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November 1. We've all seen the comparisons between Bush's America and Nazi Germany, and they're accurate as far as they go, but here's a great NY Times piece comparing the Bush regime and the French Revolution!
November 3-5. The most important thing to remember about Ron Paul is that he will never be president. It's been speculated that They want him to be president because he's right wing on certain issues, but the system is not right wing, left wing, Christian, libertarian, or even capitalist. It is a collection of interests and habits that has become so bulky and rigid that it cannot stand any deep change. Even its most harmful and wasteful elements, like the "war on drugs," or the holy crusade in Asia, or junk food agricultural subsidies, or the medical insurance industry, now have so many careers and egos depending on them that anyone who threatens to end them will be neutralized by any means necessary. Elections are a show, and sometimes the pale hand of the real rulers reaches onto the stage and yanks someone off, and the audience just sees enough to feel sad and not know why. I don't think they'll have to kill Ron Paul -- my best guess is that they'll Howard Dean him: let him go for a few more months, get everyone to invest their money and hopes in him, and then wait for a minor gaffe and play it over and over on TV.
November 7-8. So the dollar is in free fall, global oil extraction has peaked, and the deflating housing bubble is bringing down half the banking industry. A hundred years from now, they'll file 2007 with 1929. The crash is not close -- we are in the crash. This is what the crash looks like -- not roving gangs storming your house to steal canned food, but gasoline and milk prices rising twenty cents, and another vacant house on your street, and your credit card sending you a few pages of fine print about some new ways they can charge you 29%. The crash looks like trains breaking down and roofs leaking and unemployed people moving in with family and employed people cynically going through the motions. Every day will look almost exactly like the day before, but in a few years you will find yourself eating dandelions and sorting out your pre-1982 pennies to sell the copper.
We fantasize about the Road Warrior crash scenario because it would make life simple and raw -- the winners would have a fun time and the losers would not have to suffer long. In the real crash, you'll still have to go to your job and pay bills and get stuck in traffic, but everything will be a little crummier, a little less predictable. You will see more depressed people and rambling crazies and potholes and buses that never come and long lines and important phone numbers where nobody answers. Your whole city will not be wiped out by a biowar super-plague, but here and there someone you know will die of cancer or MRSA. Even when oil is $200 a barrel, I predict that more people will die of car crashes than starvation.
Of course I could be wrong. It's prudent to prepare for worse than you're expecting, which is why I bought land with drinkable water and planted fruit trees and bought good tools. If you haven't bought land, don't worry -- the land isn't going anywhere... but you might not be buying it exactly. Maybe you'll buy 200 gallons of high fructose corn syrup while it's still subsidized to keep poor people sick, and ferment and distill it into 120 proof alcohol, and trade seven kegs for five acres of clearcut. Or you'll get a job in the "fell off a truck" economy to save money to buy a farm at a foreclosure auction, or you'll know someone who already has land and needs helpers, or you'll squat an abandoned house with a quarter acre lawn, turn it into gardens, and when the owning bank notices you and threatens to call in Blackwater, you'll slip out in the night and do the same thing somewhere else.
Everybody is talking about preparations. Land and tools and stored food won't hurt, and social connections will help, but I really think if you're healthy and adaptable, you can make zero preparations and do better than the most prepared person who is not adaptable. Many doors will close, but if you know how to look, and how to change your ways, you will find the doors that are opening.
November 12. Patricia sends this page on Edward Bernays, the father of corporate propaganda and one of the most harmful people who ever lived. Dan and Randy add that Adam Curtis, the same guy who made "The Power of Nightmares," made a brilliant four part documentary about Freud and Bernays, "The Century of the Self." The whole thing is online: The Century of the Self on YouTube.
November 13. On the list of the scariest places in America to be in the collapse, Phoenix is near the top. Here's a report from a reader who owns a business there:
I've been invited to many a-list parties here. I deal with the paycheck-to-paycheck people as well as multimillionaires. I also have customers and friends who are among the "illegal" immigrants from Latin America. Here is what I am seeing: Working class people, the middle class and even the upper middle class are worried about the future as they never have been before and they are all taking a hit. The immigrants who have established themselves are the most worried, while the mobile immigrants don't care because they will just move to another state or they will go back to their own countries. The incredibly wealthy are having a blast and are enjoying these times. I've had people tell me that they are putting their money into gold, New Zealand dollars and euros, commodities futures and are waiting for the real estate crash to buy up large swaths of property. It's amazing for me to hear people sing the praises of George Bush, but when you are concerned with your own bottom line you will credit the guy in the White House.
It will be sad for me to give up the store at the end of my lease, but the store is no longer justifiable given the astronomical rent and the state of the local economy, which will only get worse. On my 2.5 mile journey from my apartment to my store, there are four abandoned commercial buildings and 16 store fronts for rent. These are businesses that have been around for 40+ years. I am seeing more and more people haggling with me, just browsing, or just not showing up. I can have a better run of this if I operated it from home. For the Christmas season I will announce to my customers that I will trade fresh fruits and vegetables for merchandise to supplement the little vegetable garden in containers on the balcony of my condo.
As businesses are slowing down here people are already making choices to leave. The delivery driver for the flower shop next door told me that she's not worried if she loses her job because she can always return to her reservation and help with the sheep and grow food. In fact, her family would be happy to have her back. A woman and I were discussing this in the store this afternoon -- the housing market, the illegals leaving, etc. -- and she said she is optimistic about the future because the changes she sees are going to be good for everyone. I agree. There will be opportunities for a better life.
November 16. Creepy news: Led by Robots, Roaches Abandon Instincts. From the abstract of the scientific paper:
Even when in the minority, robots can modulate the collective decision-making process and produce a global pattern not observed in their absence. These results demonstrate the possibility of using intelligent autonomous devices to study and control self-organized behavioral patterns in group-living animals.
