Monday, January 26, 2015

Instead of being a virtuous circle, of more debt allowing more economic growth, it becomes a vicious circle

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 charcoal made from burning trees. It is difficult to make more than a few metal tools using charcoal from trees, without causing deforestation. Farmers find it difficult working with wooden plows. Most of the population must work at growing and processing food, when tools are this limited. Heat energy is particularly needed, and supplies of this from wood are very low. Wind and water power don’t provide them either–they provide mechanical energy. Solar from the sun is too diffuse.

In order to set up a system that will create goods or get an accumulation of wealth, in the form of goods that can be used for making products or generating electricity, we need a combination of energy products from the ground plus other resources that can be used with the energy products, like ores to produce steel. These can be used to make things such as modern hydroelectric plants, factories, and even nuclear power plants, wind turbines, and solar PV.

In order to afford all of these resources, the only approach is debt. This debt is at many levels–for the ultimate consumer of the product to be able to afford the new car or house; for the businesses in the supply chain to be able to put their businesses together and operate them; and for the company extracting the ore to extract the oil. There may also be a need for government borrowing to afford to put in roads, to facilitate the whole operation. Of course, as new workers are added to these businesses, they will take the income they gain, and use it as a basis for new debts as well, such as mortgages on houses. (Making new renewables, such as solar VP, is even worse than fossil fuels for requiring a lot of debt.)

As long as the gains the economy is getting from economic growth are great enough to service all of this debt, the economy is in reasonable shape. The problem is that diminishing returns sets in, in many ways–not just in the extraction of oil, but also in the extraction of minerals, and in obtaining fresh water (among other things). True economic growth starts falling, and it becomes harder and harder to service the debts. More and more of the money goes to the “rentiers” as interest. Businesses take a bigger share of the total. Governments find more calls for their services, and take more of the total. Wages for the folks who will ultimately be consumers of the products fall. Governments try to cover up the problem of inadequate wages in whatever ways they can–particularly low interest rates and more debt.

At some point, the whole system of economic growth allowing the repayment of debt with interest stops working. Instead of being a virtuous circle, of more debt allowing more economic growth, it becomes a vicious circle. An investment of $1.00 pays back less than $1.00, say $0.98. If someone were planning the process, we would call it a Ponzi Scheme. More and more investment is done, but because of diminishing returns, it is not even possible to earn back the amount invested. Banks start charging for holding your money. Eventually the financial system collapse. I expect defaults on derivatives and other financial products will play a role in this.

There is also the issue of intergenerational debt. This is not really an issue, if as soon as grandma and grandpa stop being able to contribute enough to the economy to pay for their own well-being, they are simply left behind, the way the hunter-gatherers abandoned those who were unable to keep up with the group. If the elderly are promised retirement income and health care, this sets up a form of debt that the younger generation must pay to the older generation. To some extent, this shows up in savings for pensions. These “savings” are really mostly debt-based, though. Otherwise, this debt is funded on a pay as you go basis, so as you say, it doesn’t have the interest “problem” of other debt. But it is still a major problem, when the economy shrinks.

If you still didn't get it, see Michaux's lecture above.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Fred over islam

Islam er fredens religion. Og må fredes. Om så med trusler og drap.
KANSKJE HAR IKKE karikaturstriden gitt oss ny forståelse for grunnverdiene i et liberalt demokrati, men heller brakt oss nærmere nytalen: Idioti er klokskap. Taushet er respekt. Brutalitet er fromhet. Krig er fred. - Kjetil Rolness
Les artikkelen i Dagbladet her.

Why Permaculture is the Answer

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 and dispose high-entropy emissions and waste (Nielsen 2007). This flow of energy and matter from ecological sources through the economy and back to ecological sinks has been referred to as “throughput” (Daly and Townsend 1993).
The distinction between natural and engineered systems does not mean that the former are purely frugal and cyclical, or that the latter are purely wasteful and linear. Many industries rely on the recycling of matter and energy from production processes and from consumption wastes. At the same time, the biosphere “dumps” carbon, coal, oil and gas in natural landfills (Jensen et al. 2011). While it is therefore wrong to set natural and engineered systems on opposite sides of a spectrum, there are nevertheless important differences. Nielsen and Müller (2009) argue that in natural systems, the cycles are local, decentralized and develop towards being increasingly closed with decreasing emissions and waste as a consequence. In engineered systems, however, the cycles are increasingly global, transport-intensive and have evolved to be open with increasing emissions and waste as a consequence. Waste control generally reduces profitability; costs therefore tend to be externalised.
Bill Mollison says:
When the needs of a system cannot be met from within itself, we pay the price in energy and pollution.
A permaculture system is a natural system, it's interwoven with nature. While an industrial system is engineered, wasteful and linear.

