a) Storage for MF Global’s office equipment auction?

b) A scene from AMC’s The Walking Dead?

c) Clean up efforts from Japan’s tsunami?

d)  An outtake from A&E’s documentary Hoarders?

e)  A photo of the Greek Ministry of Finance Records Division?

If you guessed e), you get a gold star… Courtesy of Zero Hedge, the above is a screen shot from a recent documentary on the Greece bailout called “The Greek Lie”.  And this, my friends, is one of the big reasons why Greece is toast.

One thing the Chinese would do was convince the US prisoners of war to write the statement  ”The United States is not perfect.”

Why?

Because they knew that we humans  form our self-image largely by observing our own actions.  Your own behavior is your primary source of information about your own beliefs and values.   In other words you look at what you do to figure out who you are.   We would love to think our self-image and values are solid as a rock, but they are not.

Why does this matter?

Look at the statement :  ”The United States is not perfect.”

This seems obvious and harmless enough right?  But big changes start with small steps.   Sometimes very small steps.  For the POWs who would not write that statement down, they might be asked to copy down statements that were written by others.  Just to copy what someone else had written.

Completely harmless right?

With time the statements were slightly expanded.  Maybe prisoners would write an essay on the things that were not perfect in the US or to write the statement “Unemployment is not a problem in a Communist country”  After a short time the belief systems of the prisoners would change to incorporate what they had written.

Eventually it was believed that ALL American POWs held by the Chinese , as opposed to the N. Koreans, collaborated with the enemy in one form or another.  Whether it was turning against their country or turning in other prisoners.  Willingly broadcasting anti-American statements or just running errands for the Chinese, these soldiers all changed their belief systems.

These were soldiers who were trained to keep their mouths shut.  But their entire belief systems were changed (you can say brainwashed)  through tiny seemingly harmless written statements.  What the hell?

They changed because they saw what they had written, and their beliefs changed to match what they had done.

Ok, that’s history, how can this information be useful to us now?

There are two primary ways.  First, to avoid being unduly influenced and secondly to be able to take control of our own belief system.

Our beliefs can be our greatest asset or our worst liability, so having knowledge and control over them is pretty damn important.

To avoid being influenced we start by being aware that when we are asked to take any action,  even a seemingly trivial one, our self image will begin to shift to accommodate it.  If we are asked to sign a petition, or answer a questionaire we will begin to change, and these small changes can lead to large consequences.  So we need to be aware of our actions especially when we are asked by others.  We should not take a step down a path that is not a path leading to where we want to go.

To take control over our own belief systems we choose to take tiny steps in the direction we want to go in.  If we want to be more resilient we can grow one tomato plant.  If we want to have more integrity to ourselves we can commit to doing one push-up a day for a week and then doing it.  This will teach us that we accomplish what we set out to accomplish.  Then we can slowly set harder tasks for ourselves, and achieve them as well.   Soon our self-image is of someone who accomplishes whatever they set their mind too.  Pretty good huh?

If the Chinese soldiers could convince POWs to  reverse their belief systems though seemingly harmless written statements we should not underestimate what they can do for us if we take the time to thoughtfully write our goals and beliefs.

Imagine an acre urban farm with over 1.2 million pounds of topsoil on top of a building.  Brooklyn Grange imagined it and created it – a commercial urban farm that provides urban resilience and a reliable source of organic produce in the middle of Queens.

The farm was financed through private equity, loans, grassroots fundraising and the website Kickstarter.com.  And in the ultimate “piss off” to the USDA, the farm has no intention of applying for the Department’s organic certification.

According to Brooklyn Grange, Conservation Technologies laid down a green roof system, which prevents plant roots from penetrating the surface of the roof and conserves water through an ingenuous use of drainage mats and small storage cups to hold excess water, which can then be accessed during dry conditions.

So, what are they growing? Hundreds of thousands of plants, including 40 varieties of tomatoes, salad greens, carrots, fennel, beets, radishes, beans and many other crops. Vegetables are grown organically with no synthetic fertilizers, insecticide or herbicides during a 9-month growing season. During the winter, Brooklyn Grange plants cover crops like rye, buckwheat and clover.

Best of all, the produce is sold directly to the community from several weekly farm stands and to several of New York’s finest restaurants.

Yes, for now big cities must still rely on rural farmers for the bulk of their food, but urban farms inside city limits that take advantage of unused roof space are a huge opportunity to improve urban quality of life, increase urban access to healthy fresh food, increase community resilience, and transform urban concrete jungles into green, highly productive spaces.

Brooklyn Grange is just one example of local entrepreneurs, small businesses and communities taking matters into their own hands to build community resilience. Urban farms are popping up quickly in the most unlikely of places – check out former professional basketball star Will Allen’s Growing Power Inc. sometime.

Allen, who quit a high-paid marketing job at Procter and Gamble and purchased a foreclosed nursery, now teaches urban farming to inner-city residents in Milwaukee. The local benefits are enormous: In addition to teaching urbanites that food really does miraculously sprout from seeds and soil rather than simply appearing in shiny grocery store display stands, the urban farming movement is reconnecting us to food in profoundly important ways.

Yes, the world seems full of bad news these days, and urban farming is still in its infancy, but the implications of what Brooklyn Grange and people like Will Smith are doing is potentially enormous and very exciting.

Now, take one last look at the picture above. Compare the concrete wasteland at ground level with what you see happening on the roof. It’s an amazingly stark contrast isn’t it? Where would you rather be?