I was about to say, in a few years they'll be doing it with humans... but they're already doing it with humans, and I don't mean television -- they're doing exactly the same thing with human children, integrating mechanical robots into groups to study and control their behavior. Patricia sends this article from a week ago, Could robots become your toddler's new best friend?
The scariest thing is that cockroaches, over tens of millions of years, have evolved an egalitarian cooperative society, and yet they can still be controlled by shadowy powers without their knowledge. Even if humans, say in a million years, catch up to cockroaches and learn deep resistance to hierarchy, we still have to learn resistance to subtle manipulation of collective decision-making. But Patricia is is oddly optimistic:
As cool as cockroaches are, they are not very high on the individual consciousness scale. I think many humans are quite capable of out-evolving this type of control. If we were not, we'd all be sending large checks to anonymous Nigerian bankers, right? In short, cockroaches lack the ability to assume the worst, to withhold their trust or belief. They are innocents, pre-Fall, in the Edenic eternal now -- until they get squished.
November 17. In the context of a post I decided not to archive, I worked out a good narrow definition of fascism: "A complex society in which repression at home and conquest abroad are taken to extremes by an alliance of government and corporations manipulating citizens with propaganda about an external enemy."
November 20-21. One of the repeating themes of this website is that top-down control is self-defeating, and top-down control with positive feedback is aggressively self-defeating. The elephant in the parlor, the giant control/feedback mechanism that no one sees, is the concept of "owning" something that you don't use. When someone owns something that they don't use, their attention is focused not on how to use it better, but on how to own more. You do it with the stuff in your basement, and banks do it with your life. If you've ever taken out a loan, the bank owned the money that you were using, and you were required to use it in such a way that the bank's realm of ownership increased. You probably live in a place that a bank or landlord owns, and you have to pay mortgage or rent, through which the owner gets richer and is able to own more. Interest and mortgage and rent are simply social customs that say, "Those who have less must give to those who have more, so that power can be concentrated and control can increase" until the whole thing becomes unstable and collapses.
The latest collapse phase has begun. The takers are now so rich, and the givers so poor, that the givers can no longer afford to pay the monthly tribute that our culture requires you to pay to merely occupy space. This appears in the physical world as more and more homeless people and abandoned houses. We have homeless people and abandoned houses because our culture is psychotic. In five or ten years, the situation will become so absurd and desperate that our individual habits of docility and submission will break down, and ordinary people will have a strange and radical thought that was completely obvious to all their ancestors from the first land animal until the first fence: the only person who "owns" a piece of land is the person who is actually occupying it. And since we all occupy land, we are all owners, and therefore we can factor out the whole concept of "owning," and just say, "we live on this land."
Even merging land occupation with land "ownership" does not guarantee that the land will be used respectfully, although it does make it more likely. And if I'm careful with language, we shouldn't "use" land any more than we should use people -- I'm stuck with that word because English does not have a word for an equal relation between people and places/things. Even "stewardship" is patronizing. To make my point as carefully as possible: In a healthy society, the right to occupy a place, or carry an item, is derived from the ability to relate to that place or item as a friend. And someone who is not occupying the place or carrying the item has no right to influence it at all.
November 25-27. In the same way that we can get sexually frustrated, I think industrial civilization is full of people who are technically frustrated. The other day I made a few offhand comments about hauling shipping containers and cutting up girders and finding uses for abandoned steel-framed towers, and I got a small flood of technical advice about biodiesel trucks and DIY oxy-acetylene and pulley systems to raise dirt up buildings. I have no doubt that readers of this site have the knowledge and inventiveness to turn the Sears Tower into a greenhouse with mobile ballistas to fight off invaders, constructed from rails left over from converting railroads into bike paths... or more likely you could all think of even better uses for old railroads and buildings. And yet here we are sitting at computers we didn't make, on chairs and in buildings we didn't make, doing jobs nobody likes to buy food we didn't grow. This is actually good news! As the dominant system breaks down, all this creative energy will be breaking out all over, and it will get harder for the jealous haters of life to crush it.
John comments:
My father was an engineer and I grew up taking radios and TV's apart and building Heathkits. My technical interest guided me all the way through college and into Silicon Valley. I could exercise my mind designing microprocessors and bigger computers. I worked there until I got thoroughly burned out. Since then, I have been having fun pushing the state of the art of vacuum tube audio and radio electronics. I love to strip down old TV sets and military radios for the parts for my projects. I also make a little money consulting for people who still make tube audio equipment.
I've found an outlet, but I find a lot of my engineering friends in the high-tech world quite frustrated. They find (like I did) that 90% of the job is BS and ass-kissing. These are smart, talented people who would love to design and make things, but are stuck in the rat race due to wife, kids, house payments, inertia, whatever. The high-tech industry is a meat grinder that chews up people and spits them out as suicides, alcoholics, mental cases, or hard-ball skeptics. The point is that there are a lot of talented people who would love to do something satisfying with their technical frustration, but since we are becoming de-industrialized, there are no longer opportunities for technical people, and the kids don't know how to make or fix anything, since that doesn't happen here anymore.
I've been traveling a lot in Asia, especially Thailand and Vietnam, and see a whole generation of kids there who are learning to do stuff with basic technology that I don't see kids here even dreaming of. Things like welding, fixing TV sets and computers, programming industrial controllers, and other things that are needed to make the stuff that we buy over here. There is a tremendous talent pool of people in Asia who know how to make and fix things, while here we have a nation of consumers and discarders. I'm building my house and family connections in Vietnam, and plan to be there if things get too ugly here.
November 27. Wonderful article about how, until very recently, Europeans slept all winter.
"Seven months of winter, five months of hell," they said in the Alps. When the "hell" of unremitting toil was over, the human beings settled in with their cows and pigs.
