Twin Oaks Community

Darla Plays Accordion in Heartwood at Acorn

Behaviorism Lives!

i was an accomplice

There is a story i often tell, about a dear friend and long time member, Kristen, who went a bit crazy here (Twin Oaks) some years back.  It was not a scary kind of crazy, like my friend who punched me in the face while i was driving with him to get some food.  This was a more of an Alice in Wonderland affair, where she wandered around the community, spoke German and French a lot (which she had studied years before) and was relieved of her commune work responsibilities while she was on this adventure (kid care, managerships, and other work areas).

Kristen had been institutionalized against her will when she was 23 years old in Kansas, and it was awful.  Imagine a prison-like situation with forced medication and unsympathetic medical people.  Even in her Alice mindset, she knew she was not going to go back to the hospital; nothing was as clear as this fact.  So we carried her.  Collectively: care teams were formed, child care was organized, her various work areas were covered  by other communards.

Of course this is what Hillary Clinton means when she says “it takes a village”. [Permit me to quickly point out that Clinton does not have a village, she has instead a detachment of secret service officers, which is not the same thing at all.]  You want to be able to take care of the people you love in the way they want to be.  If Granny gets sick, you want her in her room, with the people who love her all around and her needs getting met.

“The Seed business busy season is over when we have two days in a row of less than 100 total new orders.”  i proclaimed recently.

In a time long past i studied economics.  Economists love to define things this way.  A recession is two consecutive quarters with negative growth in gross domestic product.  [Tho one of the many rye and weak economist jokes is that a recession is when your neighbor is unemployed and a depression is when you are unemployed.  There is a reason this is called the dismal science.]

We have not quite reached the end of the busy season, which has had me running around in circles in the seed picking room.  i have been employing a few operations research and queuing theory tricks to go just a bit faster in filling the flood of orders we have for mostly organic and heritage seeds.

i dont know this person, but this is definitely the Acorn Picking Room

Reblogged from Whisky Doll:

Today I write less romantically.  My friend Pax commented on a blog I wrote a while back entitled "My Best Friends".  I intended to answer him in the comment section, but the answer "grew and grew and grew until ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around"...  Here are my thoughts, pricked delightfully by his mind:

Read more… 487 more words

This is a thoughtful response to my comment, pushing my analysis to consider the structural misogamy of the dominant paradigm and how this plays into the experience of being a woman. Please feel encouraged to comment directly onto Karin's blog.

“i appreciate the work you do around here, like fixing the floor in the smoke shack or the many times i see you up very late packing seeds.  There is no doubt in my mind you are a good communard in this sense. ” i was doing my clearness with Sandy who might be 35 and has been at Acorn a bit longer than i have.  But this was not the important part.

“But when i think about you more deeply, i realize i have an enegmatic experience of you.  i think i have a pretty good understanding of who most of the people who live here are and what motivates them.  With you i am much less sure.  i know that i like you and have enjoyed your company, but really what this clearness drives me to do is suggest we hang out more so that i can get to know you better.”  She smiles and agrees and a few minutes later our cleaness is over.

Show me what is really inside

A crew from Twin Oaks came over to help with the cleaning up of Acorns steel building which burned a couple weeks back.  i ran around with a dust mask on mostly shoveling and moving wheelbarrows full of charred often indistinguishable items to the large rented dumpsters.  We dutifully separated out copper and other valuable parts, which one day might be usable.  But it was not til today that i really realized the magnitude of the loss.

Rejoice, myself, Augie, GPaul, Xian and Shua in our appropriate attire

A newly purchased vehicle was destroyed (despite Daniels heroic efforts to move it from the steel building inferno).  A $8K table saw is now junk.   Tens of thousands in seed inventory was destroyed (tho curiously, some thousands of dollars of seeds which where were being stored in a deep freeze that was completely engulfed in flames may have survived – as did some ice cream).

And it leaves Acorn with the vexing problem of what to do with the hull of the torched Quonset hut.  The structural engineer we employed to review it says that the building is probably structurally sound, but the galvanization which coated the steel has been burned off and if we want to use the building we should 1) paint it to prevent rusting and 2) store things in it which it is okay if the building collapses on it.  Sadly we do not have enuf stuff which can have buildings collapse on them and as an operating farm and agricultural business, we have significant storage needs.

Nuclear boosters and most power utility executives are fond of telling us that renewable power can’t fill the need for reliable electricity and it’s costs are too high.  The graph below is telling because it shows that the path being blazed by Germany is actually representative of the entire European continent.  Specifically, new installed capacity of wind and solar far exceed all other fuels.  And that even with record low natural gas prices, over half of the amount of new installed capacity in gas was decommissioned last year. Despite dire warnings of increased coal burning, the amount of decommissioned plants well exceeds new installed capacity.  Little new nuclear went on line and a fair amount was pulled from the grid (almost all this year from Germany, but with many more countries likely to close them in the coming years).  There are only 4 reactors currently under construction in all of Europe – excluding Russia.