Of course, there are grades between linear and circular systems. But using permaculture design methodology you come as close to a natural system as possible. To establish small permaculture systems within the industrial system is of course a good thing to do. By time these small increments may take over, as the industrial civilization declines.

It's important to look for cracks in the industrial system where permaculture might be introduced

For more information and inspiration on local, circular and closed permaculture design systems, please visit:

www.geofflawton.com

PERMACULTURE = DESIGN WITH NATURE

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Glem jødene - det er 0,01%erne som rår

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 jeg er trøtt av stadig å høre at jødene sitter med den reelle makta og drar i trådene, også i NRK. Derfor er Steigans arbeid av umåtelig betydning for å tilbakevise denne seiglivede konspirasjonsteorien. Det er 0,01%erne som rår. Om det er jøder blant disse har ingenting med saken å gjøre, da vi her snakker om et tett stammefellesskap.

Å til stadighet komme trekkende med jødene gjør bare så oppmerksomheten avledes fra de virkelige maktutøverne, slik at de uforstyrret kan få herje som de vil.

Relatert:
The latest comprehensive look at wealth distribution data reveals that the “ultra-rich” economic top 0.01% of US households now has an all-time high 11.1% of overall wealth. The next tier, the 0.1% – 0.99% has 10.4%, and the top 1% – 0.9% has 18.3%. In total, the top 1% now has an all-time high 39.8% of wealth.

Gail Tverberg: Climate Change Models are Seriously Distorted

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 happening already.
It appears that Tverberg believes the climate models are worthless, since they have not included an economic collapse that must come. Tverberg seems optimistic about the biosphere, but this as a consequence of her pessimism on civilization’s behalf. Again, Tverberg is a mathematician and undoubtedly good at statistics and analysis.

New Site for Reclaiming the Commons as the Dominant Force of Our Societies Globally

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 find themselves enslaved by what David Bollier so well has named the tyrannic market/state-duopoly. The market and the state were meant to be our servants, but they have now joined forces and become a two-headed monster, attacking the commons. Like a mad dog which has turned against his master and tears him apart.

This need to change! Insane market competition and capitalism must come to an end, while cooperation and sharing must take its place. The state must become submissive to the commons! We have to create the ultimate InGroup-Society with the InGroup-Democracy at its core.

Please spread the knowledge about the COMMONS TRANSITION site, and please join common force with the commons!
The choice is not between more "market" or more "state", there's only one TRUE choice, more COMMONING! - Øyvind Holmstad 
Let's give back our shared world to the commons!

Friday, January 23, 2015

The Commons are Making a Comeback

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.

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.

Kajsa Ekis Ekman om kapitalismen


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 ble det så om å gjøre for dem å innføre kapitalismen, som en erstatning for og videreføring av føydalismen: http://hilobrow.com/2011/11/04/douglas-rushkoff/

Vil oppfordre til å lese min Resilience-artikkel The Ancient Taberna in a Future World, som i høyeste grad handler om levende markeder!

Fikk lyst til å legge til denne kommentaren:
Hvorfor bry seg så mye om jobb og helse, olja vil uansett stabilisere seg under 20 USD og sivilisasjonen kollapser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOR3bdRJo98

Det er forferdelig at det beste alternativet en arbeider finner i dag, er SD. Jeg kjenner ikke særlig til dem, men det virker som de er atskillig mer anti-globalistiske enn f.eks. FrP? Men å være anti-globalist er ikke nok, man må også være for en demokratisering av økonomien. Og på dette punktet tror jeg SD svikter. Med demokratisering mener jeg ikke småflikking, som at arbeiderne har en representant på styremøter e.l. Nei, jeg mener en full demokratisering hvor produksjonen selvorganiseres av små inngrupper, som helt og fullt rår over sine produksjonsmidler, uten innblanding ovenfra. Altså helt på linje med biologiske systemer, med et fraktalt hierarki organisert nedenfra og opp.

Dette kalles InnGruppe-Demokratiet, og er det alternativet både Steigan og Bongard ser for seg.

Jeg vil opplyse om at jeg er medeier i en industribedrift, og kommer til å kjempe for småbedriftenes rettigheter innenfor det kapitalistiske systemet så lenge dette eksisterer. På samme vis som du vil kjempe for arbeidernes rettigheter innenfor det kapitalistiske systemet.

