"What to make of Thrun’s apparent pleasure at the fact that 170 of the 200 Stanford students who had enrolled in the real, not online, version of the Stanford AI class stopped coming to class, preferring the online Thrun to the flesh-and-blood Thrun?
That pleasure, I’m quite sure, is genuine. I think that Khan and Thrun are at the forefront of a new, more personal way of teaching — think of them as having screen-actor skills in a world which has historically rewarded stage-actor skills. When you teach online, you’re teaching in a conversational manner, in a one-on-one space. And it turns out that many students — quite possibly most students — prefer being taught that way, as opposed to the old-fashioned model where a lecturer stands up in front of a crowded classroom and declaims to many people at once. Most students are naturally shy; they don’t like speaking up in class and saying that they don’t understand something. Online, they can just rewind and replay, or pause and look it up on Wikipedia."

"So I think one of the questions I’m asking in the book is not just about the power of debt but also why we come to see debt—exchange whereby complete transactions are debts—as being the essence of all social relations, because the very logic of exchange is just one of many ways that we ourselves think of the morality of distribution and transfer of material goods. There are always different registers and different moralities that we bring to bear, but the basic principles really are the same everywhere you go. So the moment you realize that everything we’re doing is not an exchange, suddenly you realize that forms of feudal hierarchy actually exist right here, but forms of communism also exist right here. Almost any social possibility already exists and is part of the daily fabric of our existence. We’re just taught not to notice it or think it’s particularly important...
Most interactions with people that you trust, people that you love, or people that just need to cooperate with on an immediate basis, take the form of “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” It doesn’t matter if you’re working for the government, working for a corporation, or working in your family; if you need to fix the toilet because it’s leaking and you say “Hand me the wrench,” the other guy doesn’t say “What do I get for that?” It’s not an exchange; people act according to their abilities to chip in. Ironically communism is applied because it’s the only thing that works; it’s the most efficient way to allocate resources. Thus I like to say that you could argue that capitalism is just a bad way of organizing communism."

"Some of the back-to-the-landers do have one thing right. It will be healthy communities that will survive the end of the oil age. Even in the unlikely “roving terror gang” scenario, which neighborhood is likely to be invaded? One where each household and its own little garden is isolated, or one in which 30 neighbors are solidly looking out for each other?
Communities are much easier to create where people live near each other. They form when population passes a critical mass, and where people have similar interests and needs. During my rural sojourn, I was astounded by how little my neighbors had in common.
Present-day development in rural areas is wildly haphazard, with mansions next to decrepit trailers. The makeup of the new ruralism is not yeoman farmers and ranchers (fewer than 7% of ruralites farm), but a cheek-by-jowl mix of retirees, poor refugees from cities and declining inner suburbs, low-wage workers in service or resource industries, and affluent dabblers in country life...To believe that ruralites will fare better, post-oil, than urbanites is to believe that scattered individuals are more resourceful and capable than large assemblages of people acting in concert."

"JavaRanch uses a loose Independent/Consensus/Dictator hybrid.
For about 90% to 95% of the stuff you do, you make the decision by yourself. This is stuff where you figure that nobody is going to care, or if they do care, you are probably doing it the same way they would. So in a way it is consensus, only it is never asked. Everybody is probably okay with it.
About 2% to 10% of the stuff you do, you bring up to somebody you think would care. Usually, everybody agrees and life is good. If there is disagreement and folks feel like it has been discussed enough, the person that is willing to do the actual work makes the call. Chances are that the party that disagreed was more of a "better way" camp than "it will end all life as we know it" and having something that works at all is better than nothing. So no big deal. A few things that cannot be agreed on probably need to go to the dictator.
About 0.1% to 2% of the stuff you do might be tied to the dictator. The dictator settles disputes and tries to set a common path so that effort won't be wasted."

"With the rise of the bicycle age has come a rise in bicycle robbery: FBI statistics claim that 204,000 bicycles were stolen nationwide in 2010, but those are only the documented thefts. Transportation Alternatives, a bicycle advocacy group in New York City, estimates the unreported thefts at four or five times that—more than a million bikes a year. New York alone probably sees more than 100,000 bikes stolen annually. Whether in big biking cities like San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, or in sport-loving suburbs and small towns, theft is “one of the biggest reasons people don’t ride bikes,” Noah Budnick, deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, told me. Although bike commuting has increased by 100 percent in New York City during the past seven years, the lack of secure bike parking was ranked alongside bad drivers and traffic as a primary deterrent to riding more... SFPD’s McCloskey estimated that 90 percent of bike thieves are drug addicts. In America’s rough streets, there are four forms of currency—cash, sex, drugs, and bicycles. Of those, only one is routinely left outside unattended. So the story of bike thieves would not be complete without a trip through the second half of the transaction—the recycling of cycles."

"LocallyGrown.net provides a simple system for farmers' markets to move from the traditional booths and tables "flea market" system to a fully coordinated on-line ordering system. Like at traditional farmers' markets, growers can fully display all of their goods and set their own prices. And like at traditional farmers' markets, customers can browse through the products and buy from all or just one of the growers. With LocallyGrown.net markets, customers usually get two full days to shop, the growers usually don't harvest until after the order has been placed, and the customer can come to one location and have everything waiting to be picked up.
This system has been used by growers in Athens, Georgia for seven years, and is now being used by growers in communities everywhere. Below, you'll find markets already using the system, roughly sorted by geographic area. If you don't see a market close to you and you know one or more growers ready to sell their products, you can create your own new market!"

"Over the last 50 years, food and zoning laws have worked to minimize subsistence activities in populated areas. Not only have we lost the culture of subsistence, but we've instituted legal requirements that make it almost impossible for many people to engage in simple subsistence activities that cut their energy use, reduce their ecological impact, improve their food security and improve their communities. In some cases, these laws were instituted for fairly good reasons, in many cases, for bad ones that associate such activities with poverty.
Scratch most of the reasons for these things both for zoning laws and HOA policies, and you'll find class issues under their surface in the name of "property values." There are ostensible reasons for these things, but generally speaking, they derive from old senses of what constituted wealth. They stem from the notion that what constituted wealth was essentially having things that don't do anything of economic value, but show that you can afford not to do for yourself...
No front yard gardens. Reason: The lawn is a sign of affluence - you have money, leisure and water enough to have a chunk of land, however tiny, that doesn't produce anything.. It creates in many neighborhoods a seemingly contiguous but basically sterile, often chemically toxic and seeming "public" greenspace that is actually privatized and not very green. Gardens, on the other hand, have dirty wildlife and bugs in them, and might grow food, which is bad because it implies you can't afford it - even if you can't."

"This website provides free e-books, mainly about holistic agriculture, holistic health and self-sufficient homestead living. There are secondary collections about social criticism and transformational psychology. No fees are collected for this service.

The library's subject seemingly-diverse topic areas actually connect agricultural methods to the consequent health or illness of animals and humans, shows how to prevent and heal disease and increase longevity, suggests how to live a more fulfilling life and reveals social forces working against that possibility."

Online library of public-domain farming texts.

Toby Hemenway's suggested reading list.

