PermaLiv.MyPortfolio.com / LeveVeg.MyPortfolio.com

It's all so simple. There's now too little energy to sustain growth. This means the end of investments. Soon you will have to pay banks for having money on your bank account. People will get lower wages. There will not be enough financial support to continue mining of energy and metals. Bottleneck technologies with low profit rates will go out of the system, making domino effects of falling technologies, as it's all interwoven. We are too many people to survive with solar energy from plants alone, and we will start killing each other. The woods will be cut down, and so on. This is happening now. This is the end-game. And it's all so simple to understand. Here's a comment from Gail Tverberg: I will try to explain that in another post. Basically, we are always behind in the process, so debt is absolutely essential to the system. Accumulation of metal products and other goods that represent real value is incredibly slow, if all an economy has to work with is c...

Paper:   A systems and thermodynamics perspective on technology in the circular economy . By Crelis F. Rammelt and Phillip Crisp. real-world economics review, issue no. 68 The increase of entropy on earth as a whole is reversed only because of the existence of a complex biosphere powered primarily by solar radiation, which represents the main source of work and inflow of exergy. After most of this exergy is reflected back into space, some of it is transformed by plants and organisms into chemical exergy and some of it eventually ends up buried as low entropy stocks of carbon, coal, oil and gas. Flows of energy on earth are part of an open cycle; solar exergy comes in and heat goes out. Flows of matter on the other hand are part of a closed cycle (Boulding 1966). Ecosystems are driven by high-exergy and lowentropy resources, and generate almost no waste. In contrast, engineered systems are driven by the extraction of low-exergy resources. At the other end, they produce, accumulate...

Jeg kan ikke svare for venstresida, bare for meg sjøl. Det enkle svaret er nei. Det har skjedd elendighet til alle tider, og vil sikkert også skje i framtida. Men konkret og praktisk: Det er en svært liten gruppe mennesker, ca. 0,01% av menneskheten som kontrollerer det meste av kapital og eiendom, og som rår over krig og fred. Krigslobbyen er veldig sterk, og det er de samme selskapene som eier de store bankene som også eier storundustrien, deriblant våpenindustrien. Denne gruppa har kjøpt seg de fleste kongressmedlemmene i USA og parlamentarikere i mange land. Jeg jobber konkret med å kartlegge deres makt, og på bloggen her finner du en del av det arbeidet jeg har gjort. Når Obama har bombet sju land på fem år, så har det forbindelse med disse maktforholda. En mann som George Soros har så stor økonomisk makt at man skal ta det alvorlig når han krever at EU gir 20 milliarder dollar til Ukraina for å krige mot Russland. - Pål Steigan Grunnen til at jeg poster dette sitatet er fordi j...

Gail Tverberg, one of the world’s best analysts and the “doomsday prophets own Miss Marple”, has responded  to my article about methane: Let’s stop talking about climate change. If financial collapse brings down the economy, hardly any of us are going to be around to observe it, assuming it happens. The earth’s ecosystems will recover from climate change; it is human civilization that likely won’t–but human civilization has huge other challenges, as I keep pointing out. Climate change models haven’t built financial collapse into them, so the story they are telling is seriously distorted. Climate change is popular from a political point of view, because it takes peoples eyes off of our (other) close at hand problems. It is popular with scientists, because it generates huge funding for studying this subject, whether or not we can do anything about it. The one thing we can do that is likely to impact the course of climate change is to collapse the economy, and that seems to be ...

  www.commonstransition.org The emancipatory forces of the world urgently need to move away from the simple market/state duopoly and the false binary choices between ‘more market’ or ‘more state’. As an alternative, we propose that we move to a commons-centric society in which a post-capitalist market and state are at the service of the citizens as commoners. While there are already substantial, if not thriving, social movements in favor of the commons, the sharing society and peer-to-peer dynamics, this is the first coherent effort to craft a transition program in which this transformation is described in political and policy terms. - Michel Bauwens The problem is not just too much market and not enough state. The problem is also that the state has become an enabler of the market, the market has become embedded in the state and, we might even say that today the state itself is not what could be called a ‘public institution’. -  Ciudad Furor The people of the world today...

