Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin
A Digest of Urban Survival Resources
For Independent Minded People!
ISSN 2161-5543
In
This Issue:
1.
Re-inventing a city
2.
Rep. Roscoe-Get prepared now for civil unrest
3.
Collapsible electric car introduced, Easy DIY Beer
4.
The Right to Free Speech becoming endangered
Good
Government is not intrusive,
the people are hardly aware of it;
the next best is felt yet loved;
then comes that which is known and feared;
the worst government is hated."
-- Lao-Tzu
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
the people are hardly aware of it;
the next best is felt yet loved;
then comes that which is known and feared;
the worst government is hated."
-- Lao-Tzu
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
How to Re-Invent a City
Every August for one week, the Burning
Man festival takes place in a temporary city of its own creation, called
Black Rock City after Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where it is located. This
year, Black Rock City’s population will be 60,000 — bigger than Carson City,
the state capital of Nevada.
Our real-world cities, meanwhile, are struggling to provide the
services citizens need, limited by declining tax income, record debt, and
increasingly complex social issues. Cities have no choice but find ways to do
more with less. Many seek to harness the creative energies of citizens to fill
the gaps, asking them to take a more active role in governance, service
provision, and even
in creating new services.
It’s easy to write off Burning Man as a hippie love fest in the desert.
It has its own problems like any city, but that's selling it short, especially
in one regard - its remarkable ability to foster participation. The event --
which for 26 years has expected participants to practice sharing, gifting, and
radical self-reliance -- is an effective proving ground for experiments in
community self-organization. In fact, participants build most of the city
without any direct oversight from organizers.
Michel
Bauwens, the founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation, believes that the proper
role of government in our emerging networked society is that of partner in
social production. This means that in a myriad ways government helps citizens help
themselves. This turns the existing model of government as a top-down service
provider on its head. Instead, government works in a bottom up fashion to
empower citizens to provide for themselves.
Burning Man does exactly this. It fosters a culture of participation
through its Ten
Principles and provide basic infrastructure such as roads, sanitation, and
safety, which, by the way, rely heavily on volunteer labor. Participants fill
in the blanks beautifully with a seemingly unlimited number of options for care, connection,
artistic expression, education, sustenance, and fun. At Burning Man, there are
no spectators. Likewise, we increasingly need cities where every citizen is
intimately involved in creating their city on a day to day basis.
Crowdsource The Budget
Almost none of the hundreds of art projects exhibited at Burning Man
are fully funded by the festival. Many of them are crowdfunded through Kickstarter or Indiegogo. This requires active community
participation, and it also organically vets projects ensuring that the best
ideas are likely to be funded.
Excerpted from…
Read more: http://www.utne.com/arts-culture/reinvent-your-city-burning-man-style.aspx#ixzz24TRoXAj0
Read more: http://www.utne.com/arts-culture/reinvent-your-city-burning-man-style.aspx#ixzz24TRoXAj0
Don’t sow
your crops until you’ve enriched the soil with Epsom Salts. Sprinkle about a cup over every 100 sq ft (a
10’x10’ patch).
PM’s
Compendium of Useful Resources
Survivalist congressman advocates preparedness, says likelihood of
civil unrest is 'high probability'
You buy health insurance, car insurance and homeowners insurance. You buy life insurance as well, but Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, the senior Republican congressman from Maryland, has a different take on what life insurance really means.
"There are a number of events that could create a situation in the cities where civil unrest would be a very high probability," Bartlett - one of the country's most vocal advocates of preparing for the worst possible domestic situations - says in a new documentary called "Urban Danger," where he takes viewers on a tour of a cabin he maintains in rural West Virginia - a structure that is powered by the sun and by the wind.
"There are a number of events that could create a situation in the cities where civil unrest would be a very high probability," says Bartlett, 86, in his video. "And I think that those who can and those who understand need to take advantage of the opportunity when these winds of strife are not blowing, to move their families."
You buy health insurance, car insurance and homeowners insurance. You buy life insurance as well, but Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, the senior Republican congressman from Maryland, has a different take on what life insurance really means.