"Grey versus brown is “a tension that superimposes divisions by age and experience, income, and ethnicity…the Tea Party is very much a reaction by older white conservative Americans who resent and fear what they think might be the political accompaniments of a nation transformed by rising younger cohorts with different experiences, values, and social characteristics.”
Fittingly, the Tea Partiers have chosen the Ryan Budget as their very own spiritual lodestar–the Port Huron Statement of the old, white and reactionary. The Ryan Budget–and the GOP campaign around it–divides the American populace into “those who are 55 or older now, and those who are younger.” Meaning Boomers will receive Medicare and Social Security checks unchanged, whereas Millennials get the axe–despite the fact that many of us have been paying into these programs for the past 15 years. Let the record show that it was they who fired the first shot...
But batten down the hatches, because if there’s one thing they’ve made abundantly clear, the Boomers are going to cling to life and power until the very last EKG blip, fleecing us all the while. Conservative apostate David Frum recently characterized the contemporary GOP’s platform as “a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boomer generation.” Which is pretty much the Democrats’ platform too. They just have better table manners.
We’ll be spending the rest of our formative years diving for cover from their collective Death Rattle. Thirty years from now, even if we walk away with all of our soft tissue intact, John Roberts will probably still be Chief Justice."

Excellent information and resources on soil biology, microscopy, and compost tea-brewing.

"The real substance of Mr. Gingrich’s political presence derives from his skill at massaging exhaustively researched voter preferences and prejudices into matters of lonely principle. The positions he takes are acutely tuned to the unexamined fears and resentments of large numbers of Americans, yet he stands, in his rhetoric, alone, opposed by “the system,” by “Washington,” by “the liberal elite,” by “the East Coast elite” (not by accident does a mention of Harvard in 1945 provoke the sympathetic President’s antipathy to “East Coast snobbery and intellectual hauteur”), or simply by an unspecified “they.”...This was not a mind that could be productively engaged on its own terms. There was the casual relationship to accuracy, the spellings and names and ideas seized, in the irresistible momentum of Mr. Gingrich’s outlining, in mid-flight."

"A tale is told of two computer scientists back in the 1970s, discussing the new microprocessors. "They're going to be cheap! A dollar each!" One of them explained. "But who needs computers that cheap? What are they going to do, use them as doorknobs?" Asked his friend. Ten years later, the computer scientist was checking into a hotel room and suddenly looked at the card-key in his hand and realized, yes, there was a computer in every doorknob.
Imagine a very smart networked computer attached to every genetically engineered maize plant in a field in a poor rural backwater of Uganda. And that they discuss how fast they're growing via wifi and agree a nutrient plan to optimize growth, including restricting water to one particular plant that's shadowing a couple of others. The farmer, aged 80, harvests them via a quadrotor drone from the comfort of his air-conditioned farmhouse. (The quadrotor is powered by methanol fermented from their discarded husks.) When he needs to sell them, he hires a self-driving cargo truck to come and pick them up. And maybe hitches a ride to the clinic in town in the unoccupied cab. to get his anti-cancer booster shots updated Implausible? Partly because in the long term, things change more than we expect. But mostly because he's one of the 20% who don't live in cities."

Letter from 1865, written by a former slave to his former master, who had requested that he come back to work on his farm. "Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to."

"SOME FRINGE BELIEFS ABOUT FUTURE CHANGES
It's surprising how little vitality these have nowadays. Instead of fanaticallly dedicating themselves to narrow, all-explanatory cults, people just sort of eyeblink at 'em and move on to the next similiar topic." Peak oil, Islamic caliphate, chemtrails ("I've got a soft spot for chemtrail people, they're really just sort of cool, and much more interesting than UFO cultists, who are all basically Christians", BitCoin, space travel people, transcendent spiritual drug enthusiasts, nuclear armageddon enthusiasts, etc.

"Future Change as Seen by Serbia

1. Albanian ethnics occupying the ancestral land of Kosovo, an obscure patch of mountains that nobody else in the world has ever heard of. However, Kosovo's nevertheless incredibly and totally crucial and important to the general fate of mankind; like, seven-hundred tooth-grinding grudge-grumbling years' worth of importance. Tennis stars, busty turbofolk singers, everything else pales by comparison.
2. "NATO." NATO were the guys who blew up Serbia in 1999 and therefore ended the most recent Balkan wars, and this affront hasn't been forgotten. It has to be "NATO" that committed this misdeed, as Serbia is currently on rather cordial terms with all the countries actually in NATO. So tf you're Serbian and you go tell some NATO member like Denmark, "hey, you blew us up," they're like, "What?" So in Serbian parlance, "NATO" is always up to all kinds of elaborate skullduggery that nobody else understands. More fools they...
6. "Russia." Serbia's fantasy version of Russia is like nobody else's conception of Russia; most everybody else thinks of Russia as some half-blind, yellow-fanged ursine creature bristling with rusty nuclear weapons, while for Serbia, Russia is a fluffy angelic-winged flying bear to be depicted in stained-glass windows in a cloud of Orthodox incense. Tremendous emotional energy is invested in imagining that Russia will somehow show up and set everything to rights someday, even though Russia has never really done that anywhere for anybody."

"And here we see the fundamental dishonest characteristic of each and every article which advances this particular enraging argument. "Sure, it's an objectively large sum of money," they say. "But it is far smaller after I spend it."
No shit.
Money pays for the costs of life. That is what money does. You can't fucking argue that, hey, your money doesn't go that far after you've already spent it. You used it! Paying taxes and paying bills and paying the mortgage and putting money in a retirement fund and going out to dinner are the things that money gets you. You asshole. Just because you didn't blow it all on jewelry, caviar, and cocaine doesn't mean you didn't get anything out of it. This argument is like a man eating a hearty meal, licking his plate clean, then turning to a starving person and saying, "Look, we're in the same boat. My plate is empty too!""

"I don’t have a solution myself – the more I end up discussing this with people, the more I am reminded of the London Business School proverb taught on some of the gnarlier case studies, which is “Not All Business Problems Have Solutions”. So, CT hivemind, what do you think the best outcome is? Below the fold, I note some talking points, aimed at preventing our commentariat from falling into some of the pitfalls and mistakes which appear to be dominating debate at present. Because the whole issue is a twisty turny maze which at times seems to consist of nothing but false moves, I am presenting it in the form of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book."

"I want to tell the story of the rise of the modern cruise ship industry from its beginning in the 1960s - how it promised to make a world of aristocratic luxury available to everyone in the west, but also the hidden story of how that promise was achieved.
In many cruise ships there are hundreds of workers from some of the poorest countries on earth who are paid minute amounts of actual wages - sometimes less than two dollars a day - to attend to the passengers' needs...
But it wasn't always supposed to be like that.
The biggest company in the cruising world is the Carnival Corporation, based in Miami (the Costa Concordia is owned by one of their subsidiaries). Carnival has its roots in a small company set up in the 1960s which had a utopian vision that cruise liners could transform the world. One of its founders believed that the giant ships were machines that could help bring about a new era of world peace.
The liners would, he was convinced, unite the rich westerners and the poor from the "third world' by bringing tourists to new and remote destinations. This would foster a new enlightened understanding of each other that would bring about equality and justice throughout the world.
But it didn't turn out like that. And this is the story of what happened - and how the very opposite resulted.
It is also the story in miniature of one of the central consumer phenomenons of our time: the democratisation of luxury. How one half of the world all began to live as though they were aristocrats, while the other half became their servants. And how this allowed the real elite aristocrats of our time - who had become wealthier than any group ever before in history - to disappear, and become invisible."

"This report is an in-depth study of current market conditions, including supply and demand. It examines characteristics of successful markets, identifies underserved areas, analyzes the markets’ economic impact, and offers recommendations for an expanded City role in fostering market growth. All Portland market managers, over 50 local farmers, and peer communities were consulted." From 2008.