In Burgundy, after the wine harvest, the workers burned the vine stocks, repaired their tools and left the land to the wolves. A civil servant who investigated the region's economic activity in 1844 found that he was almost the only living presence in the landscape: "These vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food."
December 1. There's a lot of buzz about the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act. According to the script, we're supposed to respond, "Unthinkable! Outrage! Constitution! Fight through usual channels! Oh no, usual channels not working! American reality different from American ideal! Protest! Ow, stop hitting me!"
If we respond this way, we are going along with the abuse ritual. To an abuser, there is nothing sexier than when the victim expresses shock and outrage and fights back in a way that's totally ineffective. The next sexiest thing is to grovel in submission, and next after that is total numb defeat. These strategies not only don't work -- they actually feed a demon that inhabits the collective consciousness and many individuals, and they encourage more abuse.
So what can we do about it? As Thaddeus Golas said, "A great deal, if our heads are clear." The common mistakes of abuse victims and political dissidents correspond exactly to the first four of the five stages of grief. It's time to stop fucking around and get to the fifth stage.
America has passed from Republic to Empire, and will not go back. We are living in an authoritarian state in rapid decline. The federal government will pass more and more repressive laws, because that is what declining empires do. By all means, we should pay attention to hostile moves by government and business, the same way you would pay attention to rising floodwaters. You don't get angry at the water. You don't say "the Constitution forbids water getting this high." It is not a good idea to march through the water holding signs demanding that it recede. But you might be able to channel the water to where it will do less harm, or pile up sandbags to protect critical areas, or at least evacuate to higher ground.
Moving from metaphor to reality, we can fight big domination systems with little systems that are still democratic. Your vote for president is now worth less than your vote on Reddit, but you could make a huge difference by starting a group to run a candidate for city council, or to connect responsible squatters with vacant houses, or to fix and give away old bikes, or to turn an abandoned parking lot into a garden.
Another thing we have to understand is that the law is a distraction. The highest and lowest classes already know this in their bones: the only thing that matters is what you can get away with. The police will invade your house if you run a perfectly legal website that scrutinizes the police too closely. But you can flagrantly violate the law by occupying an empty house, raising chickens in your back yard, and providing unlicenced medical care, as long as you maintain good relations with everyone who knows you're doing it.
December 3. I tried and failed to find a really good critique of microwave ovens. Here's one with only a little bit of bad science, Radiation Ovens: The Proven Dangers of Microwaves. It would be better if they just presented the results of the studies, that eating microwaved food damages your body, without trying to explain the mechanism. Sadly, in our mechanistic culture, most people will not accept any idea, even one supported by evidence, if they can't tell a story or draw a picture of how it could work that way. It reminds me of Carl Sagan's rejection of astrology: "How could it work?" That kind of thinking is not science but religion, excluding avenues of investigation that don't fit existing mental models. The duty of the priest is to put people at ease that the world is completely understood. The duty of the scientist is to expand our understanding by seeking experience that we cannot yet explain.
December 10. Excellent piece by Malcolm Gladwell on IQ and the Flynn effect. Basically, IQ scores have been steadily rising, and the implications of that fact demolish the social Darwinist position on intelligence. It turns out that IQ doesn't measure how intelligent we are, but how modern we are:
The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. "A wise man could only do such-and-such," they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, "How would a fool do it?" The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the "right" categories.
This raises the question: Is there any use for modern "intelligence"? Is it going somewhere, or is it a total dead end?
December 11. Here's a long 2005 Hakim Bey interview with some grumpy-old-man parts and some other parts that are totally brilliant. He talks about the collapse of industrial civilization, peak oil, cars, television, the internet, the uselessness of the left, organic food, Canada, anarchism, homeschooling, protests, climate change, Russia, secession, and how capitalism ruins everything.
December 12. Human evolution is speeding up! The new research is focusing completely on physical changes, like blue eyes and malaria resistance and the ability to digest milk, but I wonder if we're also changing mentally, not just on a cultural level but on a biological level. And mentally, the great new threat to humans over the last 5000 years -- indeed, the only new threat -- has been Empire, Leviathan, giant repressive centralized systems. I don't want to get my hopes up too much, but it is possible that deep human resistance to Empire has been growing, while innovations in repression and mind control have been masking this resistance by always staying one step ahead -- but repression is expensive and resistance is cheap, so if we run out of energy and resources, the world might get a lot better.
December 14. It's taken me more than a month, but I've finally finished Fredy Perlman's Against His-story, Against Leviathan. To my knowledge, the book is unique, a full history of western civilization from the ideological perspective of the resistance. The whole book is online here, and it's still in print from Black and Red Books, but I don't recommend it to everyone, because it's damned hard to read. For example, from page 84:
Darius the Persian must know that the Greeks are far ahead of his Canaanite subjects on the Levant who actually worship the abstraction of Leviathan, but who treat this abstaction as if it were a Sumerian god and make their actual Leviathan subservient to it. These Canaanites even persecute Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, Samaritans, Phoenicians and other Canaanites who do not worship the abstraction in their Temple.
But if you can make it through stuff like that, you are treated to a mind-blowing historical landscape, with insights that have not been integrated into anti-civ visions of the future, let alone the dominant vision.
First, resistance movements always succeed. Sure, they're repeatedly crushed -- but they can survive anything! They go underground, take a new form, and come back stronger, while the repressive systems they fight get more and more riddled with internal weaknesses. Inevitably, the revolution topples the Empire, sweeps away hierarchy, and we rebuild free communities living close to the Earth.
