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After Crystal and i fought about the usefulness of memetics as metaphor (forget it being a science) he sent me an excited email about the Thrive video he had come across.

Crystal explains:

[It is an] interesting mix of new age, new left, and
libertarian thinking that is drawing in all sorts of different people.
Notice the production values and the incorporation of all these
different perspectives and prejudices into one story….

But quickly into this video it clear what this really is, another slickly produced piece of loony new age nonsense. Crystal is playing with me to point out that successful memes are not necessarily useful ones.   i did not watch the whole movie which appears to be a wild mix of conspiracy theories around banking and energy companies, new age silliness around crop circles, universal codes, free energy and UFOs and inspiring monologs about how we can build a better world. 

When i heard that the folks from Open Circle community in Culpeper had asked Kassia, Sky, Roberto and Marta for advice about recruiting is simultaneously annoyed and pleased.  Pleased because i love the folks being asked and think they are very clever and annoyed, because as much as i love them i think they are not really recruiters for intentional communities and i have been fairly successfully for over a decade and the Open Circle clan knows this.  But i recognized this annoyance as a pointless luxury emotion and put it aside.

On my way back from Death City about a month back i stopped by for a blitz meeting with the Open Circle clan and some local friends of theirs and did a quick intense brainstorming meeting with them.

i asked “What are you looking for? Or how are excited about in growing your community?”  They replied they wanted 0rganic growth and to incubating new communities. To become and facilitate multi-generational community.

All these things were music to my ears, since i am interested in developing these things also and in search of allies.  I continued my sociocratic style quick go round questioning. “What are the obstacles or binding assumptions you have about this expansion?  Could you merge with another community? Could you leave Culpeper?”  They had surprisingly few binding assumptions.  They would merge with or foster independently a new community.  They would consider moving if they had an offer more compelling than what they had.  They were excited about local connections both in terms of food production and modeling localism.

The Vancouver Sun headline is “Japan rushes to restart reactors to avoid total shutdown”.  The article discusses the rush of the Japanese government to make sure that before the last operating reactor in the country is shut down in May, two others will be brought back on line to insure the grid is never without nuclear power.  Currently 53 or 54 reactors are down, and because Japanese nuclear policy has depended on local governments signing off on reactors operation, post Fukushima no local governments have been willing to say “yes” to restarting their reactors.  The reason given in this Reuters story for the rush to restart is that if the power grid is still operating without any reactors running, the populace will doubt the need for nuclear power.

But the “Rush” headline misses a number of other important stories, which are not making it to the North American media.  The Kyodo News reports that PM Noda assured the Japanese Diet on March 30th, that ”We will not push for restarting (the reactors) simply out of fears about power supply,”  This “promise” was made in response to the recent polls which that show that the public largely distrusts the government assessment of reactors’ safety and has concerns that Noda will disregard public opposition to restarting idled reactors.

Abigail woke up amused. She was doing comic theater in her dreams with friends who were engaged by her performance. When we spoke about it on the phone, she realized that it was rare for her to wake this way.

This got me spinning. We dont engage our dreams. Violating one of the funological principals, most of us almost all the time simply fall asleep without a thought about what we might dream about and we just watch our subconscious put on what ever show it wants for us.

What if we assumed a more active role in our dream experience? I am not talking about lucid dreaming. Where we are aware that we are dreaming, but not really designing it’s content, though lucid dreams can sometimes manipulate the dream environment radically. What I am interested in exploring is the idea that you can seed your dreams by holding on to ideas or images as you go into sleep.

 I’ve spoken with lots of people who find themselves dreaming about things which are pressing on them in their lives. It is clear we can unintentionally influence our dreams with the ideas which are important or up in our lives. But can we use dreams as self reflective tools to help us understand ourselves better?

San Francisco asks one especially tricky question: Are you doing what you love?

When i was in Eugene i got into a long and  heated argument with one of our larger hammocks customers who was upset about our prohibition on them selling thru Amazon and Walmart.  At the end of the conversation Abigail asked “How as that for you?”  After some brief reflection i replied “i have one of those conversations a month, many of my peers from college have those conversations all day long.  They make 6 figures for doing that work, i am willing to have one conversation a month like that for the rest of my lucky life style.”

