Paxus's blog

One of the worlds most enduring poets is Jal?l ad-D?n Muhammad Balkh?, a Persian sufi mystic who died in the 13th Century.  The world remembers him as Rumi.

Elegant, profound and wrong

Rumi is famous for powerful quotes like the one above.  And when i saw this on Facebook, i recognized it and took issue with it.  I have seen many activist and organizers drop out of political work to pursue spiritual paths or personal growth and the like.  This leaves those of us foolish enough to “stay behind” with even more work.

Gandhi’s famous quote is a bridge between these two paths “Be the change you wish to see in the world”  [Tho Gandhi probably never said this.]  One can even argue that you must start by cleaning up your own stuff, before you can be effective in influence the world.  But the world is in desperate need of concerted attention and it is in no way wise to focus on yourself instead.

This mysticism i am down with

While i was ranting recently about  gun control on a nameless social media platform, an ex-member of Twin Oaks called out my hypocracy because my own community bans television.  Excellent point.

There is no written anti-television policy at Twin Oaks, but this is a strong cultural norm which few have been willing to challenge.  This agreement goes back to our founding in 1967, before the internet and home theater technologies (VCRs, DVDs) could deliver similar content.  When we banned TV it really meant something.

There are lots of different stories about why we banned television and why we maintained this restiction.  Here are my favorites:

Television is a social toxin.  New communities generally fail.  The early thinking was that if people were in their rooms watching TV after a long day of working (and our days were much longer 40 years back, because quota was much higher) then they would not be in the living rooms socializing with others who lived in their residence.

Commercials rot your mind.  When VCRs, DVDs and the internet started to replace broadcast television, a distinctions  was made that TV has commercials and these other medias dont or have far fewer.   I have to say as an occasional television watcher i find this compelling.  Here at my parents house after watching commercial TV i find myself however briefly wishing i had an SUV or thinking fast food would be tasty – when these thoughts never enter my mind without this influence.

It has been a journey of film makers.  I was chatting with these charming Italian film makers a couple days ago in a Dutch bar when 8 phosphorescent yellow dutch police showed up.  They explained in Dutch that they were part of a routine search for hard drugs and weapons that was taking place in the area and that they hoped for our cooperation.  They said it would take less than 15 minutes.  No one objected, tho I think half the crowd did not understand them and they went to work.  They searched my dingy dutch jacket and frisked me.  Women cops frisked the two Italian women in my party.  Perhaps 2 dozen bar customers were searched and it seemed like they found nothing.

I was fascinated by this in light of the raging gun control argument in my home country and I promptly went and interviewed the bartender about these events.  They explained that there had been several stabbings in the area and the police we doing random searches not only on bars, but also at coffeeshops (where the Dutch sell marijuana and hashish) and on the street in random sweeps.   Our bar tenders were absolutely supportive these searches.  There was no concern about the civil rights of their customers and they believed that these types of searches would in fact be effective driving down crime in their region (which was near Oosterpark in Am*dam).  The whole thing took less than 15 minutes before all the police were gone.

What are the limits?

The day i returned to the US from 3 month abroad was the day the National Rifle Association announced their plan to avert gun violence in schools, which is to place armed guards in every school in the US.  i cant say it makes me feel nice to be back.

There are many media responses which are furious.  The Wall Street Journals coverage strived to be balanced, but in the video section only showed NRA and former NRA spokespeople talking.  The WSJ story did site the after action report on the Columbine killings in which identified that an armed school resource officer exchanged gunfire with one of the teenage gunmen. That the exchange forced the two gunmen into the school library, where they then killed 10 students.

Codepink protests NRA press conference advocating more guns in schools

But the best advice from the MSM is actually to ignore the NRA completely for now.  The Washington Post points out that this is a familiar poly of the NRA, distraction.

The Czechs are clever. In my brief time there I was introduced to intellectuals and dissidents as well as many thoughtful radical activists and well read anarchists. After an evening of story telling about “the good old days” in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, an anarchist friend of Jakub’s Ondre wanted to do an interview with me.  His was curios as to how i viewed the political changes i had seen in  the Czech Republic.