But these golden ages, or in the propaganda of Empire, "dark ages", last only a few decades, or at best a few centuries, before Leviathan emerges again. And normally it emerges out of the resistance movement itself. The ancient Persian empire started with Cyrus, a leader inspired by Zoroastrianism to sweep away the machinery of previous empires. The Roman empire started as a people's movement to eradicate the Etruscans. The modern nation-state began with the Moravians forming a defensive alliance against the Franks, who got stuck in warlike habits after centuries of resisting the Romans. And we all know the story of Christianity.
Strangely, even Perlman himself seems to miss this insight. It's embarrassing seeing him strain to argue that civilization was a fluke, that the present Empire will be the last, that we are on the verge of an enduring Utopia, even as he lists one resistance movement after another, all through history, that believed the same thing and was wrong, even as he writes in the last paragraph of the book, "The cycle has come round again."
December 15. Heritage and seedling apple varieties have more medicinal value than supermarket apples. The article emphasizes that we don't need scientific instruments to know what to eat. Healthful apples just taste better. Commercial apples could be selected and bred for flavor, but because our whole culture favors blandness and shallowness, commercial apples are selected and bred for beautiful skin, uniform size and shape, crispness, juiciness, and sugar content. Basically they're being bred toward cans of soda. Related: my big landblog apple post.
December 17. Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms. I've written before that I think bioengineering has the potential to be totally cool. I would love to see ten thousand gene hackers in garages churning new critters into the biosphere. But the trend is something different:
"I see a cell as a chassis and power supply for the artificial systems we are putting together," said Tom Knight of MIT, who likes to compare the state of cell biology today to that of mechanical engineering in 1864. That is when the United States began to adopt standardized thread sizes for nuts and bolts, an advance that allowed the construction of complex devices from simple, interchangeable parts.
So far, synthetic biology is still semi-synthetic, involving single-cell organisms such as bacteria and yeast that have a blend of natural and synthetic DNA. The cells can reproduce, a defining trait of life. But in many cases that urge has been genetically suppressed, along with other "distracting" biological functions, to maximize productivity.
"Most cells go about life like we do, with the intention to make more of themselves after eating," said John Pierce, a vice president at DuPont. "But what we want them to do is make stuff we want."
Ultimately, this plan will fail for the same reason Linux beats Microsoft and grass beats pavement: Life has deeper roots than Control. Adam explains:
Successful gene insertions generally tax the organism's metabolic energy in ways useless outside of the controlled high input farm environment (for example, when every cell is pumping out excessive amounts of metabolically expensive proteins). Abandon a farm -- or convert it to low energy agriculture -- and the GMOs probably wouldn't survive long against heirloom varieties or the weeds nature throws up.
So even if biotech gets to the point where it's possible to make enduring new species, the big money will not be making them. It will be making species that are radically unsustainable because they put "making stuff we want" ahead of survival... just like this whole society!
December 18. Difficult multi-part essay, The Programmer's Stone. William summarizes:
Alan Garter tried to find a reason why some programmers are 10-25 times more productive than others. He stumbled across the answer, and made a team of super-programmers. Then the rest of the organization turned on his team! His theory is that people are literally addicted to stress. Stress releases dopamine in the brain, which gives a the stressee a good buzz. When two people accustomed to different levels of stress meet, they often don't like each other because one is getting overly stressed and the other isn't getting their dopamine hit. Stress also shuts off what he calls juxtapositional thinking, a holistic, comparative mode of thinking.
Basically there are two kinds of thinking and you need both, but under stress you're limited to thinking that is narrowly focused, methodical, and not at all intuitive. And to have a productive/unstressed programming team, you first need an unstressed organization around them. Clearly this goes way beyond programming. This whole civilization is driven by stress, and has been for thousands of years. Also, I think the negative reaction against unstressed people is about much more than dopamine. Repressed cultures murder free cultures because if they don't, they have to admit that they could have been free too, that all their suffering was for nothing, and they don't want to face the grief.
But here's a puzzle: Clearly civilized life is more stressful than tribal life... so why has civilization been so much more innovative and productive than tribal societies? I see two answers. First, most of the "productivity" of civilization is nothing like computer programming -- stressed-out slaves are slower programmers, but much faster at building pyramids and cutting down forests, because unstressed free people have no reason to do those jobs at all. Also, all the innovations of civilization have come from either elites or outsiders, people who had some way to get off the treadmill.
This also explains the cycles of Empire. In a young free society, everyone is adaptable and smart and full of energy. But cut loose from the customs of a stable society, they use that energy to systematically extend their power beyond their wisdom, which leads to a repressive conquering society, which adds more and more control and stress, until almost everyone is either zombified or a resister. And then a young free society sweeps it away, and the cycle repeats...
December 19. Just finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. The narrator is a 31 year old woman who grew up in what appears to be an exclusive private school in the country, but turns out to be something much darker, and we look on as she uncovers the secrets. But we're left with one more puzzle: that most of the book is not about the dark secrets at all, but instead goes into great depth in the relations between the characters -- hundreds of pages only connected by a thread to what the book is supposedly about. Ishiguro is a meticulous writer who doesn't do anything without a lot of thought, so what is he doing with two books in one?
Here's what I think: On one level, there is an unspeakable horror. The book doesn't say it, but I wonder if this is supposed to be an alternate history where the Nazis won WWII. Then, within that horror is a sheltered place where people can talk about literature and play games and make art, and not really understand what they're part of. So you've got a lie wrapped up in a nightmare, and the bulk of the book illustrates that when human beings are raised in a lie wrapped up in a nightmare, they become incredibly fucked up! Liars, manipulators, and inventors of ridiculous belief systems are rewarded, while seekers and honest people are mercilessly crushed. So, really, he's writing about our own world.
December 21. Good news from James:
When I first decided to squat, I put an ad in Craigslist asking if anyone knew of abandoned houses I could live in and fix up. I was hoping for friendly neighbors, but I got an owner of a four unit building who will let me stay in one unit for fixing up the rest! It's not quite squatting, but for now it will be warmer, safer, and legal. Plus there is a huge abandoned factory nearby, and many houses.