"Normally, rich guys are very Great-and-the-Good in their attitudes, even in private. If you go to Davos, you find that they're well-briefed, extravagantly polite to everyone, and extensively concerned with do-gooder issues like river blindness and child vaccination. That's because they're mostly Type-A executive dudes who figure that they can create rational plans and have them successfully carried out. So they behave in a way that accommodates those ambitions and legitimizes their long-term aims.
In the Crisis, though, the rich tend to drift toward a bling-bling Russian Mogul version of wealth, which is all about flinging your elbows into the faces of the help. Also, attacking one another in a frenzy of open looting, often lethally...
The Russian semibankyrschina age ended in a strange kind of Spy Bonapartism,which we still have with us today. I'm guessing a regime of Punk No-Future Rich would be vulnerable to the same modern driving forces. When you've got a free-market state so hollowed out that there's nothing left but spies, prisons and the military, you're gonna end up ruled by some tough-guy spy prison-camp general. And he might even get the votes, because the 99% like and admire him a lot more than they like you."

"Elbow: The Mysterious Pattern Inside Everything and How It Will Change the Way We Think About the Economy, Health Care, and the Internet
What is an “Elbow”? As best-selling science journalist Jonathan Brainer explains, it’s a ubiquitous pattern that looks much like its namesake anatomy: a line moves in one direction and then– suddenly– in another. Brainer ingeniously shows us how Elbows seem to turn up any time we make a graph, no matter what data is used: stock markets, marmoset populations, even the contours of seemingly ordinary rocks. How should we manage the world differently knowing that another Elbow might come at any time? The implications for areas as diverse as global financial systems, medical insurance, and space colonization are discussed in eye-opening detail. Several chapters toward the end address how readers can learn to recognize– and take advantage of– the Elbows in their own lives. Starred Review."

"Since Romney’s defending it and probably believes it, let’s dissect this argument. A quick glance would show that things like unemployment are worse in places that are poorer. Yet Romney’s comments are predicated on there being a set of problems – problems that have policy solutions – that impact middle-class people but do not impact the poor. Let’s try to make a list of these problems, stipulating in advance we might not find them convincing."
Problem 1. Middle-Class People Have to Work
Problem 2: Loss Aversion and Reproducing the Middle-Class
Problem 3: Relative Cost Inflation
Problem 4: Debt, Housing
Problem #5: Retirement Savings
Problem #6: Job Polarization

"I’ve been running a marathon lately to cover all the major players that may provide viable alternatives to fossil fuels this century. Even though I have not exhausted all possibilities, or covered each topic exhaustively, I am exhausted. So in this post, I will provide a recap of all the schemes discussed thus far, in matrix form. Then Do the Math will shift its focus to more of the “what next” part of the message.
The primary “mission” of late has been to sort possible future energy resources into boxes labeled “abundant,” “potent” (able to support something like a quarter of our present demand if fully developed), and “niche,” which is a polite way to say puny. In the process, I have clarified in my mind that a significant contributor to my concerns about future energy scarcity is not the simple quantitative scorecard. After all, if it were that easy, we’d be rocking along with a collective consensus about our path forward. Some comments have asked: “If we forget about trying to meet our total demand with one source, could we meet our demand if we add them all up?” Absolutely. In fact, the abundant sources technically need no other complement. So on the abundance score alone, we’re done at solar, for instance. But it’s not that simple, unfortunately. While the quantitative abundance of a resource is key, many other practical concerns enter the fray when trying to anticipate long-term prospects and challenges—usually making up the bulk of the words in prior posts."

"We offer open-pollinated SEEDS for medicinal & culinary herbs, heirloom vegetables, staple crops, flowers, and smoking tobacco...Everything we offer is Farm-Direct. We organically grew, harvested (or wildcrafted), and then processed all of the items you will find here ourselves. Most other herbal merchants are middlemen, buying from processors or importers who buy from farmers or gatherers. With these merchants, “Fair Trade” is the best thing you’ll get, but the surest way to ensure quality is to go Farm-Direct.
Our seed collection — which is entirely Open-Pollinated — ranges from the common to the rare, from the native to the cosmopolitan, and from the fussy to the invasive. For our plant medicines, we harvested our plants at peak potency, and use Certified Organic alcohol or olive oil (unless otherwise noted)."

"The concept of “winter gardening” in the Pacific Northwest is well-known, but not widely practiced. The lack of farmers’ markets at this time of year shows that not even the farmers do much of it...First, most people who want a winter garden start too late. The month when I have usually heard the most talk about winter gardening is September, by which time it’s too late to seed most things. In actuality, planting for winter harvest in 2012/13 starts now! Below is a simple month-by-month planting guide based on the experiences I had gardening in Portland."

"I am a farmer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. This season I have partnered with two other farmers and we are working about seven acres together, trying to grow vegetables, medicinal herbs (not OMMP) and staple crops such as legumes and grains. In the recent past, we were urban farmers in Portland, growing produce for our CSAs in little yards and empty lots while experimenting with staple crops on larger suburban and exurban plots.

Among us, we have over ten years of farming experience, a botany degree, and work in the restoration field, as well as above-average intelligence, impressive resourcefulness and a dawn-to-dusk work ethic rarely seen anymore these days in the U.S. (at least among white people). We are not trying to get $-rich, but we are not idealistic money-haters. Until the seed-and-feed, gas station, and hardware stores take barter, we need the cash...We are farming on land that was formerly used for grass-seed production, and has been hammered with chemicals and big machines for decades. Over 50% of the cropland in the Willamette Valley is planted in grass-seed, so the lessons we are learning are potentially valuable for future farmers who will be attempting the same in this area. But the issues we are facing — lack of soil fertility, residual chemical effects, out-of-balance insect populations — will be found across the nation for anyone trying to farm on land that was conventionally abused."

"The short and often unsatisfying answer to this questions is to focus on soil health, which in turn will give stronger healthier plants, which are in turn less attractive to pests and less susceptible to their damage.
While this is generally the truth, it does turn out that this is rarely achieved purely and there are a few simple practices that will augment the healthy soil, healthy plants approach, especially where we’re trying to push the limits of what can be grown in our particular micro climates.
I don’t think a lot about pests in the relative sense of worries on the farm or especially in my garden, but if I’m honest with myself there are a few pests that I deal with consistently and I’ll talk about those here, with more general approaches below."

"In June of 2010 I moved to a place in Montana with only electric heat. By myself. In the past few winters I had conducted experiments in cutting the amount of energy I needed to stay warm, with a focus on heating myself instead of heating the whole house."

Lots of great info on potatoes. "Potatoes are the standard. I view grains as honorary potatoes. Potatoes and grains are comparable as sources of protein. A boiling type of potato, for example, with 2.1 grams of protein per 100 grams fresh weight, has 10.4% protein per unit dry weight. Brown rice with 7.5% protein in the bin, has 9.6% protein per unit dry weight. (Many people don’t realize potatoes are a high-protein food because they are used to seeing numbers that compare the levels of protein in wet potatoes with those of dry grain.) Pasta varieties of wheat have protein amounts comparable to those of rice and potatoes. Bread varieties of wheat have higher protein contents. But grain protein is low in the essential amino acid lysine, so is not as usable to fill our protein (actually essential amino acid) needs as is the same amount of potato protein. In addition, we don’t absorb wheat proteins as well as those of rice or potatoes. Taking these factors into account, the potato is about as good a source of protein as the higher-protein grains, and is superior to lower-protein grains such as rice or standard commercial hybrid corn. Of annual crops, only beans are better sources of protein."

Top rated edible plants (mostly rare or underused), at Plants for a Future.

"Use Plant Information Online to discover sources in 1074 North American nurseries for 104779 plants, find 357757 citations to 161488 plants in science and garden literature, link to selected websites for images and regional information about 19131 plants, and access information on 2631 North American seed and nursery firms. Plant Information Online is a free service of the University of Minnesota Libraries."