When I was there in the early and mid 1990s, there was a big split in the country about what democratic model the Czechs should follow: was it the “wild west” capitalist style of the United States or a social safety net system like the Scandinavian systems. Now 20 years later it is safe to say the Czechs have made their choice and the model they are choosing to mimic, is actually the Russian model.

the many tools of corrupt governments

In many European countries, including the Czech Republic your party needs to get a 5% of the vote in the general election before you can get a single seat in parliament.  For the last several elections this has meant that 5 parties have been in the Czech parliament.  The last general election 2 years ago required 3 of these parties to unit to form a coalition government with enough parliamentary seats to control it.  They called themselves “The anti-corruption coalition.”

Hawina: “Willow, some people think the world is going to end tomorrow”
Willow (age 10): “I am disinclined to believe any religious text that is found written on a wall”

Willow is more inclined to believe in flying machines

Early returns from New Zealand look promising

Jakub and i went out together in Prague the other night.  Jakub was one of the founders (with Honza Beranek) of Hnuti DUHA, the Czech dark green environmental group i worked with for nearly 7 years.  i had a wonderful time, both meeting new activists and retelling stories of these glory days.

When reasonable people had gone to sleep, Jakub and i kept talking.  We went to the home of his friend, a night owl and independent film maker, Vit Janecek.  “So you are the spiritual father of Hnuti DUHA” Vit said to me and i was quite taken a back.  I never considered myself to have such a significant role, but as Jakub described it i could see how someone might think this.  I was touched and flattered.

Czech Film maker Vit Janecek

In a couple weeks i will start my visitor period at Acorn.  Acorn is Twin Oaks younger sister community, just 7 miles down the road in the town of Mineral.  At first glance Acorn is quite like Twin Oaks, perhaps like the Spanish language is similar to Portuguese.  Both communities are income sharing (meaning members dont get “paid” but all their expenses are covered), both are egalitarian (meaning work is valued the same and resources are accessible to all), both are non-violent, both have elaborate sharing systems. Both are largely free of crime.  Both select their members and charge nothing to join.  Both grow much of their own food, run their own businesses and build their own buildings.

When Willow and i were recently on the train from Berlin to Prague a strange thing happened.  Two twenty somethings with backpacks came into our compartment.  They spoke to each other in what we suspected was a Slavic language.  Willow whispered “Are they Russian?”     I knew enuf Czech to be fairly confident that this was not what they were speaking.  When i asked they said they were Portuguese.  This surprised me because i speak a little Spanish and it did not sound at all the same.  Despite the numerous similarities there are key differences between these sibling communes.

Acorn was founded by a collection of Oakers and some of the people from our long waiting list at the time.  The idea was to create another egalitarian, income sharing community,  but not necessarily saddle Acorn with the same systems that Twin Oaks had.  And the devil is definitely in the details.

Reblogged from Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History:

The school shooting at Sandy Hook last week is unspeakably tragic.  I’m not personally affected, most people aren’t, but the murder of children strikes a chord with many people.  Children shouldn’t die, especially in these violent and horrific circumstances.

For about 6 hours my Facebook and news feeds were full of calls for prayers, healing, and empathy for the families and friends of those affected. 

Read more… 446 more words

Even tho this is a reblog - i too plan to delete gleefully any derailing comments, stay on topic for this one folks.

As i oft do, i let my optimist run over my realist.  I thought the new political parties in Japan which were formed from the dissatisfaction with the institutional corruption and pro-business and pro-nuclear orientation might gain control of the country.  I thought the huge weekly demonstrations, different from Japan’s history signaled something deeper in terms of political change.

But apathy, xenophobia and a distorted electoral system have triumphed. The Japanese electorate has justly punished the Nodo government by foolishly retreating into the arms of the LDS which ruled the country continuously since WWII, until 3 years ago.  But dont mistake LDS’s control of over half of the parliaments seats confuse you.  Japan’s election laws enable them to leverage only 30% of the popular vote to almost 60% of the seats.  At the same time only 60% of the country voted, the lowest turn out since the war.

Shinzo Abe will be only the second Japanese PM to return to the job since the war (and he is the youngest ever elected to the top spot).  Sadly, the Japanese are choosing to forget his incompetent crony government from 2007 – complete with minister suicides and scandal driven resignations. His low popularity made it impossible for him to keep Japanese troops in Afghanistan or pass repressive anti-terrorist laws, so he suddenly resigned.  He is a revisionist Hawk, who wants to re-write school textbooks to eliminate Japan’s war crimes and add teeth to its military.