Allikevel, mitt overordnede mål er å bli kvitt hele kapitalismen. Jeg har kommet til at å produsere for profitt er nedverdigende og umenneskelig. Samtidig skaper kapitalismen store forskjeller og miljøproblemer. Men som bedriftseier føler jeg det i stadig sterkere grad som nedverdigende å produsere for profitt, og jeg opplever det som en krenkelse av mitt menneskeverd. Dette gjelder også deg, på den andre sida av bordet. Å produsere for profitt er en krenkelse av menneskeverdet, samme om vi er bedriftseiere eller arbeidstakere. Derfor er vi begge fanget i samme båt, det kapitalistiske systemet.

The Meaning of Life

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Erik Lunde, en politiker med hjerte for allmenningene

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 Giddens et sosialdemokrati som bedre balanserte kollektivisme og individualisme.

Giddens fryktet blant annet at «gammeldags» sosialdemokratisk politikk kunne føre til at personlig, lokalt og frivillig engasjement forsvant fra samfunnet. Det ville igjen kunne føre til tap av sosiale nettverk, deltakelse og trygghet i samfunnet."

"Fellesskap besluttes ikke i regjeringskonferanser. Fellesskap vokser naturlig frem – gjennom at et mangfold av små og store fellesskap får utvikle seg organisk. Fellesskap bygges ved å vise tillit og distribuere makt nedover.

For kristendemokrater har det alltid vært viktig å bevare og styrke de sosiale fellesskapene, slik som familien, naboskap, lokalmiljø, frivillighet og trossamfunn. Ved å spre makten nedover, revitaliseres folkestyret og samfunnsdeltakelsen øker.

Sosial kapital svekkes. «Vi har glemt det gode gamle kollektive ansvaret. Nabokjerringer som følger med og kjefter når noen får juling eller blir mobbet, er der ikke lenger. Vi må få folk til å bry seg om hverandre igjen,» sa Gro Harlem Brundtland i sin nyttårstale i 1995.

Paradokset er imidlertid at sosialdemokratiet, gjennom gradvis å tappe enkeltmennesker og naturlige fellesskap for ansvar og oppgaver, selv har bidratt til en utvikling der fellesskapene og samfunnets sosiale kapital. Det vil si at de sosiale nettverkene, deltakelse i samfunnet, tilliten til hverandre og tryggheten er under press."

"Mennesket er et fellesskapsvesen og utvikler og står i relasjon til sine medmennesker og er avhengig av fellesskap med andre. En av de viktigste jobbene i årene som kommer, vil bli å legge til rette for sterkere fellesskap og styrket sosial kapital.

Fellesskapet trenger en vitaminsprøytning – og den må komme nedenfra.

Det er åpenbart at verken venstresidens sterke statstro eller høyresidens tunge individualisme er svaret. Jonas Gahr Støre skal ha for forsøket, men får neppe med seg sine partikamerater. Siv Jensen gidder ikke engang forsøke. I hennes ideologiske univers er enhver sin egen lykkes smed. Jobben må gjøres av de som balanserer individualisme og kollektivisme, og ser behovet for både det private initiativ og en sterk offentlig sektor. Jobben bør tas av kristendemokrater."
Mange gode synspunkter. Som allmenninger vil jeg understreke at i et allmenninghetssentrert samfunn har vi ikke en sterk privat eller offentlig sektor, men en sterk allmenninghet, hvor staten og markedet er allmenninghetens tjenere. Dette er godt oppsummert av Silke Helfrich her: http://www.internationalpermac...

Vi trenger således hverken mer marked eller mer stat, men mer allmenningering. Vil vise til den nye sida til Michel Bauwens et.al.: http://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’."

Lunde er på god veg til å bli en rotekte allmenninger, selv om han skurrer litt enda. Uansett, godt å se at det fremdeles finnes anstrøk av klarsyn også i politikerstanden.

Jødehatet er ikke historie

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 «jøder ser på seg selv som bedre enn andre». Les mer...

Relatert:

Foraminiferer - havets edelstener

Foto: Ewa Jernas Patrycja

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Gail Tverberg's respons to my comment

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 deplete the ecosystems they lived in. Regardless of culture, people of all eras struggled and fought for food, place, benefits and values that are connected to the two powers of selection: To get what’s needed to secure nurturing for children and family (natural selection), and to become an attractive partner (sexual selection).” — The Biological Human Being, by Terje Bongard and Eivin Røskaft, page 239
As I have commented quite a few times, the way natural selection “works” is for all species (including humans) to produce far more offspring than needed to replace themselves. Natural selection, if allowed to proceed naturally (no medical care, no coats to keep warm, many even no cooked food) then assures that the best adapted survive.