"The world record attempt all started in 19th August 2001 when I decided I wanted to break the world record for the greatest number of plant varieties in a salad with plants grown in our garden." Their garden is in Norway.

Some really cool NW-adapted seeds for sale here.

"When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life...What strikes one most vividly about such a campaign is precisely its remoteness from the actual life of the country. The figures are well known, and suggest a national indifference usually construed, by those inside the process, as ignorance, or “apathy,” in any case a defect not in themselves but in the clay they have been given to mold."

"It is the objective of this paper to outline briefly the history of this critique of usury, to examine reasons for its repeated denouncement and, finally, to intuitively assess the relevance of these arguments to today’s predominantly interest-based global economy...The fact that we live in a global economic system which is more usurious/interest-based than ever before begs the question, therefore: Are any of these criticisms of the past either serious and convincing enough or currently relevant enough to merit a legitimate challenge to the status quo? In the authors’ opinon, every one of the reasons cited in the critique of usury, perhaps with the exception of “double billing”, seems more pressing and relevant now than ever. In particular, it is the belief of the authors’ that individuals or organisations in the West with money to invest, especially those which like to consider themselves as being ethical, might have rather more to learn from Islam than is generally acknowledged. But first, society needs to be re-conscientised to the relevance of the age-old usury debate in modern times."

Lots of great historical texts on organic farming, etc.

"Current philanthropic practice is also driven by the need to find technological solutions, the same “fix-the-problem” mentality that allowed business people to succeed as hedge-fund managers, capital-market investors, or software-developers. This approach is designed to yield measurable and fairly quick solutions. A symptom of this may be found in the kind of skills that new foundations are seeking. I am struck by how few social scientists are employed at the new “mega-philanthropies.” Instead, the people most sought after are management consultants, business people, former industry leaders or lobbyists, and scientists. Each of these is expected to bring a crisp and coolly efficient approach to their work, demonstrating their “expertise” on specific issues—climate change, agricultural productivity, soil quality, or infectious disease. The nuance and inherent humility of the social sciences—the realization that development has to do with people, with human and social complexity, with cultural and traditional realities, and their willingness to struggle with the messy and multifaceted aspects of a problem—have no cachet in this metrics-driven, efficiency-seeking, technology-focused approach to social change."

"I actually have to hand it to him for coming right out and making the “wage labor is good for you” argument, which is a much tougher sell than the usual “we need wage labor or nobody will do any work” argument, and hence is typically delivered in an elided and concealed fashion. But the notion of “authentic” work that’s being deployed here is one I have a hard time wrapping my head around, although I recognize it as a central element of right-wing metaphysics.
It’s easy to glorify the dignity of wage labor when you have a stimulating job at the National Review, but this line of argument rapidly loses its plausibility when you get to the low-wage jobs I was talking about. A lousy supermarket job that you only have because your time is valued at less than the time of an automatic checkout machine is somehow more authentic because someone “voluntarily” paid for it...And as a friend put it to me earlier today: “As if the unemployed are unfamiliar with natural and authentic obstacles”. But look, if you do need some “obstacles that arise naturally and authentically in your path”, try training for a marathon or something. Or I can recommend some excellent video games."

On liberal evangelicals. "Here’s what I wish I’d had the presence of mind to say to the people at Wild Goose this summer: You speak of poverty as if it is something “outside,” something “other.” It is never “us.” “We” are upwardly mobile, well-educated people who grew up in the suburbs.
You insist on praying for people like me, but you haven’t the slightest idea that I walk among you. I have conversations with you. I hold my own in arguments. I call you out on your bullshit. I am unlucky, but I don’t think “downtrodden” describes me very well. I’m not downtrodden. I’m pissed off. So, no, I do not want your prayers. I do not want an invitation to your church, and I’m not interested in discussing “the poor” as if they are some kind of abstract concept. The things you had to say—the things you’ve built your careers on—are irrelevant in the face of actual poverty."

"What I want Paul detractors to confront is that he alone, among viable candidates, favors reforming certain atrocious policies, including policies that explicitly target ethnic and religious minorities. And that, appalling as it is, every candidate in 2012 who has polled above 10 percent is complicit in some heinous policy or action or association. Paul's association with racist newsletters is a serious moral failing, and even so, it doesn't save us from making a fraught moral judgment about whether or not to support his candidacy, even if we're judging by the single metric of protecting racial or ethnic minority groups, because when it comes to America's most racist or racially fraught policies, Paul is arguably on the right side of all of them.
His opponents are often on the wrong side, at least if you're someone who thinks that it's wrong to lock people up without due process or kill them in drone strikes or destabilize their countries by forcing a war on drug cartels even as American consumers ensure the strength of those cartels."

"I think then about a recent post written by a colleague at Democracy in America, who ruminates on the world's failure to address climate change and says:

"Maybe a hundred years down the line, nobody will look back at climate change as the most important issue of the early 21st century, because the damage will have been done, and the idea that it might have been prevented will seem absurd. Maybe the idea that Mali and Burkina Faso were once inhabited countries rather than empty deserts will seem queer, and the immiseration of huge numbers of stateless refugees thronging against the borders of the rich northern countries will be taken for granted. The absence of the polar ice cap and the submersion of Venice will have been normalised; nobody will think of these as live issues, no one will spend their time reproaching their forefathers, there'll be no moral dimension at all. We will have wrecked the planet, but our great-grandchildren won't care much, because they'll have been born into a planet already wrecked."

My colleague presents this as a depressing possibility, and indeed it would seem to be so. But turn again to those living 100 or 500 years ago. How would they have viewed civilisation today? Think of all the animals, languages, and societies that have since gone extinct. Modern lives might seem like a vision of hell. The coastal, urban corridor along which I live now is horribly changed from its condition a century ago. Those of us who live along it spend the vast majority of our time indoors and only rarely glimpse anything that could honestly be called nature. The food we eat is highly processed and often unidentifiable as one plant or animal versus another. Many of us rarely see many of our close friends and family, and communicate with them only through the tinny interfaces of our electronic devices. "Some life!", a resident of the past might conclude. Yet how many of us would switch places with those who lived centuries ago? A century from now, much more of the world will likely have been despoiled. Humans might live in underground bunkers eating lab-grown meat. But who's to say they won't prefer their lot to ours?"

"The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting. Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported.
“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” said Nevle.
Tying together many different lines of evidence, Nevle estimated how much carbon all those new trees would have consumed. He says it was enough to account for most or all of the sudden drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice during the 16th and 17th centuries. Such a depletion of a key greenhouse gas may have helped augment Europe’s so-called Little Ice Age, centuries of cooler temperatures that followed the Middle Ages, Nevle's team has argued."

"NPR just ran a story called “Unpaid Bills Land Some Debtors Behind Bars.” As they report, ”Here’s how it happens: A company will often sell off its debt to a collection agency, generally called a creditor. That creditor files a lawsuit against the debtor requiring a court appearance. A notice to appear in court is supposed to be given to the debtor. If they fail to show up, a warrant is issued for their arrest.” Marie Diamond has more.
This is increasingly common across the country...
Debtors who run into the law often don’t understand the process; since the debt has often been resold multiple times, they may not even recognize the names of the plaintiffs. It is also problematic that debtors who don’t show up for the summons are likely to be confused as to what they are being jailed for. They may think they are being jailed for nonpayment when they are actually being jailed for the failure to show up and not telling the court and creditors about their assets. It is in the interest of creditors to blur this distinction. Though debtors can often get out of jail by compliance, they may feel they need to pay off debts immediately to get out of jail instead. Debtors will be willing to make costly financial decisions, including using money that is legally protected from debt collectors, to get out of jail immediately."

