November 17th 1983 ... rewinding 30 years of constant revolution

If we only loved one thing about the Zapatistas it would be the clean refreshing feeling that comes in their writing.  Inspired by ideas of Europe and by the ideas and struggles of native people instead of producing through a dialectic blend even more complexity for us to digest, they create from 0 something new and simple.  Instead of complicating what for centuries seems too complex to implement, they implement what it was so simple to implement to begin with.  But as every major human discovery has in the past, the notion of "why didn't I think of that before", for 30 years they are continuing to discover new ground and content so fast that we must forget what we are and what we do in order to comprehend the significance of their discoveries.

Here is a sample of what we are (and probably failing) trying to convey:

Original source from the jungle

nov192013

REWIND 3.

REWIND 3.

Here we explain the reasons behind this strange title and those that will follow, narrate the story of an exceptional encounter between a beetle and a perplexing being (that is, more perplexing than the beetle) and the reflections of no immediate relevance or importance which occurred therein; and finally, given a particular anniversary, the Sub tries to explain, unsuccessfully, how the Zapatistas see their own history.

November 2013
To whom it may concern:

WARNING – As noted in the text entitled “The Bad and Not So Bad News,” the writings that preceded that text had not yet been published. Ergo, what we are going to do is “rebobinar” (that is, “rewind” the tape) to what should have appeared on the Day of the Dead. Having rewound, you may then read in inverse order the inverse order in which the texts will appear and that way you will…hmm…forget it, I’ve even managed to confuse myself. The point is that you get the gist of the “retrospective” perspective. It’s as if one is going in one direction but later returns to see how they got going in that direction in the first place. Got it? No?

Building a Home with the Earthbag Technique

Step-by-Step Earthbag Building
by Owen Geiger http://www.instructables.com/id/Step-by-Step-Earthbag-Building/

This Instructable explains each main step of construction for building vertical earthbag walls. Videos on my Earthbag Natural Building YouTube channel demonstrate the process.

For those who don’t know, earthbag building uses polypropylene rice bags or feed bags filled with soil or insulation that are stacked like masonry and tamped flat. Barbed wire between courses keeps bags from slipping and adds tensile strength. The final plastered walls look just like adobe structures. Thousands of people are now building with bags to create their dream homes, home offices, shops, resorts, rootcellars, storm cellars and survival shelters. Non-profit organizations are building schools, orphanages, emergency shelters and other structures.

I got involved with earthbag building when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit Southeast Asia in December, 2004. As the director of Builders Without Borders at that time, I searched all available affordable, sustainable building methods and decided building with bags was the most practical. They’re flood resistant (used for flood control), earthquake resistant (passed an ICBO shake table test), bullet and blast resistant (used for military bunkers), and now engineer and code approved plans are available. Just search for earthbag house plans on the Internet.

Gold, Copper, Iron, Petroleum, Uranium, Water, and now Bitcoin

The world has gone mad or what we thought as sanity is not really

far from madness?  This is how silly their value system is that one does not really need to dig mountains, melt ore, have vaults, and make laws and rules to create value.  One can seat on their PC and harvest/mine coins that are not made out of any matter, use them to buy and sell material goods and services, and get wealthy collecting those virtual coins that no state and central bank in the world regulates.  Yes, gold coins are just as silly but cost lives and do tremendous damage to the land their harvested from.  The question we ask is not whether such a currency can replace other currencies or be used as a universal currency for international trade but whether this "value" system is as silly as any of capitalism's value systems. 

Here we have a description and summary of what this late madness of virtual currency is by a globally respected economics journal "The Economist".  The longer this phenomenon lasts and the longer states are unable or unwilling to control and repress it the more the traditional value systems prove their irrationality.  Thousands, millions maybe, died in battles and wars over gold and other resources so states and the elites behind them can maintain domination over land and lives.  For what?  For regulating, usually to their benefit, the accumulation in wealth, power, and control, based on a virtual and irrational value system.  Bitcoins have reduced

Another Kind of Revolution

November 06, 2013

Another Kind of Revolution

The Mapuche’s Struggle for the Land

by JOHN SEVERINO

In the aftermath of the inspiring popular uprising in Argentina at the end of 2001 and the battles that blocked neoliberalism in Bolivia from 2003-2005, the Left came to power in governments across South America—most notably in Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, and Bolivia—in a series of electoral upsets that were quickly hailed as revolutions. In hindsight, these victories prove to be less than convincing. The new revolutionary governments institutionalized social movements, turning them into mere appendages, they continued cutting down the rainforests and displacing indigenous peoples in the name of progress, they supported free trade agreements, used paramilitary or police forces against student demonstrators, expanded the exploitation of gas, oil, and coal, and imprisoned dissidents. Business as usual.
The cynicism of these new governments should not have come as a surprise. True revolutions do not happen overnight, and they are not delivered by politicians. The kind of transformation that ends exploitation, misery, and the destruction of the environment, and that allows people to organize their own lives and fulfill their needs in freedom and dignity comes about in an altogether different kind of way.

The treacherous world of modern scientific practice and its industrial use

Here is a piece from an essay that relates the experience of a scientist within the industrial scientific complex.  Science has evolved to a tool that is isolated from society to have value only to large scale private industrial institutions.  Its funding comes from public taxation and "humanitarian" organizations, but its product is funneled to private industry.  This is an example of how those from above load the burden of their cost to further develop their machines of exploitation, on those from below who are ultimately the objects of exploitation.

Urban Farm Collective Grand Dekum Garden

Urban Farm Collective Grand Dekum Garden

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    The Burnside Arts Trust recently partnered with Portland’s Urban Farm Collective to sow good seeds in the Grand Dekum Garden. Resident artists
CircleFace and N.O. Bonzo spent a week in the sun painting a small garage located on the property with a mural to celebrate the joyous growth in the garden around them. We were fortunate enough to have local artist Dhestoe come to contribute his phenomenal talent. Each artist dedicated time and energy to the project to actively promote Green Spaces within our city. We all believe in the power of community gardens to build neighborhood relationships, beautify developed areas, and promote positive environmental use of space.

Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy

The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community

           

FRED TURNER

           

Published in Technology and Culture, July 2005, Vol 46 Pages 485-512

           

                                

In 1993, freelance journalist Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and with it defined a new form of technologically enabled social life: virtual community.1 For the last eight years, he explained, he had been dialing in to a San Francisco Bay area bulletin-board system (BBS) known as the Whole Earth  Lectronic Link, or the WELL. In the WELL s text-only environment, he conversed with friends and colleagues, met new people, and over time built up relationships of startling intimacy. For Rheingold, these relationships formed an emotional bulwark against the loneliness of a highly technologized material world. As he explained, computer networks like the WELL allowed us  to recapture the sense of cooperative spirit that so many people seemed to lose when we gained all this technology. 2 In the disembodied precincts of cyberspace, we could connect with one another practically and emotionally and  rediscover the power of cooperation, turning cooperation into a game, a way of life a merger of knowledge capital, social capital, and communion. 3