posted by jim | April 4, 2010

from Democracy Now; some rights reserved.

“If it is not controversial…If it is not dangerous, if it does not ask us to consider changes that frighten the establishment, it is not about democracy.” -Paul Woodruff, First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea.

I’m leading a reading group on democracy at the Northern Virginia Ethical Society using Paul Woodruff’s book First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea.

Arundahti Roy writes about the experiment of liberal democracy in India…but is it really democracy: I am eager to read her new work.

Category: Community & Mutual Aid, DIY Community & Mutual Aid, Utopian Economics | No Comments »
Tags: arundhati roy, democracy, field notes on democracy: listening to grasshoppers, first democracy: the challenge of an ancient idea, paul woodruff

posted by jim | October 26, 2009

Last year in the Mid-Atlantic region there was a lot of discussion about the lack of acorns. Some oak trees, it seemed from some accounts, produced no acorns at all (this may be the oak trees evolutionary way of keeping the squirrel population at a sustainable level). This year was a different story: there was plenty for everybody. The squirrels had so many this year that they hardly complained when my son and I gathered a mess of ‘em and left the rest to compost naturally. So now what to do with them? Acorns take a lot of labor to prepare but they remind me a bit of wheat. I mean in their ability to serve as a staple food. Listen:

California Indians did not have to be farmers, and for the most part were hunters and gatherers. There was a ready supply of deer, fish, rabbits, fowl, native plants for vegetables, native fruits, and even seaweed. Even so, acorns are said to have been the main food of as many as 3/4 of our native Californians. Acorns were everywhere, are easy to gather and store fairly well … as long as your storage places are squirrel tight. Some groups buried baskets of nuts until they were needed.@ Siouxme.com.

I can believe that when I see so many acorns in a suburban landscape that has many fewer oak trees than it once did.
But as I was saying using acorn is a labor intensive job: it helps to have a village. Barring that, here are some techniques I found helpful to getting acorns.
1. Enlist the aid of kids. They love gathering them.
2. Use something heavy to crack them. I used a sledge hammer. We put some down on the sidewalk and I picked up the sledge hammer and dropped it on them. Imagine the early Indians (sorry, after listening to Sherman Alexie I can’t say Native American or Indigenous people with a straight face anymore) using a large wooden mortar and pestle. Once you’ve cracked them you have to take the shell off. This takes tough nails.
3. Once you have separated the meat from the shells acorns need to be leached in water. You can read how this was traditionally done at Sioux Me. I boiled the water a couple of times but then used several changes of cold water.
4. I put the meats on aluminum foil and dried them on our grill after cooking a meal (hey I’m a utopian economist, right).
5. Final step, I used an electric grinder to make acorn flour. It is slow going in my little grinder but you don’t need much. I can see where two or three people working together with a large stone or wooden pestle could do a better job. Acorns don’t have any gluten which means the flour won’t stick together like wheat does, you can use it like corn meal in your conventional recipes.
For a fantastic taste experience try this Acorn Cake recipe. I highly recommend it but heed the warning on cook time. When acorns are abundant, you get a real sense of why the Earth becomes the subject of worship and adoration in many cultures. Enjoy the abundance!

Category: DIY Community & Mutual Aid, DIY Food, Food, Utopian Economics | No Comments »
Tags: acorn flour, acorns, DIY Foo

posted by jim | August 14, 2009

photo by Mike Licht, some rights reserved.
With Sarah Palin working on the issue, can universal health coverage be far behind? Perhaps Sarah Palin’s Death Panel will look something like this. Please see Mike Licht’s creative montage at his flickr site. So this is why Paula Abdul quit Idol!
Here are the facts:
1. The U.S. does not have the finest health care coverage in the world. It’s not even in the top 10. It is not even in the top 20. Don’t trust me. Look it up.
2. The U.S. spends more on healthcare than all first world countries and has worse results.
3. Countries with national coverage spend less per person than our current system AND they have better results.

Universal insurance is as much an Enlightenment idea as any notion of socialism. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and their friend the Marquis de Condorcet-perhaps the most utopian of them all-wrote about the use of social insurance. Here is Thomas Malthus criticizing Condorcet:

“By the application of calculations to the probablilities of life and the interest of money, he proposes that a fund should be established which should assure to the old an assistance, produced, in part, by their own former savings, and, in part, by the savings of individuals who in making the same sacrifice die before they reap the benefit of it. The same, or a similar fund, should give assistance to women and children who lose their husbands, or fathers…”

Sounds a lot like our modern Social Security to me. Viva la Classical Liberalism!

Category: Body Health DIY, Community & Mutual Aid, DIY Community & Mutual Aid, Do It Ourselves Health, Health, Mental Health DIY, Utopian Economics | No Comments »
Tags: death panel, Death Panels, Healthcare, Paula Abdul, Sarah Palin

posted by jim | June 23, 2009

This video may not be suitable for minors. It may discomfort the comfortable. I was playing Bucky Fuller’s World Game in the early 1990’s. The question came up as to what we thought would change the world and I remember answering the ability for anyone to speak to anyone else. I hadn’t used the internet yet, but I would soon. We all would soon.