It remains to be seen what the commons will come to mean — a catch-all buzzword easily co-opted by the establishment or a genuine shift away from it. By  Nathan Schneider The commons is an old, simple idea but one that we have never needed so urgently. It’s whatever a community of people shares and manages together. A commons can be anything from a lake that has been fished for centuries to a folk song no one owns to a neighborhood garden to the planet itself. Commoning goes back as long as human history, and it was a basic assumption of the Byzantine emperor Justinian’s legal code and  the Magna Carta . It forms the basis for a kind of economics run by neither state nor market but rather by community relationships in which everyone has a personal stake in a shared property or project.

Brilliant! Vil repetere: Marked = produkt – penger – produkt Kapitalisme = penger – produkt – proffitt Finans = penger – proffitt – penger Så min bestemor var en del av markedet da hun hadde stabburet fullt av høner og så solgte disse for å kjøpe smør hos den lokale kjøpmannen, da hun ikke hadde ku. Har denne dama hørt om InnGruppe-Demokratiet? Hun har forstått at demokratiet er meningsløst så lenge det ikke innbefatter økonomien. Noen burde føre henne og Bongard sammen. Kom videre til å tenke på at menneskesynet blir et helt annet i et marked enn i kapitalismen. Mens man i et marked ser på sine medmennesker som likestilte samarbeidspartnere, ser man i kapitalismen på mennesker som noen man kan utnytte og profitere på. Personlig kan jeg ikke se noen vesensforskjell på kapitalismen og slaveriet, mens markedet er frihet. Det var vel også derfor elitene ble så bekymret i seinmiddelalderen, da de så at føydalismen svekket seg og det begynte å utvikles markeder. Derfor b...

Kommentar her . Jeg begynte i dag å lese noen artikler av Erik Lunde på VD, og det viser seg at han har skrevet mye bra, og har et hjerte som banker for allmenningene og allmenningheten. En meget god tekst er: - Støre møtte den sosialdemokratiske inkvisisjon: http://www.verdidebatt.no/deba... "Støre er ikke den første sosialdemokraten som møter motbør når han vil løfte frem betydningen av små, naturlige fellesskap. Troen på at andre enn det offentlige kan ta ansvar for og skape velferd, har aldri vært særlig sterk hos sosialdemokrater. For sosialdemokrater bygges fellesskap ovenfra gjennom politiske vedtak og reguleringer. Som Einar Førde sa det: «Regulering er sivilisasjon!» Det kan virke som om det bare er når en velferdsoppgave er løst av det offentlige, at den er løst i fellesskap. Alt annet er «privatisering». På 1990-tallet ble disse dogmene utfordret innenfra. I boken The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy etterlyste den britiske sosiologen Anthony Gid...

Viktig innlegg av Erik Lunde på VD. Historien har vist oss hvor katastrofal antisemittisme kan være. Men jødehatet er ikke historie. Mange har lest Marte Michelets kritikerroste bok Den største forbrytelsen i julen. Den usedvanlig viktige boken forteller historien om ofre og gjerningsmenn i det norske holocaust. Noe av det som gjør sterkt inntrykk i boken er hvor sterk antisemittismen var i det norske samfunnet i tiårene før krigen brøt ut. Motviljen mot den jødiske minoriteten kan være med på å forklare hvordan forbrytelsen mot jødene under krigen kunne skje uten større motstand fra den norske befolkningen. Antisemittisme i dag Dessverre er det godt dokumentert at antisemittismen ikke er et tilbakelagt kapittel. Senter for studier av Holocaust og livssynsminoriteter (HL-senteret) har publisert en rapport som viser at én av fem nordmenn støtter påstanden om at «verdens jøder arbeider i det skjulte for å fremme jødiske interesser». Én av fire nordmenn mener det er riktig at ...

Foto: Ewa Jernas Patrycja

The biologist Jared Diamond published in 2005 the book Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive . He summarizes how native populations and cultures that have ‘advanced’ in technology, have, without exception, expanded above carrying boundaries, destroying their own foundation for life. And then they collapsed. There are no historical examples of native populations who cared about anything else than short sighted gain. Human cultures have in the past only been restricted by technological limitations in using up resources, not by their nobility. There is a clear boundary between those cultures who remained at a hunter/gatherer level, in which some still exist, and cultures which developed technology or grew their populations to change the ecosystems they depended upon. All the latter-mentioned cultures are gone, except for the one we live in today. The world’s earlier cultures, like ours today, are a history of how people used all available means to fight for, exploit and deple...