There you go! As the American economy continues to slide, there will be more abandoned buildings and competent people with no place to live, and more need and opportunity to make that kind of connection. It could even become a "squatter's market," where you won't even have to fix anything up, just keep the place from looking any worse and scare away the copper scavengers.
December 22. Lakota group declares secession from US. I changed the headline to "declares secession" because "secedes" is incorrect. The issue here is symbolic action vs real action. One faction of the Lakota have said "this land is ours," but that's logically no different from the European conquerors 200 years ago saying "this land is yours and we promise we won't invade."
There's a smart piece in the New Yorker this week, Twilight of the Books, about how reading and non-reading affect human consciousness. In ancient Greece, when reading was new, it was a kind of trance or possession -- people had trouble distinguishing between the reader and the text, the actor and the role. You can still see that today, when fans of TV shows treat the actors like their characters, or a cowardly president can be popular by swaggering like a "strong leader," or activists think protests and petitions can change anything.
One of the things we're going to have to do, before we get out of this ugly age of history, is to learn to navigate the symbolic and the real without losing our grip on which is which. George Bush is more spiritually evolved than his opponents when he says the Constitution is "just a piece of paper." Laws and treaties and money and other pieces of paper begin as agreements between people, but when the people no longer agree, they become meaningless, and the advantage goes to the first person to notice the loss of meaning.
I hope the Lakota secessionists know what they're doing. They say they're going to file liens to get property back, but I don't think a white South Dakota sheriff will evict white people from land even if the white courts say the Indians own it. What happens if a business owner in Rapid City stops paying taxes, and federal marshals show up? Will the secessionists just throw a statement of outrage into the toilet of symbol-space? Will they have enough foreign allies to force the American Empire to negotiate? Will they leverage the spectacle in the media to inspire secession movements to break out all over, until central command can no longer buy or bully the obedience of enough guards to put down the revolution?
"It's just a piece of paper" is a two-edged sword, and the edge we use is more powerful, because there are far more pieces of paper that take away freedom than grant freedom. Secession is the right path, both morally and strategically, because the human agreement that holds America together is coming undone. But I think this move is a bit early.
December 27. The Global Cooling Project. No, it's not about spraying aluminum out of airplanes or dumping iron into the ocean or building a giant orbiting sun umbrella. Apparently all we have to do is plant trees and conserve rainwater in dry areas, and the moistened earth will make clouds that reflect sunlight. And here's a link that doesn't mention cooling but describes a successful bottom-up greening project in India.


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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Ruby on Rails latest stable (v5.2.3) - 1 note - Class: ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder
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# File actionview/lib/action_view/helpers/form_helper.rb, line 2250 def emitted_hidden_id? @emitted_hidden_id ||= nil end
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Ajedi32 - February 8, 2013 - (>= v2.3.8)
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The purpose of this method
This method keeps track of whether a hidden id field needs to be created when the form builder is generating fields for a nested model. It gets set to true by #hidden_field when that method is used to create a field named 'id'.
Here's an example of what this can be useful for: http://railsforum.com/viewtopic.php?id=39640


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Gaijin Entertainment's real-time strategy series Modern Conflict has garnered a fair amount of praise in iOS gaming circles, but many have criticized the series for a distinct lack of castles and dwarves. And so here we are.
Where are we? Why the faraway kingdom of Baldoria, where greedy dwarves have swiped the crystals that control the flow of time. This makes the King oversleep, which naturally leads to the brutal genocide of an entire race of beings, and you get to lead the charge!
Along with a healthy sense of humor, Fantasy Conflict delivers 35 campaign missions, six survival battles, and the chance to sit for hours on end, poking a finger at the screen of your favorite iOS-powered device while looking all intense, and really that's what it's all about.
Fantasy Conflict is available right now in both HD and SD flavors—same great taste, different resolutions.
Fantasy Conflict HD Version — $2.99 [iTunes]
Fantasy Conflict SD Version — $1.99 [iTunes]


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Error C000-016B occurs when you try to update your Xbox 360 console
You see the following error code and message when you try to update your Xbox 360 console:
Can't update your console. Please visit www.xbox.com/support.
Status Code: xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-C000-016B
This means your console experienced a problem during the update process.
Note The "x" digits in the sequence vary.
You can resolve this issue by retrying the update after ejecting the disc tray and pushing it back in halfway. Here's how:
- Eject the disc tray and remove any disc from the console.
Important Do not close the disc tray. Leave it open.
- With the disc tray open, remove the power cord from the back of the console.
- Gently push the disc tray about halfway back into the console.
- Plug the power cord back into the console.
- Push the power button on the console. The tray should close the rest of the way, and then the console should restart and display the Xbox Dashboard.
Important Do not use the controller button or the disc tray eject button to turn on the console for this step.
- Try updating your console software again.
Request a repair
If these steps didn't resolve the problem, your console needs to be repaired. See Getting your Xbox console or Kinect sensor serviced.
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Almond Butter Coconut Sweet Potato Curry Vegan Baked Samosa Recipe
Sweet Potato Almond Coconut Curry
1 sweet potato, cubed into bite-sized pieces
1/4 onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves
olive oil
smoked paprika or chipotle pepper or chili powder
2 tsp. olive oil
generous sprinkling of garam masala- 1/4 tsp or more (blend yourself or purchase from Penzey's Spices)
1/2 small lime, cut into small wedges
Optional: fresh julienned cilantro to add to dish at end or to layer on pastry or rice
Favorite gluten-free pastry OR the following pastry mix OR serve on rice
Preheat oven to 375F. Throw sweet potato, onion, and garlic on a baking sheet and drizzle with a little olive oil and sprinkle with "red" spice of choice. Bake for about 20 minutes and then turn sweet potatoes and bake another 20 minutes.