Humans has adapted to requiring fuel of some sort to cook their food. It is also helpful in making clothes, keeping warm, boiling water to make it better to drink, helping in catching animals for food, and making better tools. We have used the fuel we have become adapted to for health care, so as to keep the less well adapted alive. We also provide monetary support for people who are unable to work. All of this works at counter-purposes to natural selection.

If there are survivors, we are destined to relive the same story, but with a much lower cap on fuel use.
It's important to note that Tverberg writes "if there are survivors". It's not sure there will be survivors, that serious is the situation. The turning point is now, from 2016 and forward the decline will gather speed. It's of course sad to know that my beloved daughters probably will starve to death, but as I'll soon move back to the countryside I can might give them an upper hand. I will do my best to make them among the survivors, whatever efforts there will be.

I still want to mention that the Archdruid, JMG, thinks the collapse will last another 2-300 years, and with survivors. But as he's a male he's full of hubris, and cannot be trusted like a female with equal intelligence and knowledge.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Why Deflation is the Endgame, Conceptually Explained

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 demand. As their income falls below costs of production, miners will be forced out of business and the necessities of life will no longer be available to humanity. Some people imagine that they can "save" for this eventuality by hoarding gold or whatever, but that is a delusion because the operational fabric of industrial civilization will be broken, so even the simplest amenities such as a toothbrush or toilet paper will not be available at any price. It will be truly horrific for everyone and we have no contingency plan, nothing to collapse back to except the Stone Age.

So, are we there yet? Considering the ongoing price crash with regard to oil and other commodities, I think there is a strong possibility that this is it. Again, I have to credit Gail Tverberg with explaining how increased depletion leads to falling oil prices, or else I would be just as clueless as most people. She is kind of verbose, however, and uses lots of graphs and supporting data which is all very important, but not really needed to grasp what is going on intuitively. So maybe my putting it into few words can help more people understand. She thinks we have at most two years of business as usual left, and then collapse will occur by the end of 2016. And the only remedy she can come up with is to pray for divine intervention.

If you understand how this works, you will quit worrying about comparatively distant issues such as climate change and realize that falling commodity prices is the most ominous problem of our times. Of course, the problem may well morph into something else before it becomes obvious that there is a resource crisis, such as another World War or a crippling financial crisis. But even if we avoid any other major disturbances, deflation will kill us rather soon. After oil prices go too low to encourage further exploration and drilling, for example, the depletion rate of existing oil wells will be at best about 6% per year. So imagine the economy shrinking by 6% as a best-case scenario. Our financial system is not arranged to handle orderly degrowth, however, so most likely there will be a much more rapid collapse instead, in one way or another.


Ps! Tverberg is like Miss. Marple, investigating our energy and resource scarce future. She looks like Miss. Marple, speaks like her and is extremely intelligent. And as she's a woman she can better be trusted than a man, lacking male ego and imagined infallibility.

Friday, January 16, 2015

The Animal That Wouldn't Die

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

Let Things 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 provisions that require them to die automatically if no one moves to save them, rather than that they live automatically if no one moves to kill them.

When dying things bring sadness, that's okay too. Work to turn those emotions into new resolve for growth and creation of new things. - Craig Freshley

We Are All Very Anxious

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

Om korstogene og de kristne samfunn i Midtøsten

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 Karakosh i Irak. Det var en by med 50.000 innbyggere, 98 prosent av dem var kristne. De få som ble tilbake, ble tvunget til å omvende seg til islam. De andre er borte. Og selv om det skulle skje at det blir mulig å komme tilbake, er ingenting som før. De kristne kan ikke lenger leve trygt i Irak. Eller i Syria.

For sent. Jeg husker godt kirken i Karakosh. Den var stor og lys, og den var stapp full av folk som sang med i den innviklede liturgien på arameisk. Kvinnene med hvite kniplingstørkler, guttene som hadde tigget kulepenner utenfor. Det skjærer meg i hjertet at dette samfunnet ikke finnes mer.

For 15 år siden hadde jeg tenkt å skrive en bok om de kristne i Midtøsten. Jeg var fascinert av disse kristne søsken som nesten ingen visste noe om, og som hadde holdt fast ved troen gjennom to tusen år. I den hensikt reiste jeg i årene 2000 – 2003 til Irak, Syria, Jordan, Libanon og de palestinske områdene. Men notatbøkene mine ligger fortsatt i en skuff fordi forlaget jeg hadde avtale med, gikk konkurs. Nå er det for sent å skrive den boken jeg hadde tenkt – for det jeg ville skrive om, finnes ikke mer.