By Eivind Berge. Original article here . To intuitively understand why deflation is the endgame of our civilization, divide people into miners and everyone else. The miners are everyone in the business of extracting nonrenewable resources, such as oil and metals. Miners are indisputably subject to diminishing returns as we consume the highest ore grades first, which means rising inefficiency and increased costs for every unit produced. Therefore, to keep civilization running, society must allocate increasing amounts of resources to the miners at the expense of everyone else. In other words, we get poorer, and poorer people are able to pay less, rather than more, for commodities. As natural resources get depleted, it therefore follows from the law of supply and demand that commodity prices will go down, rather than up as is commonly and erroneously assumed. Perhaps this becomes clearer if "demand" is understood as "affordability," without which there can be no de...

A small freshwater animal – the uncommonly resilient hydra – challenges the belief that all living things must die:

In principle, groups can spend a lot of time and energy keeping ideas and projects artificially alive. We are all familiar with the agenda item that keeps coming up over and over again but that no one seems to have energy for; or the committee for which energy is fading, attendance is waning, and discussion becomes mostly about process rather than substance. Putting energy into dying things distracts attention from helping other things grow. That things die is okay. The wonderful thing about dying is that it leads to new life. When things die, the energy goes to other places. Letting things die fertilizes new creativity. Practical Tip: Make deliberate decisions about what you want to help grow and what you want to let die. Chasing instincts to save everything is inefficient. If a committee or project of your group is dying and it is not something that you care about or have optimism around, don't put energy into keeping it alive. Plan for dying. Create committees with sunset p...

People who follow us closely will have noticed that one of my current priorities in the p2pfoundation.net wiki is documenting solidarity mechanisms. This is not an accident, and the following analysis, a brilliant essay and an absolute must-read, shows us why. - Michel Bauwens -   We Are All Very Anxious Se too:  Category:P2P Solidarity

Det har vært publisert to informative artikler i det siste, som på et vis har et fellesskap. Mens vi i Vest stadig bærer på skyld over korsfarertiden, ble året 2014 det året da de første kristne kirkesamfunn, med røtter tilbake til aposteltiden, forsvant. En 2000-årig historie og tilstedeværelse visket ut på ett år, uten at knapt en avis har viet det oppmerksomhet.  Samtidig kan man stille spørsmålstegn ved hvor mye skyld vi bør kjenne på for korsfarertiden, da bildet er mer sammensatt enn som så. Og i hvor stor grad kjenner de muslimske land, dog med god støtte fra vestlige intervensjoner, på skam over å ha utslettet verdens eldste kristne samfunn? Studer også de meget informative kommentarene til korsfarerartikkelen. -  Krig i 1000 år – kollektiv skyld? (av Pål Steigan) -  Den glemte tragedien  (av Erling Rimehaug) Fra Rimehaugs artikkel: Det var søster Luna som fortalte dette i Vårt Land en av de siste dagene i 2014. Byen hun forteller om, er Karakos...

Today, the atmosphere contains 5 Gt methane. An estimate estimates that around 50 gigatonnes of methane might be about to be released in the Arctic, ie, a tenfold increase. Several thousand Gt is stored in the Arctic permafrost, in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf alone lies the 500 – 5000 Gt methane. Methane is by releasing more than 150 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2, after 20 years 86 times stronger on average, and after 100 years 23 times stronger. This is because it turns into H2O and CO2. Man is a product of fire, this now seems to become our tragedy. Meanwhile the Sunday open stores are being debated in Norway, obviously a bad thing and a forcing of consumerism, yet evidence of human short time horizon. Geoengineering can not help us, it is far more sensible to store carbon in the soil. It is 5-6 times more carbon in the soil than in the atmosphere and vegetation combined. Here biochar ( terra preta ) play an important role. Biochar may be in the soil f...