Whisk sauce ingredients together in a small bowl.
Meanwhile heat nonstick frypan or cast iron skillet on medium and add your oil. When it is warm, add your diced onion and mushrooms. As mushrooms release their liquid and become soft, add your greens and pour the almond butter coconut sauce into the pan on top of them. Combine ingredients thoroughly and season with garam masala, salt, and more of your chosen "red" spice. Let sauce thicken and then take off burner.
Add lime wedges for garnish and flavor. If you will be using in a pastry, add the juice and remove the wedges. You can fold in fresh cilantro and/or sprinkle it on rice or pastry if you will be serving the curry accordingly.
To make pastry (optional) combine pastry ingredients, form into 2 balls and chill for 30 minutes in the refrigerator. Preheat oven to 375F. Place one ball in a large, gallon, freezer quality ziploc bag and roll it out inside the bag to your preferred thickness. If there is too much pastry for the bag, take some out and roll it later. Cut the edges of the bag when it has been rolled out and use it in mini tart pans, to line muffin tins, or even for a shaped pastry although I found it prone to cracking and not well suited for this application. I recommend using it for mini savory pie crusts.
Once you have lined your tart pans with dough, sprinkle them with freshly chopped cilantro and drizzle a little olive oil on them. Then you can fill the crust with your sweet potato curry and bake until golden brown. (Start checking at 15 minutes.)
*For an example of a brown rice flour GF mix, Rebecca Reilly's GF flour mix uses 2 cups brown rice flour, 2/3 cup potato starch, and 1/3 cup tapioca starch mixed together.


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It's Saint George's Day today - the day we celebrate England's patron saint. Or the day we moan about how we ought to celebrate him, whilst not doing anything to actually celebrate him ourselves. Both are fine options.
Here is your guide to George, his life, his legend, and why he is our patron saint.


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Wren, Braves plan for future without Chipper
"I feel like this is a more focused offseason," Wren said. "I'm looking forward to it because I feel like there is a narrower focus of what we need.
"We've got a lot of good young players in place. We've got to determine what we do in center field. That couples with what we do with the leadoff [hitter]. And then how we replace Chipper. Other than that, our club is pretty solid."
While the Braves will evaluate the possibility of bringing Michael Bourn back to play center field and serve as their leadoff hitter, they are not likely to get in a bidding war with the Nationals and Phillies, who are also expected to make a run at Bourn.
The Braves will have approximately $25-30 million to spend this winter. While this puts them in the market to afford top free agents such as Josh Hamilton or Bourn, they may look at other options via trade or free agency.
With some financial flexibility, the Braves will likely be linked to Justin Upton, B.J. Upton, Chase Headley and any of the other top outfielders or third basemen who might be made available via trades this winter.
"We're going to be looking for premium players," Wren said. "I don't think there is any doubt about that. But there [are] a couple things we're always mindful of. We're putting a team together. We're not trying to put a player on this team. That's overriding philosophy -- to put a team together. If we think we can add two players that give us more than one player, then we're going to do that."
If the Braves choose to reconstruct their roster via the trade market, they will have the option to take advantage of their depth in the starting pitching department. Tim Hudson is expected to return to a rotation that will also include Kris Medlen, Paul Maholm and Mike Minor. The fifth spot will be manned by either Tommy Hanson, Julio Teheran or Randall Delgado.
With the understanding that Brandon Beachy should return from elbow reconstruction surgery by July, the Braves may be more apt to move some of their top young pitching talent this year. Despite the decline he has experienced since the 2011 All-Star break, Hanson will gain a decent raise as a first-year arbitration-eligible player.
But unlike right-hander Jair Jurrjens, Hanson is not viewed as a potential non-tender candidate.
As long as catcher Brian McCann is not forced to undergo a surgical process that forces him to miss a significant portion of the 2013 season, the Braves are expected to exercise his $12 million option. If healthy, McCann still has the potential to be one of the game's top offensive threats at the position.
Free agents: Michael Bourn, CF; Eric Hinske, OF/1B; Lyle Overbay, 1B; Jeff Baker, INF; David Ross, C; Matt Diaz, OF; Reed Johnson, OF; Miguel Batista, RHP; Chad Durbin, RHP; Peter Moylan, RHP; Ben Sheets, RHP
Eligible for arbitration: Jurrjens, RHP; Prado, LF/3B; Eric O'Flaherty, LHP; Hanson, RHP; Paul Janish, SS; Jason Heyward, OF; Jonny Venters, LHP; Medlen, RHP
Club options: McCann, C -- $12 million ($500,000 buyout); Hudson, RHP -- $9 million ($1 million buyout); Maholm, LHP -- $6.5 million ($500,000 buyout)
Non-tender possibilities: Jurrjens
Position-by-position look at where the 2012 roster stands going into 2013:
Catcher: The Braves are expected to exercise McCann's option and re-sign Ross, who remains one of the game's top offensive catchers and a solid clubhouse influence. McCann's offensive struggles date back to his early return from an oblique strain in Aug. 2011. He should be motivated to enjoy a productive turnaround season before hitting the free agent market next winter.
First Base: Freddie Freeman experienced an odd sophomore season that was filled with both great promise and injury-related frustration. He was named the National League's Player of the Week in two of the season's first four weeks, but some vision problems and an injured right index finger halted his ascent toward a monstrous season. Still, the 23-year-old first baseman gave the Braves reason to believe he will be a force in the middle of their lineup for years. With Hinske's days in Atlanta likely done, the Braves will be looking for a backup for Freeman.