What Europe is doing with its power mix (EU 27)

Source http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/files/library/publications/statistics/Wind_in_power_annual_statistics_2012.pdf

Both of the intentional communities I live in have cottage industries.  These are the economic engines which allow us to buy the many things we don’t make or grow ourselves.  Most of Twin Oaks’ income comes from the hammocks business and the tofu business, over 90% of Acorn’s income comes from the seed business.  I’ve been involved with tofu and hammocks for over a decade, but I’m just starting with the retail part of the seeds business.

There are some highly desirable features to Twin Oaks’ Hammocks business, which i believe are part of the reason the community has been successful.  The first aspect is that production is highly flexible.  You can come in to the hammock shop at any time and weave or do other fabrication tasks.  You can work for as long as you like, there is no “boss” telling you what to do, though there are people who will train you and direct you, should you need it.  You track your own hours on a trust-based system.

this pattern is called interweave

For those of you who can’t get enough, or just can’t wait for the Twin Oaks Communities Conference, The Farm in Tennessee is hosting it’s 5th annual Conference on Community and Sustainability.

Held Memorial Day weekend, May 29 – 31, here’s some words from the organizers on the event:

The Farm’s Solar School, a conference workshop location

“In community we depend on each other, and it is clear that each one of us has value and something to give, contributions to the whole, made visible through our work.
Find your passion:

• Green Building
• Green Business
• Organic Food Production
• Alternative Education
• Midwifery
• Environmental Activism
• Peace and Justice Activism
• Music and the Arts
• and more

There is room for everyone in community, and you will have the opportunity to see how this can be expressed in a very real way when you are part of our special gathering.”

Reuters tells us that the Republicans are trying to rebrand their party.  After losing the presidency, several senate and house seats in the most recent election, this would seem a good time to re-evaluate.  And what was the conclusion of the most recent effort to understand the problem?

Republicans on Monday outlined a broad plan to attract racial minorities, women and young voters – and shed their image as a “narrow-minded, out-of-touch” party of “stuffy old men.”

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus

If we are being more precise we would have said “stuffy old rich white men.”  But this only scratches the surface of the republican parties problems.  [in the spirit of transparency, if you did not know, i am an old white guy with access to resources]

As long as they are wedded to southern Christian conservatives, they will oppose gay marriage, which they are loosing votes on all over the place.  Should there be any doubt left about the political advantage of supporting gay marriage, Hillary Clinton (perhaps the most calculating politician in recent history) has changed her position on this issue and  just signed on supporting it.

We can tell where this is going

When i asked Abigail what she thought of the Cirque du Soliel performance we had just seen.  She replied thoughtfully “it makes me appreciate Vegas.”  The performance was amazing and CdS reliably delivers that.  And what is true about Abigail’s observation is that this show will never tour and can only happen here.  The multimillion dollar stage was built into this space and the complex show depends on it

Love is CdS’s Beatles tribute

It costs 13.40 Euros to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.  They told us it would cost US$19 each to go to the top of the 1/3rd scale Eiffel Tower here in Vegas.  Which means at current exchange rates it is cheaper to go to the real thing, than the scale model (tho Abigail points out the lines are much longer for the real thing).

1/3 size is still impressive

Vegas is a symphony of distorted scales.  There is a 1/2 size scale model of the statue of liberty is here.  There is a 3/4 scale model of the pyramids and a full sized Sphinx.  And perhaps a half scale model of the Trevi fountain from Rome.  And the odd thing is i have seen the originals of most of these in the last 6 months.

Reblogged from Dispatches from Intentional Community:

“They don’t even have enough respect for us to come and kill us themselves.”

Afghani civilians know the US military is going to kill them. After years of war, this much is to be expected. But now we will not even send our soldiers into their country to kill them as they sleep, or work, or go to school. We are sending machines to do our dirty work.

Read more… 681 more words

More onthe highly depressing topic of drones

Shortly after this incident, the prof lost his job and got banned from campus.

Critics of this action by the UO not that this professor did not have tenure and likely would not or could not have been fired if he did.

It is deeply satisfying to wake up and read articles like this one from Bloomberg business press on how wind power is putting nuclear plants out of business.  Last year in the US $25 billion were spent and new wind capacity.  This raised the total grid electricity fraction to 3.4% from wind, with a forecast of it raising to 4.2% in 2013.  In 2013 there will be no new nuclear reactors connected to the grid and at least one and possibly several reactors will close this year forever.