Owned by the same family for 1,300 years, the Japanese inn Houshi Ryokan is a marvel of tradition and resilience:

Les artikkelen kommentaren er knyttet til her . Bildet av verdens ledere er konstruert: http://steigan.no/2015/01/14/f... Ja, du har rett, 1-0 til terroristene. Det er trist. Å harselere med den kristne tro er egentlig ingen vits, hva skal til i dag av harselering og satire for at en kristen skal gidde å lee på øyenbrynet? Ikke det at det er bra vi har blitt så blaserte, men religion er tross alt ingen person. "Alle mennesker fortjener respekt, men alle ideer fortjener ikke respekt. Jeg respekterer ikke ideen om at en mann ble født av en jomfru, gikk på vannet og sto opp av de døde. Jeg respekterer ikke ideen om at vi skal følge en profet som i en alder av 53 år hadde sex med en pike på ni år og beordret mord på hele landsbyer av jøder fordi de ikke ville følge ham. Jeg respekterer ikke ideen om at Vestbredden ble overlevert jødene av gud og at palestinerne skal bli bombet og trakassert for å overgi den. Jeg respekterer ikke ideen om at vi i et tidligere liv har vært geiter, og a...

He, he, Adolf Loos, you've made a fool of yourself! I LOVE taggers!!! Original image here . In his famous essay of 1908, “Ornament and Crime,” the Austrian writer/architect Adolf Loos presented an argument for the minimalist industrial aesthetic that has shaped modernism and neo-modernism ever since. Surprisingly, he built this argument upon a foundation that is accepted today by almost no one; the cultural superiority of “modern man”, by which he meant Northern European males. Loos proclaimed that, in this new era of streamlined modern production, we had apparently become unable to produce “authentic ornamental detail.” But are we alone, he asked, unable to have our own style do what “any Negro”, or any other race and period before us, could do? Of course not, he argued. We are more advanced, more “modern.” Our style must be the very aesthetic paucity that comes with the streamlined goods of industrial production — a hallmark of advancement and superiority. In effect, our “...

The book is out! By Michael W. Mehaffy and Nikos A. Salingaros In this brief, accessible volume, the authors — an urban philosopher and a mathematician-physicist — explain the surprising new findings from the sciences that are beginning to transform environmental design in the modern era. Authors Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros explore fractals, networks, self-organization, dynamical systems and other revolutionary ideas, describing them to non-science readers in a direct and engaging way. The book also examines fascinating new topics of design, including Agile, Wiki, Design Patterns and other “open-source” approaches from the software world. The authors conclude that a profound transformation is under way in modern design — and today’s students and practitioners will need to be aware of its implications for our future. “Lucidly describes what’s coming in the world of design — and what needs to come.” —Ward Cunningham, Inventor of wiki, and pioneer of Pattern Languages...

Trapani, Sicily! Not-separateness is the degree of connectedness an element has with all that is around it. A thing which has this quality feels completely at peace, because it is so deeply interconnected with its world. There is no abruptness, no sharpness, but often an incomplete edge which softens the hard boundary. The element is drawn into its setting, and the element draws its setting into itself. Not-separateness is a profound connection occurring at many scales between a center and the other centers which surround it, so that they melt into one another and become inseparable. - TkWA

"A magical cabin converted from a watermill by a Serbian painter whose father owned and operated minimills along this Bosnian river.” Photo by Brice Portolano While the typical Norwegian "cabin" today is reduced to vulgar suburbanism in timber, as Norwegians are unable to imagine anything else than Suburban Hell , there are still cabins brought in from the fairy tales in poorer parts of the world.

DAVID GRAEBER Asecret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with. Read on...

- Life Without Cars 2014 Unfortunately, when people imagine Life Without Cars today, they usually imagine today's Suburban Hell, perhaps with some bike lanes. This is stupid. Suburban Hell is designed around automobile dependency, which is why even cyclists feel like lonely refugees in a barren landscape of gigantic roadways and parking lots. This pattern is typified by places like Gjøvik, Oppland, although almost all of Norway today is in one or another variety of Suburban Hell. A part of the Norwegian scenery usually not presented in the tourist brochures. Here from Gjøvik . 