Second Base: With three years remaining on his five-year, $62 million contract, Dan Uggla still has some time to live up to the expectations the Braves had when they gave him this deal. He struggled through the first three months of the 2011 season and then caught fire during the early stages of a productive second half. This year, Uggla was consistent for the season's first two months, and then hit below .200 for the season's final four months. The Braves would like to see him get back to the days when he could be counted on to hit .240-.250 with 30 home runs.
Shortstop: The Braves found their shortstop of the future in Andrelton Simmons, who proved to be the game's best defensive shortstop during his first month at the Major League level. A broken finger forced Simmons to miss two months this year, but the Curacao product should be at full strength and ready to build on his rookie success next year. The sure-handed Janish stands as a potential backup infielder. The other option would be Tyler Pastornicky, who is capable with the bat and suspect with the glove.
Third Base: The Braves could go a couple of different directions as they look for Jones' replacement. If they do not find a third baseman via trade or free agency, Prado could serve as the starting third baseman. But this might require the club to find two outfielders this winter. They could also use Juan Francisco as their third baseman in games against right-handed starters. When facing a left-handed pitcher, Prado could vacate his left field position to play third base.
Outfield: The Braves know that they will have Heyward starting in right field at the start of the 2013 season. If Prado is not positioned at third base, he will once again start in left field. The starting center fielder will be found either via trade or free agency. The odds of Bourn returning to Atlanta next year decreased as he hit .225 in the second half and totaled 155 strikeouts as a leadoff hitter.
Rotation: Medlen's dominance during the season's second half, combined with Minor's impressive second-half turnaround, essentially negated the need for the Braves to enter this winter bidding for Zack Greinke or any other potential starting pitchers. The most pressing question entering the 2013 season will center around who will serve as the fifth starter.
Bullpen: Craig Kimbrel will return with the hope of building off of one of the most dominant seasons ever completed by a closer. His primary setup men will once again be O'Flaherty and Venters, who seemed to right himself after struggling during the early months. Luis Avilan and Cory Gearrin seemed to show enough this past year to position themselves to begin the 2013 season in Atlanta's bullpen.


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Friday 25 January
|Meleagris (1)
The ocellated turkey is a conspicuous, vibrant-coloured bird that can be easily distinguished from the only other turkey species, its larger and less colourful North American cousin, the North American wild turkey (Maleagris gallopavo). The body plumage of both males and females is a striking mix of iridescent bronze and green colour, although females often appear duller than males, with a greener rather than bronze tinge (2). Both sexes have bluish-grey tails feathers with a distinctive, blue-bronze coloured ocellus (eye-shaped spot) near the end, from which the species derives its common name, followed by a bright gold tip (2) (4). The brilliant blue head and neck of both sexes feature distinctive orange to red, warty, caruncle-like growths, called nodules, although these are more pronounced on males. Males also possess a fleshy blue crown adorned with yellow-orange nodules, which become more prominent during the breeding season (2). During this time an eye-ring of bright red skin also becomes especially visible on adult males (2) (4). The deep red, short, thin legs and feet of males sport impressive spurs, which are much longer than those of the North American wild turkey (2).
During the breeding season in spring, ocellated turkeys are more commonly seen in clearings and roadways where male gobbling and strutting behaviour intensifies to attract the females. Most mating takes place from late March to mid-April and the majority of chicks are hatched by mid-June. The average clutch size is 12 eggs, but not all chicks will survive, with many predated by gray foxes, raccoons, cougars, jaguars, and numerous birds of prey and snakes, which may also prey upon adults (2).
Ocellated turkeys have an extremely generalist diet, eating a wide variety of plant materials from leaves to seeds, nuts and berries, as well as insects such as ants, moths and beetles (4) (6). However, chicks appear to feed exclusively on insects for the first month or so of life (7).
The ocellated turkey's range extends over 50,000 miles in Central America, and includes south-east Mexico (Yucatán peninsula), north Guatemala (north Petén) and north-west and west-central Belize (4) (5).
This bird most commonly occurs in tropical deciduous and lowland evergreen forests and clearings such as abandoned farm plots (4). Although found in non-flooded mature forest during much of the year, this turkey is also found in seasonally flooded habitat and open areas, which are especially important during the breeding season (5).
This turkey is heavily hunted for food across its range, even within reserves, and also occasionally for sport (5). Much of this hunting occurs during the breeding season in March, April and May, when the bird favours more open, exposed clearings for its displays, making it more easily accessible to poachers (2). Unfortunately, when females are killed at this time, there is a knock on impact on the survival of their chicks. Large-scale timbering operations, clear-cutting, and conversion to agricultural land has destroyed and fragmented much of this bird's habitat, and thereby also increased its vulnerability to hunting (4) (5). The alarming rate of forest destruction in Central America poses a significant threat to the long-term survival of this beautiful bird (4).
The ocellated turkey is found in a number of 'protected areas' although these do not always provide safe refuge from poachers (5). It has been argued, however, that appropriately managed sport hunting, advertised at a high price to foreign countries, may be an effective conservation measure by bolstering the economy of many small villagers, reducing the pressure for locals to hunt the turkey for subsistence and commercial purposes. The idea is to demonstrate that the ocellated turkey is much more valuable through carefully regulated sport hunting than through unrestricted, and unsustainable, subsistence hunting. Currently only limited sport-hunting opportunities are available to non-residents in Mexico and Guatemala (2).