"The higher education system is currently set up so that a limited number of mostly long-established colleges and universities have an exclusive franchise on the ability to mint academic currency (credit) that can be redeemed for valuable credentials. The tens of billions of dollars currently made available by the government to subsidize higher education can only be spent at those institutions and only for credit-bearing courses. If you walk up to an employer or graduate school with a diploma or official note (transcript) certifying your credit accumulation, it gets treated like currency. Not quite as good as specie issues by the U.S. Treasury (colleges prefer you buy your credits from them, not someone else), but the underlying assumption is that your credits are probably good, particularly if they come from a regionally accredited institution.
Whereas if you walk in with a piece of paper or an email from Sebastian Thrun saying ”the bearer has completed the following course of study in artificial intelligence and has passed the following assessments resulting in X class rank,” people wouldn’t really know what to do with that. The underlying assumption is that you can’t transfer it to another college or redeem it for a credential or otherwise do any of the things with it that college credits are good for.
If you stop and think about that for just a minute, you’ll realize it doesn’t make any sense."

"The problem was that the telephone system was centralized. You had a hierarchical switching system. It was a five-level hierarchy. You had switching centers. It was all analog transmission in those days, and you couldn't go through more than five links before the quality was unacceptable.
So you had the realization that the phone system couldn't be trusted. And the fallback, which was high-frequency radio, couldn't be trusted in a nuclear environment. So a distributed network of ground-wave transmission was one direction of solution. I tried to figure out how much communications we needed and went around to different command centers and asked them what they needed. You could just pick up and go and do all these things. Now there would be a lot of red tape. Back then Rand had a blanket "need to know," so I had no problem on that.
I figured there was no limit on the amount of communications that people thought they needed. So I figured I'd give them so much communications they wouldn't know what the hell to do with it. Then that became the work - to build something with sufficient bandwidth so that there'd be no shortage of communications. The question was, how the hell do you build a network of very high bandwidth for the future? The first realization was that it had to be digital, because we couldn't go through the limited number of analog links...If you were going to build a network with redundancy, that tells you right there how many paths you need. There's no choice. At the same time, you don't have to use high-priced stuff anymore. Because in the analog days both ends of the connection had to work in tandem, and the probability of many things working in tandem without failing was so low that you had to make every part nearly perfect. But if you don't care about reliability any more, then the cost of the components goes way down."

"I have not seen anyone make the argument that a relocalized food system is “just as efficient as” industrial agriculture. The problem is that “just as efficient as” line – efficient for what? No one expects a thousand small farms in a thousand different parts of the world to produce the same amount of the same crop with the same inputs and distribute it to the same people as a monoculture a thousand times as big.
High crop yields from large monocultures of single, GMO crops designed for high yield also degrade soil, cause erosion, contribute to deforestation, require plenty of synthetic inputs, and pollute the watershed. This is only an efficient system if you are looking at one output – the crop you have focused on."

"The fact is that if homeowners act rationally with regard to their mortgages, the housing market becomes unpleasantly volatile. The New York Fed recently put out a compelling piece of research saying that both the sharp rise in house prices and the subsequent sharp fall can in large part be attributed to speculative buyers — the small minority of people who do act rationally and are perfectly willing to overpay in bull markets and walk away in bear markets. What Surowiecki is encouraging, here, is that the rest of us start to behave much as the speculators did when house prices fall.
Historically, homeowners haven’t behaved that way, and not just because they’ve been guilt-tripped into paying their debts. Rather, they’ve done what bank lenders used to do in the good old days: hold their assets at par, rather than marking them to market...Let’s say that you’re significantly underwater on your mortgage and you don’t have much in the way of savings. Does it then make sense to say that you’re insolvent? Historically, homeowners never thought that way — the mortgage was a monthly payment they made to stay in their home, and their home was a place to live rather than a financial asset.
If we move to a world where houses do become financial assets, that might be a good thing. But let’s be honest about what such a move entails: a large decrease in homeownership. It’s not sensible, on a financial level, to have so much of your net worth tied up in one illiquid asset."

"It's often "only the beginning" with Gingrich, because its always the beginning. Before you even have time to fundamentally transform your bureaucrats into efficient Lean Sigma Six machines you're suddenly forced to abandon that plan so you can build a successful New Deal-style employment agency in a war zone... and meanwhile on the home front/battleground, the War on Terror would suddenly require transforming our understating of the Bill of Rights."

"1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier...
Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice.
They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."

"How, then, did OWS embody anarchist principles? It might be helpful to go over this point by point:
1) The refusal to recognise the legitimacy of existing political institutions.
One reason for the much-discussed refusal to issue demands is because issuing demands means recognising the legitimacy - or at least, the power - of those of whom the demands are made. Anarchists often note that this is the difference between protest and direct action: Protest, however militant, is an appeal to the authorities to behave differently; direct action, whether it's a matter of a community building a well or making salt in defiance of the law (Gandhi's example again), trying to shut down a meeting or occupy a factory, is a matter of acting as if the existing structure of power does not even exist. Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.
2) The refusal to accept the legitimacy of the existing legal order.
The second principle, obviously, follows from the first. From the very beginning, when we first started holding planning meetings in Tompkins Square Park in New York, organisers knowingly ignored local ordinances that insisted that any gathering of more than 12 people in a public park is illegal without police permission - simply on the grounds that such laws should not exist. On the same grounds, of course, we chose to occupy a park, inspired by examples from the Middle East and southern Europe, on the grounds that, as the public, we should not need permission to occupy public space. This might have been a very minor form of civil disobedience but it was crucial that we began with a commitment to answer only to a moral order, not a legal one.
3) The refusal to create an internal hierarchy, but instead to create a form of consensus-based direct democracy.
From the very beginning, too, organisers made the audacious decision to operate not only by direct democracy, without leaders, but by consensus. The first decision ensured that there would be no formal leadership structure that could be co-opted or coerced; the second, that no majority could bend a minority to its will, but that all crucial decisions had to be made by general consent. American anarchists have long considered consensus process (a tradition that has emerged from a confluence of feminism, anarchism and spiritual traditions like the Quakers) crucial for the reason that it is the only form of decision-making that could operate without coercive enforcement - since if a majority does not have the means to compel a minority to obey its dictates, all decisions will, of necessity, have to be made by general consent..."

"Do-something punditry means almost never considering the possible benefits of getting the government out of the way of a given issue, since that would be “ideological” and require walking away from the world’s largest problem-solving tool. Pragmatism also means never having to say you’re sorry about the unintended consequences of well-meaning legislation, the capture by industrialists of the regulators who were supposed to constrain them, or even the basic failure of government action to produce the promised results. By the time such flaws make front-page news, there is always a new crisis requiring urgent intervention. And if all else fails, you can blame it on the competence of the government that followed your advice.
Pragmatic problem solvers (including the vast majority of the nation’s newspaper editorial boards) were foursquare behind the invasion of Iraq. And if detail-free simplicity is inadequate to the current task of economic recovery, it was downright frightening in the service of banging the drums for a major war. "

"Once, in college, a teacher asked my class if anyone could name a film that lacked a three-act structure. Naively, I suggested My Dinner with Andre, only to have my suggestion, so smugly chosen, systematically dismantled by the professor. Yet my foolishness disclosed a worthwhile insight: perhaps the film's greatest piece of artfulness is its ability to cloak that very artfulness in a Columbo-like guise of simplicity. A basic three-act breakdown of the film could, for example, read like this:
ACT 1 (The Problem): Where Wally must face a dinner with a strange and possibly unhinged man.
ACT 2 (The Clues): Where Andre, contrary to expectations, is shown to be an inspiring man-of-action, and Wally, exactly according to expectations, is shown to be a timid intellectual.
ACT 3 (The Twist): Where Andre reveals himself to be more close-minded and inhibited than we first thought, and Wally reveals himself to be more wise and brave...
Depending on your perspective, not to mention what part of the film you're in, Andre can appear, by turns, lost, enlightened, crazy, rational, calculating, naïve, and admirably candid, while Wally can seem dour, frenzied, bitter, optimistic, pragmatic, and determinedly bourgeois. Yet there is nothing particularly incongruous in this. Who doesn't present different sides of themselves to the world? None of us are monochromatic in nature, as any good actor or screenwriter knows; we are all varying shades, tints, and hues."