So using a rough extrapolation, if these rates continue, in about 7 or 8 years the amount of wind generated electricity will exceed the amount of nuclear power in the US.  It is important to remember that many nuclear proponents continue to say that the entire class of renewables are not up to the job of powering the country and instead we should be investing in new reactor designs, most of which cant even be in prototype phase until early 2020?s.

And thus it is worth remembering, that highly paid, well educated, well intentioned, nuclear promoters are stunningly wrong yet again.

25 Arrested at Keystone XL Pipeline Protest in Massachusetts

In the latest protest against the Keystone XL oil pipeline, 25 people were arrested after handcuffing themselves together inside a TransCanada office in Westborough, Massachusetts. More than 100 students, mothers and clergy members staged a “funeral for our future,” saying TransCanada’s pipeline would spur devastating climate change, pollution and potential spills.

Protesters: [singing] “They are digging us a hole. They are digging us a hole, six feet underground, where the pipeline will go.”

The Keystone XL pipeline would carry tar sands crude from Canada to Texas. A decision from President Obama on the project is expected soon, after a State Department review found it does not pose a serious threat to the environment. (this is from democracy now)

I repost things i think are clever from Facebook with some regularity, i re-shared the image above.

The response from one friend i got on this post was “fuck this racist, classist paternalism.”

i have some explaination of this now, and i am wondering if it is clear to others.

Firefighters arrived quickly

i was quite pleased with the fire at the Acorn steel building.  Not because no one was hurt, tho this was certainly a relief.  Not because the blaze did not leap to the new seed office, which would have been seriously disheartening for Acorn in general and especially the crew working hard to complete it.  Nor was my joy from the fact that the bad chicks were moved to safety a couple days before the blaze.

What i was pleased about was that within an hour of the fire starting, after power was returned to the Acorn campus after having been out for a couple of days, i got 4 different sets of messages that i was happening.  GPaul texted me first, Mac phoned me an update, Puck gave the most details of the blaze and another person who does not like to be named told me what was happening.

What thrills me about this is that all these people thought in response to this tricky situation they would call me.  Not that i was going to do anything in the immediate sense (except blab about it on social media), but because i was someone who it was going to be important to and now is was in the Acorn family and needed to be told about our shared loss.

Steel building post fire interior – weight machine and drying racks – all photos by Mac

This is the tale of two brothers, there political disagreements and it’ very contemporary political parallel on the floor of the Senate.

I was in the WISE offices in Am*dam and i got the call.  It was Teddy Goldsmith on the line, the publisher of the radical British magazine the Ecologist.  Teddy was an inspiration to the dark green ecologists who i would ultimately work with in Czechoslovakia. He wrote a compelling ecological book called “The Great U turn. which advocates de-industrialization.  He was calling because his brother, wanted to set up a meeting of the most important anti-nuclear activists in the world.  His brother wanted a private anti-nuclear summit.

Teddy’s brother was the Anglo-French billionaire Sir James Goldsmith.  “Jimmy”wanted to fund the best ideas for stopping nukes.  I learned a lot organizing this event, first off that there was absolutely no agreement on who these people were, we started with a list of about 40 people for an event that was supposed to have only 15.

i hang with some pretty unusual folks and i hear a fair few conspiracy theories.  So the other day before the code pink drone protest that i attended in San Francisco, i was listening carefully to my dear friend Modok who was telling me about the dangers of drones.

Turns out not to be a conspiracy

Modok and Dianne talked about how the Israeli military was increasingly using drones inside that country often killing civilians, in an effort to prove they are effective for market.    But then Modok said something that caught my ear. He claimed that weaponized drones would be deployed inside the US in the coming time.  i objected.  While i despise the drone program, i was quite confident that while they might well be used for surveillance within the US, there would not be weaponized drones inside this country anytime soon.  It was too politically expensive, i countered.  Obama and company want to be able to use drones for killings overseas ad bringing them into domestic use might well endanger that tactical advantage.

i watch the nuclear news.  Especially, i watch the nuclear reactor stores which the mainstream media promotes.  This week there is a lot of excitement about the young man in this picture.

Taylor Wilson designs small reactors circa 2013

Taylor Wilson according to the TED talk article built a fusion reactor in his parents garage when he was 14.  Only he did not. Here is what the OED sez bout reactors:

an apparatus or structure in which fissile material can be made to undergo a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction with the consequent release of energy.

What young Mr. Wilson did is at best a fusion experiment.  There is no self sustaining aspect to this reaction, and what ever power was released was dwarfed by the energy that went into making his experiment.  In fact this is a classic nuclear power deception, claiming that you are solving problems when you are at best doing nothing and at worst creating other problems.

As for fusion power as a solution to the worlds energy problems, this remains another illusive myth.  In 2006, New Scientist said “If commercial fusion is viable, it may well be a century away.”