again" kind of attitude
among some residents. That was a mess that took more than a day to
clear. 

It really doesn't cost anything to keep your gas tank nearly full.
  

    
I do that.  
  

    
I think most of the folks reading this are missing the elephant in the
room on resilience.  Simply:  we are in the first stage of a global
economic depression.  That's the event that is going to frame your life
for the next couple of decades.  

Within that context, resilience is about bootstrapping an economy that
works for you, your family, and your community.  About taking control
and being in charge of your future. 

Granted, it's a big shift in thinking.  We live in a culture that's
based on complete and utter dependence (I don't buy into the fantasy
that just having a big savings account or a pile of gold makes you
free).  
  

    
Yes, I sometimes look around the suburb I live in and wonder how soon
people would start going hungry if trucks stopped rolling up at the
stores. Not long, I'd say.

Of course, the obvious alternative presented to a big savings account
or a pile of gold is a basement full of ammo and freeze-dried food. 
The survivalist dream/nightmare is probably no more realistic than
thinking that we can keep on going the way we're going.

Still, imagination does not easily provide alternate templates.  I've
read some of James Kunstler's fiction which sort of envisions the
future as a re-run of the 19th century, but I'm not sure if I buy it.
  

    
>We live in a culture that's based on complete and utter dependence

I don't disagree with that at all, but this is what I was getting at
earlier with "how do I convince my neighbors to start being more
self-reliant without sounding like a nut job?"

On a personal level I've been trying to support local businesses and
manufacturing in hopes of keeping them in business.  That's a drop in
the ocean, to be sure, but I've been trying to convince my friends to
do the same.

However, I've started reading _Endless Novelty_ at the same time as a
friend of mine in Japan.  It's a detailed look at the local
manufacturing climate that existed in the US around the turn of the
century, and from what my friend in Japan says, they still have a lot
of this capacity that we have lost.    I live in what used to be one
of the bigger manufacturing hubs in the rust belt and there's now
barely more than a few pages of machine and fabrication shops in the
yellow pages.

So yes, even tho one of us might be reasonably self-sufficient, our
greater region is probably screwed.
  

    
Looks like an interesting book:

<http://www.amazon.com/Endless-Novelty-Philip-Scranton/dp/0691070180/ref=sr_1_1
?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315933008&sr=1-1>
  

    
It really is, if you're into the history of manufacturing and such.  I
knew we shipped a lot of our manufacturing capacity overseas, I just
had no idea how much.
  

    
For the last 75 years our politicos and the economists in their employ
have assured us that it is possible to replace the old Adam Smith
memes of hard work, sound money, savings and investment with new,
improved economic memes.  If sound money was replaced with a rapidly
expanding money and credit supply and artificially low interest rates. 
Then savers would be forced to become speculators to preserve their
wealth and society would benefit from more rapid wealth creation. 
Losers in this more Darwinian speculative process would be caught in a
'social safety net.'  Or so we were told.  

Now, you are implying that this new magical meme set was on which the
politicos have risk all of our futures is nothing more than smoke and
mirrors.  Yet another scam for allowing politicos to centralizing
power, just as communism proved to be.   

We have only been living a bubblicious delusion of prosperity that has
only served to leave both our governments and ourselves up to our
necks in debt.

If the economic memes around which we have built our globalized
trading system are, in fact, bad memes.  Then we are not simply facing
a second Great Depression.  We are in for something an order of
magnitude worse than that, call it the Great Collapse.  A world where
not just 1/3 of our businesses have gone bankruptcy, as in the Great
Depression, but where nearly all of our private and public institutions
windup bankrupt and ineffectual.  A world where confidence in national
currencies could fail and our entire globalized just-in-time economy
could grind to a sudden halt.  If these new economic memes are bad
memes, then we could be looking at a potentially civilization
destroying event here.

Are we facing something this potentially dire?
  

    
Hey, John, I asked a question back in post 78 that relates to what
mcdee is saying, and to the looming or current depression. Is it not
something that you want to address, or did it get lost in the shuffle?
  

    
re: 93: Ever since reading Dmitry Orlov's "Global Collapse Best
Practices", I've become somewhat a fan of global collapse scenarios.
But I confess that I still think they're low probability - there's a
big difference between a long-running recession and collapse. What
should I be reading that might convince me otherwise?