[This post originally appeared on October 21, 2009 on my previous blog.  I am reposting it because i think handling death is an important aspect of healthy community life.  And because i am frustrated by the lack of things which will likely happen nationally around the Newton killings.]

Allen a few weeks before his suicide

About a week back a new member of Twin Oaks, Allen, took his life. He had wrestled with depression for much of his adult life and his mother said at the community sharing circle that “Twin Oaks had been the happiest month and a half of his life.”

The morning before he took his life i was in the tofu hut with Mushroom and in one of those rare moments when there is no one else there but the lone kettle person and the lone trays person she said to me. “Who do you think is the sexiest person on campus?”

“Allen” was my immediately response. He was quiet, diligent, attractive, musical, mechanically inclined. I had hooked him up with ex-member Denny Ray to help with the communities perennial problem of equipment maintenance. They had fixed the Llano refrigerator together and Denny had been impressed by his quick learning and eagerness. They were working on the ice machine together the day he passed.

There are about 8 kids killed by guns each day in the US.   They dont make headlines unless they are killed in groups like they were today.  After what ever feelings of grief and anger recede the normal response is to think about what can be done.

Many reasonable sounding suggestions are foolish.  Some people are calling for more security in school, while it turns out that schools are some of the safest places for kids, increasing security means ignoring reality and wasting money.  And group school (k-12) killings were at a 2 decade low last year at 33.  If we are concerned about children safety, we should have them at school all day long.  There is an important form of “news illusion” happening here, where we believe that lots of coverage of a tragic event means that it is something that is trending upwards, it is not.

Large corporate creatures are especially touchy about their brand identification.   This makes these companies particularly susceptible to campaigns which are critical of their policies and politics and tweak their marketing messages to demonstrate the problem.

Perhaps Victoria’s Secret even started the fight.  When the radical feminist Baltimore group called FORCE did an art installation in 2010 – they displayed a women’s underwear 3 pack where one set said “Yes” another pair of panties and “No” and the final set said “Maybe”.  Hannah Brancato said of this installation “we thought was a cute way of wearing what you were in the mood for.”  A month later Victoria’s Secret came out with a line of panties which had “Yes, no, maybe” all on a single pair of panties – taking the clear message of the feminists and making it confusing and ambiguous.

This is not how VS usually works however.  Their underwear messages and endless come hither ad campaigns usually care unambiguous pro-sex messages.  But the nimble feminists from FORCE we not to be outdone by this multinational.  They decided to run their own mock VS ads with pro-consent messages on underwear and put them up all over the internet.

Google has produced a flashy Zeitgeist video about everything people search for in 2012.

My second reaction (after thinking how clever of them to claim all of popular history for the years as somehow theirs) was “Who are these people and what is going on in the world?”

i read a lot online. i watch the headlines everyday.  i like to consider myself fairly on top of things.  But i dont watch TV.  The commune bans it and i have not really had much of a relationship with it since i was a kid.  So when i went further into the top google lists for 2012, i realized how tremendously out of it i was.  These are the most searched terms for the year:

Tottero Snowco

Cat in the Hat Snowcat

Cast of thousands of snow people

There are 20 of these snow creature images here.

When i was much younger i thought i had stumbled upon a clever universal truth – women like getting flowers. But when i gave some roses to Anissa, she informed me that cut flowers were not at all her thing and if i wanted to go pick wild flowers, especially with her, she was down with that – but otherwise she did not want to participate in this commodification of affection.

nicer than roses

i’ve sent something over 200 cards and letters on this trip (which has been less than 80 days so far). Most of these are to my slightly dizzying array of romantic intimates current and past. Many of these are postcards to people in my hundred person commune. i dont have a relationship with everyone at Twin Oaks that warrants a post card, but i do with perhaps 2/3rds the people there [if you have not gotten one yet, be aware that about 30 are completed in my hands or in the post].

And while not everyone likes cut flowers (actually a minority of my current intimates do – tho wild flowers are the new universal), i have yet to have anyone say “Hey Pax, please dont send me a postcard again.” Perhaps it will happen, but given the nearly unanimous positive and enthusiastic response to people getting often unexpected mail, I will keep writing them.