But it is not completely true.  One of the things that this trip to San Francisco has taught me is that i need to be initiating more things.  Talking with Kyle at the Feyboy Mansion got me excited about being a community creator, even if they were not places i would live.  They are exploring buying land and creating a radical faery event space and commune.  It was clear early in the conversation that i could be of assistance to them.  Especially since they were not looking at the classical community start up problems (like a lack of cash) but instead had investors eager to support them, they had the high class problem of design and donor relations.

Bochie decided to call April “Not Here” because i am so often gone from the community these days.

As regular readers know, when i was in the Czech Republic i borrowed Erik Pipers cultural adaptation and started naming months things other than June and October.  Polyglot Erik was encouraged because the Slavs themselves have their own wild inspired month names.

But “Not Here” is strangely appropriate month name for me as well, because with unusually high probability i dont know where be in 7 days time.  I might be Am*dam, i might be Louisville and i might be someplace completely else.

Sara and i are trying to do the right thing in terms of our time together.  There are many factors at play, including the cost of the trip to Europe.  I am betting that my old college roommate Jay Walker will bail me out with his PriceLine.com cheap last minute tickets, should we decide to go.

i met Nora not far from her high tech office job on Folsom in San Francisco.  She is some how both not dressed up and highly stylish in my captured eye.  She is perhaps 30, but it is a bit hard to tell.  We have a shared friend, she has agreed to meet with me, because i pushed one of my old geek buddies.  i pushed  quite hard about it, actually.  I wanted to meet Anonymous if there was any way i could.   She would eat lunch with me and talk for 30 minutes, all on record.

The first things she told me was that Anonymous was not important anymore, but gifted hackers monitoring Anonymous feeds would appear to all the world to be from this brand name clandestine group.  This served their collective purposes.  She told me that there is a massive dark internet where the real hacker communication happens in various trusted limited chat spaces using an elaborate anarchist consensus building format, which i frankly did not understand very well.  If you cant find your way in, you cant come. And no one helps you find your way in. It is an elite club, which i sensed  some pride in her being in.

I posted this today
In the short time I have been back many members have asked me what my plans are.  The near term ones are a bit fuzzy, the longer term plans are becoming more clear.

In the next week or so, Sara and I will decide if we are going to go to Europe.  We do not have tickets yet and getting last minute cheap tickets is one of the deciding factors in the trip, it is not the only one.  If we dont go to Europe, we will likely go on a US domestic trip (perhaps to the Possibility Alliance in Missouri and to Caroline in Louisville).  In either case I will be back in time for the Tarrytown Fair in NY on May 1st.

I had originally planned and announced that I was going to quit Hx marketing and RPM before this vacation.  Hawina joined the RPM in part with the intention of getting me to stay longer in these jobs which I have.  At this point it is pretty clear I am going to stick to my earlier proposed retirement date of Sept 15th of this year from Marketing and RPM.  I feel like I have built the customer base significantly and I will do marketing for next years Early Buys before I go on PAL.

All the Stars (Sky, Hawina, Willow and Paxus) will be going to Europe in October of this year for 3 months.  Sky and Kassia are applying for membership this summer with the intention of returning around New
Years 2013 as new members.  This is when Hawina and Willow will likely be returning from their PAL.

Reactor projects are like zombies, hard to kill and even when you think they are dead they keep coming back.  The Belene nuclear power plant in Bulgaria is certainly such a project.  In order to kill it in 1992, Bulgarian activists had to actually overthrow the government.  But like a zombie, this multiply canceled project just kept coming back.

This week, after years of hard work, some dear friends finally killed this beast.  This time i looks like for sure.  I know some of these people and a bit about this place and want to tell my version of it’s story.

Bulgaria's two reactor complexes. Kozloduy operating and Belene recently closed

Bulgaria is what i call “tough turf” for international political organizing .  I was the international coordinator for Ecotopia 1992 in Bulgaria and i had heard all the horror stories about organizing there.  “Neme Problema” literally means “No problem” in Bulgarian, but what it really means is there may well be a problem and i am not telling you about it.  I thought myself clever and was determined to organize around this cultural divide.

Tamera is the community i probably should live at.  It has a mandate to be a model to save the world.   In the midst of the Portuguese dessert they create lakes and grow food.   They bring in all manner of experts and geniuses to teach and model all manner of sustainability philosophies and technologies.  They are thinking big and bold.