For more information on the ocellated turkey see:
Taylor, C.I., Quigley, H.B. & Gonzales, M.J. Ocellated Turkey (Meleagris ocellata). National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF) Wildlife Bulletin, 6: 1- 8. Available at:
For more information on turkeys see:
The National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF):
For more information on this and other bird species please see:
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Friday 25 January
Friday 05 October
Monday 24 September


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Athleta fitness yoga Hurdle Hurdle Hurdle Hoodie, charcoal heather, SZ XS, soldout, NWT c901d5
Earth music&ecology Sweats & Hoodies 253660 Grey L,
ProSphere Women's University of Maryland Baltimore County Ripple Fullzip Hoodie,
"It is a brilliant piece of documentary cinema." - Michael Moore
Maglia in Pile con Cappuccio a Punta Goa Psy Hippy Fraggle, – There are 58,000 homeless people in the county of Los Angeles, which represents the largest concentration of homeless in the nation. When criminal court Tina Belcher Bob's Burgers Women's Hoodie Dress, starts a running club on LA's notorious Skid Row and begins training a motley group of addicts and criminals to run marathons, lives begin to change. Directed by Mark Hayes, AMERICAN APPAREL WHITE CONFETTI UNISEX HOODIE SZ SMALL S VGUC RARE VHTF, follows Judge Mitchell and the members of the Midnight Mission Runners Club (now called Skid Row Running Club) over a period of four years. The Judge, who suffers from a painful spinal condition, has been told by his doctors to stop running, but he chooses to ignore their advice. He needs the club and the balance it provides in his life, giving him the opportunity to change the world in a way that he can't in his own courtroom. If club members stay clean, off the streets and out of jail, the Judge will take them around the world to run marathons. The runners fight the pull of addiction and homelessness at every turn. Not everyone crosses the finish line. Their story is one of hope, friendship and dignity.
Victoria's secret Pink ARMY SWEATSHIRT, NIP, Oversized Medium, NWT ,Laemmle Playhouse 7 in Pasadena starting March 22, just two days ahead of the Skechers Performance Los Angeles Marathon. Judge Mitchell and his running mates will be in attendance at screenings on opening night and throughout the week-long run for post-screening Q&As. The feature-length documentary was produced by Gabriele Hayes and Doug Blush.LADIES SWEATSHIRT,JUMPER,TOP purpleC COLOUR WITH AN EMBROIDERED FOX DESIGN,.
Item specifics
New with tags: A brand-new, unused, and unworn item (including handmade items) in the original packaging (such as ... Read moreabout the condition
|Size (Women's):
|Sleeve Style:
|Long Sleeve
|Size Type:
charcoal heather
does not apply
"When my wife (producer Gabriele Hayes) and I read an article in the LA Times about a judge who started a running club on skid row, the heart of LA's homeless community, we decided to show up and run. This began a journey that has now lasted four years," said Skid Row Marathon director Mark Hayes. "Our film is about more than just running marathons. It's about the camaraderie of an unlikely group of individuals who receive a second chance at life, all brought on by a simple act of kindness."
New Wildfox Raspberry Purple UNICORN Top BBJ Baggy Beach Jumper S,'s mother passed away when he was 9 years old. Before she died, she took the him to Watts after the Watts Riots which had big impact on his life. After teaching high school in South Central Los Angeles for more than 17 years, Mitchell decided to go to law school. He went to work as a prosecutor in 1994 in the L.A. District Attorney's office and became a judge in 2005.
Material Girl Women's New 47.50 Plus Size Squad Graphic Hoodie (1XL), studied documentary filmmaking at New York University under renowned documentarian George Stoney. Mark traveled extensively through East Germany during the period leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. During that time, he picked up his future wife (Skid Row Marathon Producer Gabriele Hayes) hitchhiking. They were married but were not permitted to leave East Germany until the fall of the wall in 1989. Over the years, Mark has directed several documentaries related to the Cold War, which have aired on public television in the US, Europe and Australia.
ProSphere Women's Indiana State University End Zone Fullzip Hoodie (Apparel), was born in the former East Germany. After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, she moved to the US and now lives in Los Angeles. In 2011, Gabriele produced the documentary film One Germany, The Other Side of the Wall, which examines the reunification of Germany after 20 years. Her other documentary From Red State to Golden State (2013) tells the story of Soviet Jews and their families who immigrated to Los Angeles before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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Director Mark Hayes
Producers Gabriele Hayes and Doug Blush
Editors Tchavdar Georgiev and Benjamin Dohrmann
Composer Kim Planert
Director of Photography James Stolz
Editorial Consultant Yana Gorskaya
USA - 2018 - 85 mins - Color - DCP
Web: http://skidrowmarathon.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/skidrowmarathon/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/skidrowmarathon
Women's University of Wisconsin-Whitewater College Prime Hoodie Sweatshirt,Los Angeles TimesThe Hollywood ReporterLA Daily NewsGood Day LA


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Urge your members of Congress to support continued medical research funding
View our newest patient resource, an informational booklet on hydroxyurea for sickle cell disease.
The American Society of Hematology has developed the resources in this section to educate the public about the importance of healthy blood and to raise the awareness of common blood diseases, such as anemia, bleeding and clotting disorders, and blood cancers.
An hour-long documentary focused on the lifesaving work of hematologists
Descriptions of the four main components of blood and the function of each within the body
Blood Banking and Donation Hematology Glossary
Information on common blood disorders such as anemia, bleeding disorders including hemophilia, blood clots, and blood cancers
Bleeding Disorders
Blood Cancers
Blood Clots
Blood Disorder Fact Sheet
Definitions for key terms related to blood diseases
Links to websites with patient information on blood diseases
Tips for talking with your doctor
Support the mission of ASH and help move hematology forward.
Search a database of practicing hematologists in your area.
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Phone 202-776-0544 | Fax 202-776-0545
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We understand that data is central to your operations. At tamigo your data is kept private and safe.
We are committed to privacy, security compliance and transparency. To earn our customers' trust, we have appointed a Data Protection Officer. To further earn our customers' trust, our Data Protection Agreement (DPA) has been updated to provide you with contractual commitments regarding tamigo's compliance with GDPR.
You can already configure tamigo so that your employees only can access pages that they are meant to access. You can also create custom roles in tamigo to ensure that different employees who handle data (managers, planners, payroll) only will see necessary data.