[With apologies to E.F. Schumacher, who wrote the important book Small is Beautiful]

“Don’t bet against technology. ” is the advice i give to people who are saying certain industrial developments wont happen, or will not happen soon.    There are breakthroughs everyday and most of them are not forecasted much in advance.   So why am i not excited about the recent Department of Energy’s decision to fund the development of Small Modular Reactor (SMR) designs ?

So the hype runs like this.  We want a reactor which is smaller because the big reactors are inflexible on the grid, often providing more power than an area (or even small countries) can use.  Small is flexible.  Small reactors can be built in factories and shipped to the site nearly complete – reversing the current ratio of 70% of the reactor built on site and 30% in the factory.  Mass production will help avoid cost overruns and delays which plague larger reactors.  Smaller reactors can be refueled less frequently and will require smaller staff to run.  We need a mix of energy solutions, rather than depending on just fossil sources and renewables.  The navy has successfully used small reactors to power aircraft carriers and submarines successfully for years.  Let’s just take this technology to the private sector.

I wrote about a week ago that the infamous revenge porn mogul, Hunter Moore, was being hunted by the hacktivist group Anonymous.  [Revenge Porn is when someone uploads naked pictures typically of their estranged ex-lover because they are upset with them.  In addition Moore gave links to people Facebook pages who were in the pictures.]  Anonymous said in its media release:

“We will protect anyone who is victimized by abuse of our internet, we will prevent the stalking, rape, and possible murders as by-product of his sites.”

A week ago Moore was dismissive of Anonymous’s effectiveness, perhaps emboldened by his ability to keep himself outside of trouble in his last venture.  [Though Moore was already stabbed with a pen by one woman who he posted pictures of on this last site.]  But last time he was just dealing with individual upset people, who had been harassed because he had posted their Facebook account info along with their revealing pictures.  And the government, which was likely unsympathetic to the plight of people who had choose the wrong people to trust with their images.  The law is written to take care of Facebook, so Hunter is under that protection.

i love Beatrice, especially when we disagree.  She recently went to Larry Kramer’s Facebook Page and read the speech he gave that sparked the AIDS group ACT UP.

“Kramer said:** “If my speech tonight doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble. If what you’re hearing doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men will have no future here on earth. How long does it take before you get angry and fight back?”**

And Beatrice asks “Where is our Larry Kramer? to fight to save our Biosphere, to take on big oil.”

She found Kramer’s anger and passion compelling and believes that climate change needs a similar enraged and dedicated hero.

ACT UP logo – and compelling political message

i am less convinced.  i certainly dont want to stop such a person from stepping forward, and i will get arrested and a non-violent climate change action faster than most people will (and already have).  But the issues are so different and the forces which need to shift are not at all the same.

In climate change we are fighting big oil, big coal and to a lesser extend nuclear.  These are rich, powerful entrenched interests which are willing to do lots of legal and illegal things to stop us.  With AIDS we were fighting a priorities battle.  Would medical resources be spent on dealing with this epidemic?  For the first many years the entrenched bureaucracy said “no”.  And Kramer gang was extremely effective in changing this, they were relentless, they got arrested repeatedly, they dogged political candidates and bureaucracies until they finally caved.

When people ask me about funology i talk about this quasi-science’s testbeds or parties and festivals.  Today i want to write about amusement parks.

Willow, his half brother Fabian, Hawina, Micha and Wieneke and i all went to the Dutch amusement park called the Efteling yesterday.  We arrived early and closed the place.  It was cold and gray, which it turns out is the perfect weather for going to this successful theme park, because there were virtually no lines on any of the rides.  Fabian went on this boat ride 10 times, Willow went 8.  My stomach could only handle 3.

Paxus, Micha, Willow and Fabian on Efteling Boat ride

The Efteling is a vibrant successful theme park with 4 million visitors a year employing 3,000 (mostly) locals at the height of the season.  Part of what makes a theme park work is adding new attractions.  This year is the 60th anniversary of the park and they added a new light and water show.

Sixty years ago (just 7 years after the second world war which devastated this country, the main port of Rotterdam had not yet been rebuilt) the park was built around the idea of showcasing fairytale stories.  It has grown to a more classical theme park with roller coasters and other rides since then.