The other night i had the privileged to share the stage with Kate Bunney from Tamera.  She was an interesting mix of eloquent and pragmatic and a bit new agey.  She spoke and showed a short video about Tamera and it was quite impressive.

And comparisons are a bit foolish, because we are very different communities.  They require donations and workshop tuition to survive financially. Twin Oaks has 5 cottage industries and are income sharing.  They actively are looking for solutions to the worlds problems and promoting them widely, we are looking for solutions to our own collective problems and being somewhat insular about what we find.  Tamera is a culture that celebrates experts, Twin Oaks promotes egalitarianism and all contributions being valued equally.  Tamera is explicitly spiritual, we are clearly secular.

We both consider ourselves Eco-villages, but this is a big class of community types.

Kreisky Forum Speech – 5 Blossoming (May) 97

With IAEA and Austrian Permanent Mission to the UN On Sustainable Development and Nuclear Power

No rational definition of sustainability includes the current design of nuclear power plants. The people alive today receive the benefits from these reactors and then the following thousands of generations have to deal with the expensive and dangerous radwaste we are producing. Interim waste sites have been plagued by popular opposition, technical and geologic problems and as the recent UK decision demonstrates, governmental rejection. As for long term spent fuel storage – there is not an operating site anywhere in the world, though dozens of countries have been working on it, some for decades and billions of dollars have been spent, virtually every national program has been delayed.

To be sustainable a resource must reproduce itself. The ambitious plans for a nuclear breeder program are in a shambles – with the Super Fenix in France never to rise again due to endless technical and licensing problems. The Japanese breeder program is likely permanently derailed in the wake of the serious accident at the only operating breeder facility at Monju.

Reprocessing is the other way the nuclear industry has attempted to sustain itself. But the economics of reprocessing have always be questionable at best and now numerous utilities are canceling their reprocessing orders. The recent UK decision to block the NIREX dump site also seriously endangers the THORP facility in England, which now will likely have to add huge waste transport costs to its fragile economic justification.

Spring in Santa Cruz means Frisbee and that means DeLaveaga.  This disc golf course is where the world championships occasionally are held and is both challenging and visually dramatic.  Crystal, Rabbit, Anat and i played for an afternoon.

Rabbit told his story about trying to convince his comrades to play Frisbee golf doubles, where each of the pair on a team would throw from the same first point and then subsequent throws for both would be from the subsequent best landing spot of each of the two.  His friends were unconvinced and felt the spirit of the game was to do your personal best.  A view that strikes me as especially as US american in outlook.

an oft maligned outfit of mine

Rabbit was right.  Anat and i played on the same team both of us pretty marginal ability frisbee players.  But she could putt a bit better than i could and i could drive a bit straighter and longer than she could.  So between us, especially as weak players, there was some competition to Rabbit and Crystal who are borderline epic disc golfers.

Spring!

It’s spring in the Ozarks, and all of us are loving it.  The days have been sunny and warm (warm enough
to jump in the creek for many of us), and winter is far behind us. The Ozarks
are vibrant and alive with plant and animal life.  Chickweed, toothwort, trout lily, plantain,
wood sorrel, dandelion, cress, wild grape, and violet are just a few favorite
wild edibles popping up in abundance this time of year.  Many trees and smaller plants have already
begun to flower, with our many dogwoods and red buds putting on a brilliant
show of spring color.

“The US military would win more wars if they listened to me, but they dont.”  Crystal’s claim would be considered arrogant if it were coming from almost anyone else, but my old friend and political mentor is almost certainly right in this case.  As a scholar he has studied war extensively, and particularly the pentagons fascination with automated and computerized warfare.   I asked him about the effect of predator drones in recent combat and he explained how they contributed to losing the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  By increasing the civilian casualties and especially in a way that breeds more people to the resistance to the US occupation.  He pointed out that the current military and political doctrine of minimal casualties is also central to the US failing to win wars.  You must take casualties to win. That the US colonial effort in Iraq failed to win the hearts and minds of the people because there was no connection to the people.  And that the British were much better at imperialism through sending in people who spoke the language and lived amongst the people.

Predator Drones at work losing the wars

Abigail and i often talk about posters.

The way that the bureaucracy works is that it wants measurable products for campaigns, including from programs that deal with as tricky to quantify problems as sexual violence.  What Abigail does that is most effective is very progressive peer theater work with SWAT – the Sexual Wellness Advocacy Team.  Students doing powerful theater on topics people are uncomfortable talking about and engaging audiences to think and talk and challenge rape supportive norms.