Men minnet om det som var, finnes fortsatt. Jeg husker kontoret til den syrisk-ortodokse erkebiskopen i Aleppo – rotete og med folk stadig ut og inn. I en av hyllene fant erkebiskopen fram en kopi av verdens eldste liturgi som fortsatt er i bruk – den er 1700 år gammel. Nå sitter han i fangenskap hos IS.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Is a Methane Disaster Awaiting Us?


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 for several hundred thousand years, and some of it can be stored for millions of years. This as long as one does not use chemical fertilizers, which destroys micro life in the soil. Microorganisms stabilizes carbon.

However, one can drench biochar in urine, after which the nitrogen is released slowly into the soil because it binds in the litter. In the urine can also be found 80 percent of the nitrogen, 50 percent of the phosphorus and 60 percent of potassium (NPK) from the food we eat. Urinary Sort toilets should be introduced in conjunction with a major focus on biochar.

At the same time soil erosion needs to be stopped!

Related:
I would be grateful for more articles on biochar and arctic methane. Please add these in the comments field.

Appendix:

Gail Tverberg, one of the world's best analysts and the "doomsday prophets own Miss Marple", has responded to the article:
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 happening already.
It appears that Tverberg believes the climate models are worthless, since they have not included an economic collapse that must come. Tverberg seems optimistic about the biosphere, but this as a consequence of her pessimism on civilization's behalf. Again, Tverberg is a mathematician and undoubtedly good at statistics and analysis.

The Houshi Culture

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

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Uten allmenningene er ytringsfriheten meningsløs

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 at vi eventuelt vil leve om igjen som lus (…) Når du forlanger respekt, forlanger du at jeg lyver for deg. Jeg har altfor mye respekt for deg som menneske til å delta i en slik parodi." – Johan Hari, forfatter

Ellers er vår ytringsfrihet bunnfalsk, da det ikke er lett å gå på tvers av de rådende liberale doktriner. Det er også slik at vi ikke har noen fysisk ytringsfrihet, den er overtatt av teknokratiet og "markedet". Med dette mener jeg at allmenningheten som selvorganiserende enheter, er død.

Uten en levende allmenninghet har vi intet samfunn!

Jeg vil derfor melde at P2P-Foundation nettopp har lansert et nytt nettsted for å koordinere gjenerobringen av allmenningene: http://commonstransition.org/

Skal vi ha et samfunn hvor mennesket er fritt til å ytre seg på det dypeste plan, dvs. som et individ som er del av et større selv, ALLMENNINGHETEN, er kampen for allmenningene en kamp for ytringsfriheten.

"The P2P Foundation recently launched a new website, the Commons Transition Platform, as a central repository for policy ideas that help promote a wide variety of commons and peer-to-peer dynamics. The site represents a new, more coordinated stage of activism in this area – collecting practical policy proposals for legally authorizing and encouraging the creation of new commons."

http://bollier.org/blog/newly-... 
Så for de som ikke ønsker hodet skutt av i sin kamp for ytringsfriheten, vil jeg anbefale å kjempe for hjemkomsten av allmenningene. Hvor vi ikke kun som individer, men som fellesskap, ytrer våre liv. Hvor vi ikke kun fritt uttrykker oss gjennom våre ord, men også gjennom våre fysiske omgivelser ved å forme vårt nærmiljø.

En uhyrlig tanke for stats/markeds-duopolet.

"This is, of course, a rampant nod to commercialism, which, if we did not live in such a commercial era, would be seen for what it is. The life of a community cannot be held hostage, by a person or corporation who seeks to make money and profit from the construction of its streets and buildings. The streets and buildings are part of the neighborhood’s life blood, the city’s lifeblood, and they must be interwoven with the activities and life of the people themselves. Anything less leads inevitably to drug abuse, crime, teenage violence, anomie, and despair – the very earmarks of modern urbanism." – Christopher Alexander

Friday, January 9, 2015

CRIME!

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 “ornament” would be the simple minimalist buildings and other artifacts themselves, celebrating the spirit of a great new age. Indeed, the continued use of ornament was, for Loos, a “crime.” The “Papuan,” he argued, had not evolved to the moral and civilized circumstances of modern man. As part of his primitive practices, the Papuan tattooed himself. Likewise, Loos went on, “the modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate.” Therefore, he reasoned, those who still used ornament were on the same low level as criminals, and Papuans. - Salingaros & Mehaffy

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Design for a Living Planet: Settlement, Science, and the Human Future


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 of Programming, Agile, and Scrum

“Essential reading for all urban designers.” —Jeff Speck, Author of Walkable City

“Brilliant.” —Charles Montgomery, Author of Happy City

“Inspired, compelling and fascinating… Recognizes that a true architecture can be dug from the facts, insights, and theories, that occur with a broadening of science to include the human being.” —Christopher Alexander, Author of A Pattern Language and Notes on the Synthesis of Form