"Over the last couple of months, Occupy had gone beyond a reliance on a specific place like Zuccotti. It developed a recipe for how to set up a temporary autonomous zone (what's often called a TAZ).
What is a TAZ? A location that is outside of the control of the nation-state and global marketplace...This is a formula of protest and community that will outlast Occupy."

"It was no great surprise when the highways seceded.
A decade of inadequate funding, a Federal system collapsed in all but name, and a growing trend towards autonomy by the megacities left a vacuum in transportation policy that demanded to be filled. Public funding gave way to tolls which gave way to privatization which gave way to a network of roadways with little loyalty to the faded Union and a vested interest in maintaining the exclusive safety of their limited territories...To attempt to draw a political map of the reconstituted North America is to confront these contradictions head-on. What counts as a nation? How to capture the overlapping spheres of responsibility? What about the areas all but abandoned to wilderness? Does membership confer citizen-hood?"

What your favorite map projection says about you: "Goode Homolosine: They say mapping the Earth on a 2D surface is like flattening an orange peel, which seems easy enough to you. You like easy solutions. You think we wouldn't have so many problems if we'd just elect normal people to Congress instead of politicians. You think airlines should just buy food from the restaurants near the gates and serve that on board. You change your car's oil, but secretly wonder if you really need to."

"Meditating is like taking a shit; though it’s natural, you may have to train yourself to get the urge. Meditation is like taking a shit; people who like to talk about how they do it all the time are often annoying to others. Meditation is like taking a shit; some people like to light incense while they do it."

Always enjoy this article each year.
1) India building up its military significantly, particularly sea power
2) Eastern European countries postponing joining the eurozone
3) Mexican drug violence spreading to Central America
4) Significant decreases in camel herds worldwide, particularly in the Middle East
5) All-time highs in US deportations
6) Separatist war in Pakistan's Baluchistan province
7) Increased piracy in West Africa, and elsewhere
8) A 12-day war in February between Cambodia and Thailand over disputed territory
9) Failures in efforts to secure the world's nuclear material
10) Anti-democratic developments in Rwanda

"Until now, the precise source of the now-ubiquitous sour cream has always been elusive. While butter and cheese are ancient and mentioned frequently back to the beginnings of the written word, sour cream (smetana in Russian, Ukrainian, Swedish and Finnish, pavlaka in Bosnian, schmetten in German, tejföl in Hungarian, shtalpë in Albanian, grietinė in Lithuanian, and crème fraiche in French, amongst many others) has no such pedigree. Similar substances have been consumed in the East since antiquity (Pliny describes a Middle Eastern sour milk preparation he calls oxygala in the first century), but there is no evidence of its popularity in the west...One thing that struck me about common versions of smetana is how similar they are to a popular American salad dressing...Ranch dressing contains scallions, garlic, onion, herbs, mayonnaise (or salsa mahonesa, as we prefer) and buttermilk. Buttermilk gets its name from being the liquid left behind after cultured butter is made, but in the post-pasteurization world, it’s milk that has been seeded with lactic acid bacteria to create a certain acidic tartness (essentially cow-milk kumis stopped short of the alcoholic fermentation stage). You see, Henson knew that even if you weren’t worried that your dressing was filched from the “focus of evil in the modern world” (Reagan), American sour cream is a little too tart and a little too thick for a dressing. What worked great with smetana just wasn’t going to work with off the shelf sour cream in the U.S.
Now, credit where credit is due, Henson’s solution was a little bit brilliant: add two locally available products —mayonnaise and buttermilk — that serve both to approximate the original, and disguise the origins of your concoction. With mayo you have your creamy, fat-laden base, and buttermilk thins it and, crucially, adds the lactic acid that keeps the dressing from tasting insipid. Even when commercialized, the packets called for both mayo and buttermilk — though Clorox, knowing that buttermilk wasn’t sufficiently common in refrigerators, eventually developed a version that had the acidity built in."

Interesting look at kombucha culture in the US in the early 90's. "Soon I found myself sitting in a board room of a pharmaceutical company with lawyers and contracts discussing the particulars of patents, sub-licensing agreements, market territories, and dollars running into the millions—if FDA approval was granted for a novel drug. As a whole, the group was, you might say, "straight-laced", conservative, and exceedingly better dressed than I was.
The time had come to lay the cards on the table—the time for full disclosure. I asked them about the results of their tests. "Very interesting" they started. "Our tests show that this thing produces what could be a novel antibiotic, effective against methicillin-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus " (The common bacterium responsible for " Staph " infections. Due to the wide use of antibiotics, strains of S. aureus had evolved resistance to many antibiotics.)
The company's benchmark test was designed to discover new antibiotics in the race between science and bacteria's ability to evolve. Their tests did not type the antibiotic produced by the Blob. Later studies, termed "dereplication trials" would serve to match the Blob's antibiotic with those already patented. It may be novel. It may not. If novel, patents could be pursued. To this end, they were willing to spend $50,000-$100,000 immediately on more tests.
Now it was our turn. They asked "What is it?" A long silence ensued. I hated telling them what little I knew. This was not my forte—mushrooms were. I secretly wished one of our mushroom strains would have garnished this much enthusiasm. I was noticeably uncomfortable.
I told them that, as best as we had been able to determine, from analyses by several independent mycologists, that the Blob was a polyculture of at least two yeasts and two bacteria, living synergistically.
The silence was deafening."

"System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, "Systeme D." This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy...Today, System D is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world -- close to 1.8 billion people -- were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes."

"Once upon a time, a long time ago, a Zulu man stepped up to a microphone and improvised a melody that earned in the region of $15 million. That Solomon Linda got almost none of it was probably inevitable. He was a black man in white-ruled South Africa, but his American peers fared little better. Robert Johnson's contribution to the blues went largely unrewarded. Leadbelly lost half of his publishing to his white "patrons." DJ Alan Freed refused to play Chuck Berry's "Maybellene" until he was given a songwriter's cut. Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" was nicked off Willie Dixon. All musicians were minnows in the pop-music food chain, but blacks were most vulnerable, and Solomon Linda, an illiterate tribesman from a wild valley where lions roamed, was totally defenseless against sophisticated predators.
Which is not to say that he was cheated. On the contrary, all the deals were perfectly legal, drawn up by respectable men. No one forced him to sell "Mbube" to Eric Gallo for ten shillings, and if Gallo turned around and traded it at a profit, so what? It belonged to him. The good old boys of TRO were perfectly entitled to rename the song, adapt it as they pleased and allocate the royalties to nonexistent entities. After all, they were its sole and uncontested owners. Linda was legally entitled to nothing. The fact that he got anything at all seemed to show that the bosses were not without conscience or pity.
So I sat down and wrote long letters to George Weiss and Larry Richmond, distancing myself from pious moralists who might see them as sharks and even suggesting a line of reasoning they might take. "The only thing worse than exploitation," I mused, "is not being exploited at all". And then I enumerated all the good things old Solomon gained from making up the most famous melody that ever emerged from Africa: ten shillings, a big reputation, adulation and lionization; several cool suits, a wind-up gramophone, a check from Pete Seeger and a trickle of royalties that had spared his daughters from absolute penury. "All told", I concluded, "there is a case to be made against the idea that Solomon Linda was a victim of injustice".
I sat back and waited for someone to make it. I waited in vain."