And the administration wants posters.  There is money for posters.  So she makes posters. Reclaiming a derogatory catch phrase to encourage communication and consent. We know that you cant stop rape with posters but we’ll try, and hopefully shake up some gender stereotypes while we’re at it.

[i like the msgs in these two posters, the hotter images are actually mixed ethnic and same sex posters.]

On the day that I did not especially celebrate my 55th birthday, I did get my tattoo touched up. The original was done in Hawaii by a peace activist who trained as a marine sniper to understand what it means to be a warrior. The tattoo has three components which iconographically represent my sons three names: Willow Star Falcon

Santa Cruz circa 2012 today

Starting at the end. When Hawina changed her name, I gave her the little bird icon she places where the dot in the i would be. When she Anglicized her last name to Falcon, this bird became representative of that name choice. When Willow was born, the written version of his name uses a W which is comprised of two overlapping Vs. These Vs evolved into the Falcon bird from about the I in Hawina’s name. The middle star is a star.

i went with Abigail and her friends to see Wanderlust last night and really enjoyed it.  Mostly because the film was pretty funny, but at least partly because it is an excellent parody of the culture i hail from.  Someone had done a bunch of research on US communes from the late 60s and early 70s or they have lived at one.

One of the parodies was about doors.  The bedroom that Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd end up in have no door.  The charismatic leader explains that doors separate people and they want to create a more connected culture.    While we never did this with doors to peoples individual rooms, it was certainly the case that there were some toilets which were not hidden away in stalls in the bathrooms in the community when i arrived.  Mostly these have gotten covered up with curtains, but there once was definitely the idea/belief that we wanted to move people away from the shame of naked bodies.

The movie ends with Rudd closing the door to his “small and expensive” apartment, symbolic of creating the space and privacy which he needs.

It would be way too much to ask such a film to have the heroes decide to stay on the commune.  The fact that one of them had gotten to the place of loving it and wanting to stay was slightly rewarding for me as a recruiter to a commune.  We actually had a couple who just graduated from Dartmouth come and live at Twin Oaks for a while and when he was ready to leave and pursue law school, she decided that she wanted to stay and enjoy the “good life”.

i am inspired to go thru some of the key points from this parody which need to be reclaimed.

During his recent visit Tobias and i took a sauna at the lovely facility we have at Twin Oaks.   During one of the cooling rounds we were on the dock together and Tobias decided i should go in the freezing pond to experience it.  He came over and started lifting me up and moving me towards the edge of the dock.  I said no a couple of times and this did not slow him down.  Finally, slightly frustrated i said

You don’t have consent

And he stopped.  And i realized that this has attained, at least in the progressive/radical culture that i live in, the highest level of meaning.  I was quite pleased by this.

Backstay {July 1989, 300 miles E of Rarotonga, South Pacific} “ALL HANDS ON DECK!” and your heart stops, but your feet move, out of the bunk, into the nearest shorts, across the wet floor, thru the fallen dishes and up the main hatch. Immediately your drenched, but it’s fresh not salt, a squall, a bad one. Your pitifully underdressed, but it’s not a fashion show, no time to change – a strictly come-as-you-are crisis.

“DECK LIGHTS!” But the wind is so strong the words have to be repeated to complete their ten foot journey. After some fumbling below, the powerful mast mounted lights blare on. You force your eyes to adjust and there’s the problem. The backstay has snapped. This piece of 3/8? braided stainless steel cable is writhing on the deck like an angry hydra, nipping at your bare feet.

“DROP THE MAIN!” Heeling severely, water is racing over the leeward deck, if another stay breaks we could be demasted – potentially life threatening. Justin moves forward to release the halyard, a two handed job.

“WAVE!”, but the warning is too late, Justin is hit from behind and slides on his back, across the deck towards the raging sea. Sputtering and flailing in the water, ultimately he grabs the life lines. If he were to go over the side now it would take five minutes to drop the main and turn the boat around. We’d travel almost a mile in that time and with these deafening winds and high seas a mile is forever. We’d never find him. He’s not wearing a safety harness, no one is, it’s not part of tonights dress code. Doc’s big hand is reaching towards Justin’s feet, but he’s too slow.