Some comments on the individual chapters:

“Packed with detail and beautiful in presentation.” — Gil Friend

“Human society must find a path of retreat. Salingaros and Mehaffy point the way.” — David Brussat, Providence Journal

“Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros have written some brilliant articles on how we can co-create cities which are truly resilient, rather than being ‘engineered resilient’.” — Smallworld Urbanism

“For me, this essay was like a flash of insight, and I suddenly saw the world in a new light.” — Oeyvind Holmstad, Permaliv

“We’ve just come across a very thoughtful article by Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros… [who] draw a number of lessons from biological systems and use them to draw conclusions about how resilient human systems must be designed.” — Resilient Design Institute

“Salingaros and Mehaffy take us from the configuration of city spaces to the order of cells in living beings.” — Jaap Dawson, Delft Institute of Technology

“If you wanted to know where the cutting edge was in urban design, it is here.” — Patrick J. Kennedy, CarFreeInBigD

“This is the single most intelligent and illuminating article I’ve seen on Archdaily in 3 years.” — Nìming Pínglùn Zhě, China


Michael Mehaffy is an urbanist and design theorist, and a periodic visiting professor or adjunct in five graduate universities in four countries and three disciplines (architecture, urban planning and philosophy) including the University of Oregon (US) and the University of Strathclyde (UK). He has been a close associate of the architect and software pioneer Christopher Alexander, and a Research Associate with the Center for Environmental Structure, Alexander’s research center founded in 1967. He is currently executive director of Portland, Oregon based Sustasis Foundation, and editor of Sustasis Press.


Nikos A. Salingaros is a mathematician and polymath known for his work on urban theory, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of the architect and computer software pioneer Christopher Alexander. Salingaros published substantive research on Algebras, Mathematical Physics, Electromagnetic Fields, and Thermonuclear Fusion before turning his attention to Architecture and Urbanism. He is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio and has been on the Architecture faculties of universities in Italy, Mexico, and The Netherlands.


US edition Sustasis Press HERE and HERE; International edition (forthcoming) Vajra Books HERE.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Not-Separateness

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 Castle in the Woods

"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.

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

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...

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Nathan Lewis: Life Without Cars 2014

- 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

Monday, January 5, 2015

Spriket mellom energibehov og energiproduksjon fram mot 2035

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?

Sunday, January 4, 2015

A Tiny House With a Big Heart

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.

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Are You a Mechanical or Biological Human Being?

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, something we do to reality, in order to understand it.

Descartes himself clearly understood his procedure as a mental trick. He was a religious person who would have been terrified to find out that people in the 20th century began to think that reality itself is actually like this. But in the years since Descartes lived, as his idea gathered momentum, and people found out that you really could find out how the bloodstream works, or how the stars are born, by seeing them as machines – and after people had used the idea to find out almost everything mechanical about the world from the 17th century to the 20th century, people shifted into a new mental state that began treating reality as if this mechanical picture really were the nature of things, as if everything really were a machine.

For the purpose of discussion, in what follows, I shall refer to this as the 20th century mechanistic viewpoint. The appearance of this 20th century mechanistic view had tremendous consequences, both devastating for artists. The first was that the “I” went out of world picture. The picture of the world as a machine doesn’t have an “I” in it. The “I”, what it means to be a person, the inner experience of being a person, just isn’t part of this picture. Of course it is still there in our experience. But it isn’t part of the picture we have of how things are. So what happens? How can you make something which have no “I” in it, when the whole process of making anything comes from the “I”? The process of trying to be an artist in a world which has no sensible notion of “I” and no natural way that the personal inner life can be part of the picture of things – leaves the art of building as a vacuum. You just cannot make sense of it.

The second devastating thing that happened with the onset of the 20th century mechanistic world-picture was that clear understanding of value went out of the world. The picture of the world we have from physics, because it is built only out of mental machines, no longer has any definite feeling of value in it: value has become sidelined as a matter of opinion, not intrinsic to the nature of the world at all.

And with these two developments, the idea of order fell apart. The mechanistic idea tells us very little about the deep order we feel intuitively to be in the world. Yet it is this deep order which is our main concern. – The Phenomenon of Life, by Christopher Alexander, page 16

The Self Organizing Slime Mould

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.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Eneboligens posisjon i den norske folkesjela er essensiell for å forstå den menneskekulden som råder i vårt land

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) of how things work, is not how reality actually is. It is a convenient mental exercise, something we do to reality, in order to understand it.