"The real mystery of Fleetwood Mac Live is why the group would allow the release of a document that preserves such moments for perpetuity, capturing what was evidently a difficult tour for the group. Given the relatively disappointing sales of Tusk, especially in reference to its budget, it’s likely that Fleetwood Mac Live was assembled as a sop to the label, a quick, cheap release to make some money from the franchise.
It’s a strange album, and, especially, a strange live album...Why so exacting a studio maven as Buckingham would allow these substandard tracks space on Fleetwood Mac Live is a mystery suggesting indifference or perhaps even self-sabotage on the band’s part.
Or perhaps it was their intention all along for Fleetwood Mac Live to offer up an unforgiving portrait of where the group were at on the Tusk tour, warts and all. The album sleeve bears a soft-focus black and white shot of the band onstage, taking their bows at the close of a show. The reportage photos from the tour contained within the gatefold capture Stevie all draped in flowing dresses and playing up to her hippy witch persona, Lindsey kohl-eyed and lean, screaming and pressing his head into John McVie’s chest during one mid-song crescendo, Christine peering shyly over her accordion. Bottom left, Mick Fleetwood is captured in three frames, slobbering and mad-eyed behind the kit, looking frankly deranged, and perhaps rabid. Across the centre of the gatefold are individual close-ups of the group looking glamorous but roadworn (or roadworn but glamorous), a bearded, sweaty, dead-eyed Mick looking like a junkie rabbi, while Lindsey stares on, pin-eyed and intense. The vibe of these candid snaps is edgy, suggesting just how unhinged a circus a Fleetwood Mac tour might be."

"I live in a multigenerational household. We have three generations under one roof. While I personally think it's great, it's also an extremely resilient way to live...We have a deep bench of skills/emotional support. We can pool our skills/training/knowledge (there is a lot of medical, mechanical, and military knowledge in our home) to solve problems. We can share chores. We also work together to resolve emotional problems/spats. In a big household there always seems to be someone that is neutral and can arbitrate."

"Men! They have actually made some music this year! Unlike all those other years! In fact, I might even suggest that 2011 might indeed be called The Year Of The Man in rock music, because I have found not one, but THREE examples of records, made by men, that I might want to include in my top ten...And I have now adequately covered the ENTIRE spectrum of Men In Music so thoroughly that I can go back to covering only women for the next 51 weeks of the year - next week, we'll be putting Kate Bush on the cover for the third time this year, not because she has a record out, but just because SHE. IS. AWESOME. Also, you know, it's just... my blog's stats just do so poorly whenever I put a man on the cover - see, it's not me refusing to cover men, it's just the demographic target market of my ~audience~ just can't handle being exposed to them.
So there you have it. Remember. Men In Rock. It might just be the future."

"People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different."

"The question this should raise: how do a very, very small group of neo-feudal plutocrats control a global population (of economic losers) in the modern context?
Right now? Lawfare and the bureaucracy of the nation-state. As things continue to degrade, that veneer of legality and constraint will fade and become less effective.
Long term? Bots. Software bots. Drones. My good friend Daniel Suarez did a great job of demonstrating how this works in his books Daemon and Freedom.
In short, bots will increasingly allow a VERY small group of people (in our case, a small group of plutocrats that act as the world's economic central planners) to amplify their power/dominance in a the physical world to a degree never seen before."
Also http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/11/2016-bloomberg-vs-occupy-wall-street-ows-openprotest.html

"Ford's The Trouble with City Planning: What New Orleans Can Teach Us (Yale, £18.00) is a detailed and insightful analysis of what went wrong and a blueprint for how city planning can be improved in all cities. Cities are constantly changing and the way land is used impacts the lives of every city dweller. In post-Katrina New Orleans there was a “blizzard of planning”. There were at least five different plans in all, but the process was chaotic and the results largely ignored by the city’s elected leaders. They also failed to address the thorny historical issue of why people (largely poor African Americans) were living in areas – such as the Lower Ninth Ward – which were vulnerable to flooding. As Ford says, “any street that appeared on a map of New Orleans drawn in the nineteenth century…probably did not flood”. Planning decisions made in the early twentieth century placed too faith in the power of technology to protect new residential areas. And importantly no attempt was made in the post-Katrina pans to explore, let alone explain, these decisions."

"In his analysis of the repressive hypothesis, Foucault calls to question the given that the nineteenth-century was characterized by widespread sexual repression, that sex was the great “secret” or “taboo,” the “truth” of which could only be spoken through the liberation of the twentieth century...Basically, there is a jolt of pleasure in transgressing by speaking the unspeakable. If we think sex – or fucking, I suppose – is the ultimate unspeakable thing, then when we “speak” it, we think that we have “power” while those before us didn’t. We are “liberated” rather than “repressed.” For Foucault, of course, this is a total mystification of how power actually works. There is no outside of power.
In the current discourse surrounding higher education, I think that “failure” is the new “fucking.” If we practitioners of higher education, or pundits, or columnists, or whatever, speak the “truth” of how higher education is failing, then we get that jolt of pleasure in transgressing what we have construed as a norm. “The children are not the future!” we say. “There is no future! Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket!” And then we get to take self-satisfied pleasure in how we are subjects who know, while everybody else is “naive.” Even if we present a more complicated or nuanced argument, if we start with the premise of failure – just as if we start with the premise of repression when discussing sex and sexuality – we are buying into a mystification."

"To expand on Jaffe’s article, there’s two large, interesting problems with debt strikes, student loan strikes in particular, that I’d like your opinions on. The first has to do with the opponent’s enforcers...Let’s say, instead of the butt-end of a rifle in your nose, if you fought management the Pinkerton Boys could walk – wait, walk isn’t the right word, teleport instantaneously – to every potential source of credit you could get and tell them to lock down. Then they go to every single employer in the country, and flag you as someone they shouldn’t hire. Then let’s say they could teleport to every insurance company in the company and tell them to start charging you and other strikers more money. And, why not, they zoom over to every utility company in the country, and get them to start demanding deposits and higher rates for things like gas and electricity in the homes of those who are trying to strike.
The Pinkerton Agency couldn’t do that, but the algorithms floating behind the credit reporting agencies can. And credit reports are one of the things that debt strikers would have to face down in order to make these strikes work...
There’s something important to realize about the other side in a student debt strikes, and it’s the flip of the advantages of the State for social democrats. Social democrats like the State to provide certain goods because it has powers and abilities that the private market doesn’t. Take single-payer health insurance. When it comes to providing health care the social democratic government has compulsion (everyone has to get health care and pay for it out of taxes), an indefinite timeframe (those who pay in early will be certain it’ll be there when they are old), no cut-throat profit motive (so costs can be contained, patentable information shared, pre-existing conditions ignored and health care universalized).
Interestingly, those same abilities are put into play in the nightmare scenario where the State is acting as the ultimate debt collector instead of the legal framework where debts are managed, as it does for student loans. It gets to have compulsion (loans will be repaid out of whatever income the State can see), an indefinite timeframe (it can wait out any group of debtors), no profit motive (so it has little incentive to apply cost-benefit analysis to secure whatever someone could pay), and the ability to write laws (it writes itself out of bankruptcy and give itself the ability to take from old age pensions)."