Category: Community & Mutual Aid, DIY Community & Mutual Aid | No Comments »
Tags: Buckminster Fuller World Game, Community & Mutual Aid, DIY Community & Mutual Aid, DIY Democracy

posted by jim | April 21, 2009

 My first experience with Youth Hostels was a hostel in San Francisco. The door on the address had a sign suggesting we check at a local bar if no one answered. Someone did answer our knock however. My wife and I followed him up to a room and to be honest the thin mattress on the floor didn’t look appealing-never mind the cats that went scurrying from the room. On a recent visit to Colorado I couldn’t help notice the write-up on a youth hostel in the town where we were staying it sounded a lot different from our first experience but my wife was unmoved. But we’re both reconsidering after taking a read of this New York Times article on Youth Hostels. Hostels are more family-friendly, more age friendly to older travelers, and you no longer have to feel like you need to enter carrying a heavy back pack.

The world of hip city hostels, who cares if your room has nothing but a bed (often a bunk), a simple bath (a shower with no bath products) and a small cupboard with no hangers? Common rooms, meanwhile, are often minimally — but stylishly — furnished with Scandinavian-style sofas and tables.
Countering the lack of amenities, there is usually an eclectic bar, a 24-hour Internet cafe with Wi-Fi, group tours around the city, entertainment (D.J.’s, live music and karaoke nights), kitchens where you can make your own meals or a restaurant where you can buy one — all providing a built-in social life for travelers.

Hostels across Europe have undergone a transformation over the last decade. “There has been serious quality improvement in the hostel movement,” said Johan Krüger, head of communications for Hostelling International, a consortium of youth hostel associations in over 80 countries that operate more than 4,000 hostels.

“Though hostels have always had the big shared dormitory-style rooms, we are now seeing more demand among travelers for double or single en suite rooms,” Mr. Krüger said, adding that hostels had grown even more popular in the midst of the recession. In 2008, Hostelling International had a 14 percent increase, to 1.4 million bookings, on its Web site, www.hihostels.com.
@ In Europe, Hostels Branch Out From Young Backpackers – NYTimes.com.

Check out these other sites for additional information:
hostelbrokers, hihostels, and hostelworld.

photo by kokorowashinjin; some rights reserved.

Category: Community & Mutual Aid, DIY Community & Mutual Aid, Knowledge, Travel | No Comments »
Tags: community, hostels, intelligence increase, Knowledge, Travel, youth hostels

posted by jim | March 25, 2009

Who would have thought that slacking was valuable? If you like to play games and solve puzzles on your computer consider downloading the game Fold It. Your playing the game can provide information on the best way to help computers fold proteins. Understanding protein folding could be valuable in understanding cancer, Alzheimer’s, and HIV /AIDS.

The blog Freakonomics talks a bit about the phenomena of using your slack for gain.

 

 
Consider the following: in 2003 alone, nine billion person-hours were spent playing the video game version of Solitaire — enough to create 500 Panama Canals. And as the popularity of highly “casual games” like Solitaire has grown in recent years, researchers have begun exploring ways to channel the enthusiasm of their players into experiences that solve very real problems.

One of those researchers is Professor Luis von Ahn, a winner of the MacArthur “genius grant.” Professor von Ahn created the ESP Game, which addresses the inability of today’s computers to identify random images.

The game works like this: two anonymous players are matched online without any means of communicating. Both players are shown an image (for example, a flowering plant) while a clock counts down. The players must then type words that describe the image, such as “plant.” When both players have typed at least one word in common, they both score points. More importantly, the players have also unintentionally taught the computer that the picture contains a plant!

More than 20 million labels have been harvested by the ESP Game in just a few years — the equivalent of several million dollars of free labor.

@ There’s Free Labor in Video Games – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

Category: Community & Mutual Aid, DIY Community & Mutual Aid, Utopian Economics | No Comments »
Tags: community, Fold it, games, slack

posted by jim | March 25, 2009

Home owner’s associations are a strange part of the suburban and urban landscape. Archaic corporate entities that seem to fill with people overly concerned with house colors, what mailboxes look like, and whose not retrieving their trash cans within 24 hours. But I’ve always hoped for them as part of the solution. Wherever people can use their power to bargain collectively there’s a chance for  change.

My friends over at Blueberry Hill Cohousing fought the good fight to create a beautiful planned community with walking neighborhoods and a common house to share dinner together. I was privileged to participate in the early stages of the group and I know how difficult it was.

If your part of a home owners association or co-op the New York Times gives you a look at what it takes to turn yours green or political:

As the conservative writer Robert Nisbet notes it is the community and not the individual that was the irreducible unit of society for much of history.

Modernism has atomized us into employment at will individuals. In America we are proud of our individual rights which is one of modernities greatest triumphs, but the truth is that corporations hold tremendous power over our lives and yet no one speaks of Corporate Rights or questions them. Libertarians and Conservatives really believe their rhetoric when they speak of individual liberty and business in the same sentence. Everyone hates a committee unless it’s a cushy, rubber stamping corporate board, but if we atoms, we individuals, want to assert our rights we will have to get good at it.  

Robert Nisbet quotes the anarchist Joseph Proudhon in his Quest for Community “multiply your associations and be free.” I couldn’t agree more.

In a similar take on community empowerment, Treehugger suggests you start your own Cul de sac commune. You can share resources, compost piles, have pot lucks together, and you don’t need a board! Nobody can stop you; there is no law against it. What could be more anarchistic than a pot luck?

And might I suggest you leverage your buying power and negotiate with local businesses, and urge your local government to get a bus stop close by and to put in speed bumps.

Category: Community & Mutual Aid, DIY Community & Mutual Aid, Shelter & Household, Utopian Economics | No Comments »
Tags: Cohousing, corporate rights, Joseph Proudhon, Utopian Economics