Descartes himself clearly understood his procedure as a mental trick. He was a religious person who would have been terrified to find out that people in the 20th century began to think that reality itself is actually like this. But in the years since Descartes lived, as his idea gathered momentum, and people found out that you really could find out how the bloodstream works, or how the stars are born, by seeing them as machines – and after people had used the idea to find out almost everything mechanical about the world from the 17th century to the 20th century, people shifted into a new mental state that began treating reality as if this mechanical picture really were the nature of things, as if everything really were a machine.

For the purpose of discussion, in what follows, I shall refer to this as the 20th century mechanistic viewpoint. The appearance of this 20th century mechanistic view had tremendous consequences, both devastating for artists. The first was that the “I” went out of world picture. The picture of the world as a machine doesn’t have an “I” in it. The “I”, what it means to be a person, the inner experience of being a person, just isn’t part of this picture. Of course it is still there in our experience. But it isn’t part of the picture we have of how things are. So what happens? How can you make something which have no “I” in it, when the whole process of making anything comes from the “I”? The process of trying to be an artist in a world which has no sensible notion of “I” and no natural way that the personal inner life can be part of the picture of things – leaves the art of building as a vacuum. You just cannot make sense of it.

The second devastating thing that happened with the onset of the 20th century mechanistic world-picture was that clear understanding of value went out of the world. The picture of the world we have from physics, because it is built only out of mental machines, no longer has any definite feeling of value in it: value has become sidelined as a matter of opinion, not intrinsic to the nature of the world at all.

And with these two developments, the idea of order fell apart. The mechanistic idea tells us very little about the deep order we feel intuitively to be in the world. Yet it is this deep order which is our main concern. – The Phenomenon of Life, by Christopher Alexander, page 16
Tenk for eksempel på den suburbane eneboligen, som i manges bevissthet er den ultimate lykke. Før Descartes ville en slik ide vært utenkelig, da eneboligen representerer en oppstykking av helheter ned i de enkelte deler, løsrevet fra enhver interaksjon. Inkarnasjonen av det mekaniske verdensbilde, eller hva jeg vil kalle Helvete, hvor enhver forbindelse er brutt. Helvete er et sted hvor alle interaksjoner er brutt, hvor til slutt også forbindelsen til Gud, eller hva Alexander kaller "the I", også brytes. Så at nordmenn ser den suburbane eneboligen som den naturligste ting av verden, viser med all tydelighet hvor gjennomdrenkte vi er av det mekaniske verdensbildet.

Byggefelt er menneskeørkener, på lik linje med plantefelt av sitkagran. De er anti-allmenninger. Le Corbusiers "Tårnet i parken"-typologi er selvsagt også en refleksjon av et mekanisk verdensbilde.

Plantefelt av sitkagran. Her kan intet godt slå rot. Parallelen til de norske byggefelt er slående! Foto: Orcaborealis

Derfor er det viktig at vi får fram mange eksempler på levemåter som gjenreiser allmenningene, slik som de nye natursamfunnene, hvor alt er forbundet gjennom en mengde interaksjoner eller mønstre, fundamentert i et helhetlig verdensbilde.

Mye av grunnen til den fiendtlige innstillingen mot alternative boformer er at disse ønsker å gjenreise allmenningene og et alexandrinsk verdensbilde. Dette fordi disse viser at den falske visjonen mange bygger sin livsdrøm på, den ikke-tilknyttede eneboligen, er et mareritt. Det mekaniske verdensbildets ultimate mareritt. Et Helvete!

For å gjenreise allmenningene og allmenningheten som kjernen i samfunnet, som det må være i et bærekraftig samfunn, er det derfor av uvurderlig betydning at vi etablerer et nytt post-cartesiansk verdensbilde, eller hva jeg vil kalle et alexandrinsk verdensbilde.

Jeg håper etter hvert å oversette ovennevnte utdrag av Alexander til norsk.

Vil til slutt nevne at den suburbane eneboligen også er knyttet opp mot de mest destruktive kreftene i handikapprinsippet. Eneboligens posisjon i den norske folkesjela er derfor essensiell for å forstå den menneskekulden som råder i vårt land.