Energibehovet fram mot 2035, skissert av BP Energiproduksjonen fram mot 2035, skissert av Gail Tverberg Som Terje Bongard sier det:  «Vi kan leve av Pensjonsfondet til evig tid», sa finanskomiteens leder Torgeir Micaelsen på TV før jul (2010). Han innser kanskje ikke alvoret før julemiddagen hans i 2040 blir en harddisk med pengedata fra en skrotet børsserver?

This house is drawn by architect Bill Fornaciari I never thought a contemporary architect could draw such a beautiful house. This house is filled with beautiful patterns and scales, shining with an almost extreme simplicity and inner calm. It's simply a house which brings peace to the land and the world.  Read the whole story at the Shelter blog here .

Are you a mechanical or biological human being? The mechanistic idea of order can be traced to Descartes, around 1640. His idea was: if you want to know how something works, you can find it out by pretending that it is a machine. You completely isolate the thing you are interested in – the rolling of a ball, the falling of an apple, the flowing of the blood in the human body – from everything else, and you invent a mechanical model, a mental toy, which obeys certain rules, and which will then replicate the behavior of the thing. It was because of this kind of Cartesian thought that one was able to find out how things work in a modern sense. However, the crucial thing which Descartes understood very well, but which we most often forget, is that this process is only a method. This business of isolating things, breaking them into fragments, and of making machinelike pictures (or models) of how things work, is not how reality actually is. It is a convenient mental exercise, somethin...

There’s something mysterious about organless plasmodial slime mould that suggests intelligence where we least expect it. The slime mould is being used to explore biological-inspired design, emergence theory, unconventional computing and robot controllers, much of which borders on the world of science fiction.

Et moment som ligger i kjernen av allmenningenes oppløsning er utviklingen av vårt mekaniske verdensbilde, hvis røtter vi kan spore til Descartes: The mechanistic idea of order can be traced to Descartes, around 1640. His idea was: if you want to know how something works, you can find it out by pretending that it is a machine. You completely isolate the thing you are interested in – the rolling of a ball, the falling of an apple, the flowing of the blood in the human body – from everything else, and you invent a mechanical model, a mental toy, which obeys certain rules, and which will then replicate the behavior of the thing. It was because of this kind of Cartesian thought that one was able to find out how things work in a modern sense. However, the crucial thing which Descartes understood very well, but which we most often forget, is that this process is only a method. This business of isolating things, breaking them into fragments, and of making machinelike pictures (or models) ...

Les hele diskusjonstråden kommentaren er knyttet til  her . Takk for lenker og utdyping! Du har helt klart rett i at allmenningenes oppløsning må forstås primært utifra juridisk og økonomisk utvikling fra tidlig moderne tid, det er jo nettopp dette David Bollier er opptatt av også. Vil tro du vil ha stor glede av hans forrige bok "Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law of the Commons", som han har laget ei flott hjemmeside til: http://commonslawproject.org/ Selv har jeg kun lest "Think Like a Commoner", som er ment som ei inspirasjonsbok for den allmenne mann og kvinne. Motsatsen til den suburbane eneboligen, hvor alt er brutt ned til enkeltheter, er Alexanders "A Pattern Language" hvor alt er vevd sammen i et stort hele. Se også Mehaffy & Salingaros essay "A Vision for Architecture as More Than the Sum of Its Parts":  http://permaculturenews.org/20... Også David Bollier ser ut til å ha et mildest talt anstr...

Read the article: -  The smartest cities rely on citizen cunning and unglamorous technology We can see this most easily by considering just who it is the smart city is intended for – by seeking to discover what model of urban subjectivity is inscribed in the scenarios offered by the multinational IT vendors that developed the smart city concept in the first place, and who are heavily involved in sites like Palava. When you examine their internal documentation, marketing materials and extant interventions, it becomes evident there is a pronounced way of thinking about the civic that is bound up in all of them, with rather grim implications for the politics of participation. A close reading leaves little room for doubt that vendors like Microsoft, IBM, Siemens, Cisco and Hitachi construct the resident of the smart city as someone without agency; merely a passive consumer of municipal services – at best, perhaps, a generator of data that can later be aggregated, mined for rele...