"The parallels between Wodehouse and Hergé are striking. Both clung as adults to a childish ideology: scoutisme for Hergé, the English public-school “play the game” code for Wodehouse. Both created a series of great prewar comic characters frozen in time. For over 50 years Wodehouse wrote Jeeves and Wooster stories and Hergé wrote Tintins, yet neither man’s characters ever developed...
Yet neither author was very interested in politics. That made both men easy targets for Nazi PR stunts. The Germans didn’t need Wodehouse or Hergé to write propaganda. Lending some childish cheer to Nazi rule was enough. Both men were collaborators, but they weren’t fascists.
Hergé suffered depressions for years after the war. In the early 1950s he worked through his own wartime experiences in Tintin books. In The Calculus Affair and the two Moon books, evil powers are trying to steal Calculus’s inventions. Hergé seems to be identifying with the unworldly genius exploited by criminals. Also in the Moon stories, Calculus’s assistant Frank Wolff is a traitor who almost manages to leave Tintin and friends stranded on the moon. But Wolff isn’t a bad man, and finally saves the others by jumping into space. And so the Nazis shaped the postwar Tintin stories just as they had shaped the prewar and wartime ones."

"It seems to me that there are two basic views of debt:
Modern View. If the economy is expected to keep growing indefinitely, debt is viewed as helpful–something that will allow consumers to buy goods, and pay for them over the life of the goods and will allow businesses to build new facilities, and pay for them over the lives of the facilities. The existence of debt products also facilitates pension plans, since bonds are often used to fund pension plan. The Modern View also permits governments to offer “Social Security” plans to citizens, since the expectation is that the future will be at least as good as it is today.
Traditional View. If people believe that life is a roller coaster, with some good years, and some bad years, but no clear upward trend, then debt plays a more limited role. The expectation is that citizens will set aside funds in the good years, so that they will be able to take care of themselves in the bad years. If new businesses are formed, accumulated savings rather than debt will tend to be the major source of funding. Debt will still be used to a limited extent, for example, by governments to finance wars; by businesses to cover goods in transit; and by families who truly hit hard times. But citizens and businesses will generally be wary of debt, because of the frequency of debt defaults...
I expect that the world will need to develop an entirely new financial system to fix the 65-year debt bubble. Our current debt-based approach simply is not workable without long-term growth. But making such a transition will very difficult–perhaps impossible."

"The Microbial Home is viewed as a cyclical biological machine where wastes like sewage, effluent, garbage, wastewater are filtered, processed and recycled to be used as inputs for the various home functions. The project includes various aspects like a Bio Digester Island and Larder in the kitchen, Urban Beehive, Bio-light, Apothecary, Filtering Squatting Toilet and Paternoster Plastic Waste Up-cycler."

"I would describe the aerotropolis as any city that has a closer relationship to the air, and to other cities accessible through the air, than to its immediate hinterlands. It’s a city that was basically invented because of the necessities of air travel...But the idea now is: if you’re building a city from scratch in the middle of China or India, then you’re building it around an airport. The airport is the city’s economic reason for being. You’re trying to connect to a global economy, starting from zero.
Dubai is interesting in that regard. Nobody really understood what Dubai was about, or what they were trying to do there, but its plans make sense if you look at it from the perspective that there’s this theoretical population all dispersed across the Middle East and southeast Asia, and they’re all flying in to use the city in bits at a time. The notion of the aerotropolis, then, is basically that air travel is what globalization looks like in urban form. It is about flows of people and goods and capital, and it implies that to be connected to a city on the far side of the world matters more than to be connected to your immediate region."

"The most important thing to realize about the space shuttle program is that it is objectively a failure. The shuttle was billed as a reusable craft that could frequently, safely, and cheaply bring people and payloads to low Earth orbit. NASA originally said the shuttles could handle 65 launches per year; the most launches it actually did in a year was nine; over the life of the program, it averaged five per year. NASA predicted each shuttle launch would cost $50 million; they actually averaged $450 million. NASA administrators said the risk of catastrophic failure was around one in 100,000; NASA engineers put the number closer to one in a hundred; a more recent report from NASA said the risk on early flights was one in nine. The failure rate was two out of 135 in the tests that matter most...
The lead-up to the last shuttle flight provoked a great outpouring of misplaced nostalgia, awe, admiration, and trepidation. Space aficionados are particularly upset that the U.S. now has no way to put people into orbit. (Instead, we’ll have to bum rides on the old, cheap, and dependable Russian Soyuz, which is galling not only because it highlights what a flop the shuttle was, but also because the space program still has an anachronistic whiff of the Cold War about it. Our borrowing the Soyuz is like Rocky asking Ivan Drago for a lift because he backed his Thunderbird into a Dumpster.) While it’s nice to see that people care so much about space and putting humans up into it, they’re missing the fact that we needed to drop the shuttle to make any real progress—the sooner the better. Moreover, these reactions illustrate exactly why we couldn’t cancel the shuttle decades ago, as we should have."

"I read this list of food cures to Manuela Neuman, a Canadian researcher on alcohol-induced liver damage, and she laughed at only one, the six-pack of Coke. Many of the cures probably work, she said, on the same distraction principle as the hair of the dog: “Take the spicy foods, for example. They divert the body’s attention away from coping with the alcohol to coping with the spices, which are also a toxin. So you have new problems—with your stomach, with your esophagus, with your respiration—rather than the problem with the headache, or that you are going to the washroom every five minutes.” The high-fat and high-protein meals operate in the same way, she said. The body turns to the food and forgets about the alcohol for the time being, thus delaying the hangover and possibly alleviating it...A team of scientists attempting to review the literature on hangover cures were able to assemble only fifteen articles, and then they had to throw out all but eight on methodological grounds. There have been more studies in recent years, but historically this is not a subject that has captured scientists’ hearts.
Which is curious, because anyone who discovered a widely effective hangover cure would make a great deal of money."

Describes the universe of potential economic transactions on a x-y axis.
"X-Axis: Relatedness
Relatedness refers to the relationship of the parties to a given exchange. At the summary level, it describes the closeness of the relationship between two parties. The closer the relationship between two parties the more awkward it becomes to engage in highly quantified, thoroughly negotiated transactions. In close relationships it is uncomfortable to be ‘nickel-and-dimed’. Instead, the mutual understanding that relationship will continue into the future allows both parties to operate by an intuitive sense of fairness...
Y-Axis: Refinement
Refinement is the trickier variable. Refinement refers to two characteristics:
-the degree to which a given value proposition can be accurately judged prior to exchange,
-the ease with which that value is extracted by the recipient...greater refinement indicates more effort committed by the producer on behalf of the consumer."
Unrelated/Refined: The Transactional Economy
Related/Refined: The Gift Economy
Unrelated/Unrefined: The Attention Economy
Related/Unrefined: The Relationship Economy

"First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.
Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. There are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might therefore be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is only rendered possible by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.,,
Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.
This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous."

"More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn't exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done exclusively for Food Safety News.
The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled "honey." The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world's food safety agencies...Richard Adee, whose 80,000 hives in multiple states produce 7 million pounds of honey each year, told Food Safety News that "honey has been valued by millions for centuries for its flavor and nutritional value and that is precisely what is completely removed by the ultra-filtration process."
"There is only one reason to ultra-filter honey and there's nothing good about it," he says.
"It's no secret to anyone in the business that the only reason all the pollen is filtered out is to hide where it initially came from and the fact is that in almost all cases, that is China," Adee added."