Det at nordmenn ser den suburbane eneboligen som den naturligste ting av verden, viser med all tydelighet hvor gjennomdrenkte vi er av det mekaniske verdensbildet

Dette innlegget er opprinnelig en kommentar til min Kulturverks-artikkel: David Bollier og gjenreisingen av allmenningene

Eneboligens opprinnelse

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 anstrengt forhold til den suburbane eneboligen, og ser denne som en videreføring av "the enclosure movement" i Nord-Amerika og frarøvelsen av de opprinnelige amerikanernes land. Noe han bl.a. har redegjort for i essayet "The Fateful Choice: The Pilgrims Assign Private Property Rights in Land": http://leveveg.blogspot.no/201...
As Bradford wrote: ‘‘And no man now thought he could live except he had catle and a great deale of ground to keep them all, all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scattered all over the bay quickly and the townes in which they lived compactly till now was left very thinne.’’ You might say that private property rights in land were the beginning of suburban sprawl. —  David Bollier
Den norske eneboligen anno 2014 kan spores tilbake til fordrivelsen av de opprinnelige amerikanerne
Dessverre er det et faktum at suburbia var/er en bevisst strategi for å rive i filler allmenningheten og hindre allmenningene fra å gjenoppstå. Douglas Rushkoff har redegjort for dette overgrepet i sitt fabelaktige 2011-intervju hos Hilobrow: http://hilobrow.com/2011/11/04...
DR: They had to do that in order to prevent things from getting out of control. The significant points in the development of public relations were all at crisis moments. For example, labor movements; it’s not just that labor was revolting but that people were seeing that labor was revolting. There was a need to re-fashion the stories so that people would think that labor activists were bad scary people, so that people would think they should move to the suburbs and insulate themselves from these throngs of laborers, from “the masses.” Or to return to the Quaker Oats example, people used to look at long-distance-shipped factory products with distrust. Here’s a plain brown box, it’s being shipped from far away, why am I supposed to buy this instead of something from a person I’ve known all my life? A mass media is necessary to make you distrust your neighbor and transfer your trust to an abstract entity, the corporation, and believe it will usher in a better tomorrow and all that.

DR: Everything’s got to be individual, this was all planned! Any man that has a mortgage to pay is not going to be a revolutionary. With that amount to pay back, he’s got a stake in the system. True, he’s on the short end of the stick of the interest economy, but in 30 years he could own his own home. 
It got the most crafty after WWII when all the soldiers were coming home. FDR was in cahoots with the PR people. Traumatized vets were coming back from WWII, and everyone knew these guys were freaked out and fucked up. We had enough psychology and psychiatry by then to know that these guys were badly off, they knew how to use weapons, and — this was bad! If the vets came back into the same labor movement that they left before WWII, it would have been all over. So the idea was that we should provide houses for these guys, make them feel good, and we get the creation of Levittown and other carefully planned developments designed with psychologists and social scientists. Let’s put these vets in a house, let’s celebrate the nuclear family. 
Den suburbane eneboligen er spesialdesignet for å ufarliggjøre karer som disse
PN: So home becomes a thing, rather than a series of relationships?
Hjemmet har gått fra å være del av en lang rekke forbindelser til å bli et motbydelig konsumentprodukt, den isolerte eneboligens forbannelse
DR: The definition of home as people use the word now means “my house,” rather than what it had been previously, which was “where I’m from.'” My home’s New York, what’s your home? 
PN: Right, my town. 
Det er ingen ølhaller i suburbia
DR: Where are you from? Not that “structure.” But they had to redefine home, and they used a lot of government money to do it. They created houses in neighborhoods specifically designed to isolate people from one another, and prevent men in particular from congregating and organizing — there are no social halls, no beer halls in these developments. They wanted men to be busy with their front lawns, with three fruit trees in every garden, with home fix-it-up projects; for the women, the kitchen will be in the back where they can see the kids playing in the back yard. 
PN: So you don’t see the neighbors going by. No front porch.
Modernismen, som inkluderer den suburbane eneboligen, er i sin essens et verktøy for å kontrollere massene:
Slike synspunkt gjorde Le Corbusier til ein naturleg alliert for herskarane av den moderne verda. Han ynskja å gjera alt om til ein rasjonell maskin, og ein rasjonell maskin er lett å skjøna og kontrollera for dei som sit med makta. Då han døyde i 1965 sa sovjetarane; ”moderne arkitektur har mista den største meisteren sin,” mens president Johnsen kommenterte; ”innflytelsen hans var universell og arbeida hans inneheldt ein permanent kvalitet berre få kunstnarar gjennom historia har eigd.” Leonid Bresjnev og Lyndon Johnson visste kan hende ikkje mykje om kunst, men dei visste kva dei hadde grunn til å lika. — James Kalb
Nei, jeg tilskriver ikke Descartes alt som er vondt og galt her i verden. Dette tilskriver jeg Le Corbusier! Descartes utviklet en nyttig modell for vitenskapen, som dessverre har blitt misbrukt. Ikke minst av Le Corbusier. Noen sier at Le Corbusier var et barn av sin tid. Dette er feil. Vår tid er et barn av Le Corbusier. Mer enn noensinne!

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