"There are a number of events that could create a situation in the cities where civil unrest would be a very high probability," Bartlett - one of the country's most vocal advocates of preparing for the worst possible domestic situations - says in a new documentary called "Urban Danger," where he takes viewers on a tour of a cabin he maintains in rural West Virginia - a structure that is powered by the sun and by the wind.
"There are a number of events that could create a situation in the cities where civil unrest would be a very high probability," says Bartlett, 86, in his video. "And I think that those who can and those who understand need to take advantage of the opportunity when these winds of strife are not blowing, to move their families."
Scroll down a bit to click on the link to watch the video here:
Researchers at MIT’s Changing Places Group and Denokinn have now begun
testing the Hiriko
Fold, a fully electric vehicle which is able to collapse into a more
compact shape when parking. READ
MORE...
Storing Leftover Seeds
Remove the moisture-absorbing silica gel packs from your vitamin jar
(or other source) and place one along
with leftover seeds into a jar and seal tightly and keep it refrigerated until
next spring. Most seeds kept in this
fashion will last up to three years.
Brewed and fermented spirits were a
staple of the frontier economy of colonial America. Beer, for example, was available in almost all
households and consumed at almost every meal. Beer-making provided a use for
surplus grain, which could not otherwise be transported for sale in distant
markets over the primitive roads of the time. Beer was safer to drink than most
of the water that one could obtain from wells and streams. Beer had nutritional
value, and in a world where most everything was scarce, one did not allow good
carbohydrates to go to waste. Thus beer was a routine part of the diet of
frontier families and a vital source of nutrition. If it made you feel better
during the hard times, that was also a good thing. http://eartheasy.com/eat_homebrew.htm
SteriPen
A portable water purifier that uses UV technology to kill viruses and
bacteria in water. Will purify up to
16oz at a time…easy and lightweight. Good for foreign travel and emergencies.
Requires 4 AA batteries. Available at various prices on eBay or at:
The Nanny State Updates…
The U.S. middle class has shrunk drastically over the last 10 years as Americans' net worth has plunged, wages declined and standards of living slipped away, according to a report released on Wednesday.
Middle-income earners, long seen as the solid center of the country,
are pessimistic and place the blame squarely on U.S. lawmakers, banks and big
business, the findings by the Pew Research Center showed.
"America's middle class has endured its worst decade in modern
history," researchers wrote.
The median household net worth, which is the value of assets minus
debt, dropped from $129,582 to $93,150 over the same 10-year period, according
to Pew, which analyzed U.S. data along with its own survey of nearly 1,300
adults who consider themselves middle class.
The Swine
Flu vaccine in 1976 caused more death and illness than the
disease it was intended to prevent.
disease it was intended to prevent.
The Parting Thought- The Right to Free Speech
I am one of the
lead plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit against the National Defense Authorization
Act, which gives the president the power to hold any US citizen anywhere for as
long as he wants, without charge or trial.
When Obama signed the bill into law, he announced that although he
signed it he wouldn't use it (and what exactly would it be needed for then?).
You can read his statement here:
Judge Katherine Forrest issued a temporary injunction in May to stop
the worst parts of the law (Section 1021) from going into effect in May, but US
government lawyers then argued that the administration can ignore the judge's
ruling. On August 6 Obama's lawyers appealed the injunction formally.
What does the law provide for? According to Bolen, in her Guardian
article;
...US government
lawyers had confirmed that, yes, the NDAA does give the president the power to
lock up people like journalist Chris Hedges and peaceful activists like myself
and other plaintiffs. Government attorneys stated on record that even war
correspondents could be locked up indefinitely under the NDAA.
Judge Forrest had
ruled for a temporary injunction against an unconstitutional provision in this
law, after government attorneys refused to provide assurances to the court that
plaintiffs and others would not be indefinitely detained for engaging in first
amendment activities.
The bottom line is that so far, when asked to do so, the government's
lawyers have refused to offer any clear definition of what an "associated
force" is, which leaves them free to define it as they wish. In other
words, the law gives the government virtually unlimited power to lock up anyone
who criticizes what they do.
The right to free speech is the most important freedom we have
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