We have all heard about how many Earths it would take for the entire world to live as Americans do.  I think the number is about 5.  We hear about food shortages and argue over Genetically modified foods.  Are they necessary to feed the planet?

Peak oil theory shows us that the days of cheap oil may be numbered.  As the population grows and resources diminish we may be headed towards a nasty, tumultuous period.

We are over fishing the oceans, depleting the soil, melting the glaciers, poisoning ourselves with chemicals, frying ourselves with radiation.

But I’d like to propose a different view.

160 years ago Napoleon III held a banquet.  The most honored guests were allowed to use very special utensils.  Utensils so rare, they were reserved for the elite among the elite.  The rest of the guests were forced to make due with gold utensils.   These special utensils were made of  Aluminum, the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust.  Why was this metal, that is so abundant deemed so special?  Because it was extremely hard to produce and this made it seem unbelievably rare.

As recently as the 1950s chicken was more expensive than steak and it was only served for special occasions. Well that’s interesting, eating chicken with an aluminum fork does not seem so marvelous now.  What happened?

The rare became commonplace.  This has happened repeatedly throughout history.  So what is to make us think it will stop happening?

We talk about an energy crisis and yet the earth annually receives 174 petawatts of power from the sun.  Ok what in the hell does that mean?  It means that the earth receives enough energy every single minute to meet our power needs for a year!

There is plenty of energy, just not an easy way to assess it.

Another source of energy is the atom.  Yes nuclear power has a shoddy record.  But the fact is there is enough energy in your body to power the entire United States for 16 years!

Again, plenty of power, just access issues.

This is the same with water.  Fresh clean water is a huge problem,  but come on,  this planet is made of water.  We are made of water.  Water water every where and not a drop to drink….for now.  But there is plenty of water.  Yet again it is  only an access problem.

Speaking of water, how much power is there in the rising and lowering of the tides?  I don’t  know but I’d say a lot of damn power.   So we are surrounded with energy and water and yet we worry about scarcity.

But if history is any example, the rare will become abundant.

Sure things are crazy and changing.  Power is being decentralized and large institutions will topple.  But as long as we are prepared and have our eyes wide open, what an exciting time to be alive.

In the study of quantum physics we learn that subatomic particles are influenced by our perceptions of them.  A particles spin is undetermined until we observe it.  Only when we observe it does it settle on one direction or the other.  So we literally change reality just by our observation.  When we observe the spin of one particle we can also effect the spin of an entangled particle miles away, instantaneously.  That means some type of info is being passed between the two faster than the speed of light!  But Einstein said that was impossible!  Hmm.

My point is that things are not always what they seem and we can influence the world with our thoughts and our observation.  So we might as well have a positive outlook right?  Not just because it is more fun, but because it may actually create the future we will get.

So whatever you think you are lacking, whether it is energy or water, or love or money, don’y worry.

THERE IS PLENTY.  You know.

Have a great day.

Salatin on making money without government subsidies…

In general, we run the farm like a business instead of a welfare recipient and we adhere to historically-validated patterns. For example, instead of buying petroleum fertilizer, we self-generate fertilizer with our own carbon and manures through large scale composting, which we turn with pigs (pigaerators) rather than machinery. Letting the animals do the work takes the capital-intensive depreciable infrastructure out of the equation and creates profitability that is size-neutral.

Nature does not transport carbon very far, so neither do we. We practice an integrated system rather than segregated. Animals are near their feedstuffs so that the manures can fertilize the plants that grew the food. The numbers are kept low enough for the farm’s ecology to metabolize the manure and compost rather than it becoming a toxic problem due to over-abundance. The farm runs on real time solar energy via photosynthetic activity that creates decomposable biomass. Perennials rather than annuals form the basis of our program. Perennials build soil;  annual deplete soil. American ag policy only subsidizes annuals.

We control health and pathogenicity by complex multi-speciated relationships through symbiosis and synergy. Portable shelters for livestock, along with electric fencing, insure hygienic and sanitary housing and lounging areas, not to mention clean air, sunshine, and exercise. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations are always mono-speciated, filled with fecal particulate, and deny sunshine and exercise. You could not design a more toxic system.

On the similarities between the government’s wars on drugs and sustainable ag…

It was the law school at Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s school in Lynchburg, and now run by his sons. The reason I went out on that limb there was partly penance for my two great aunts who devoted their lives to the Women’s Temperance Union and certainly played a part in creating Prohibition nearly a century ago. They are both deceased now, but I think it’s important to realize that their religious outrage over alcohol created the legal precedent to allow the federal government to come between my lips and my throat. In essence, to tell me what I could and could not ingest.

That such a precedent would morph in our day into illegal raw milk, homemade pickles, and home cured charcuterie certainly never crossed their minds. But this is why we must be very careful when we ask for the government to remedy our outrage. Outrageous behavior, also known as the lunatic fringe, is the seed bed of innovation and creativity. A government that can take away alcohol can also take away heritage food.

The drug war in the America is precisely like prohibition. I’ve never taken drugs and don’t intend to, but I absolutely defend the right of someone to take them if they want. By the same token, I don’t eat McDonald’s food, but I vehemently defend the right of people to eat it. As soon as the government becomes the arbiter, by edict, of what we can and cannot ingest, the frenzy in the marketplace to gain concessionary privileges never ceases. Indeed, the incessant cry to demonize one thing over another, criminalize one food over another, thunders in the ears of politicians as businesses jockey for favors and indulgences from legislative priests.

The moment the government determines that you do not own yourself, that society owns your body, you give up all personal choice and autonomy. You are no longer a citizen, but a slave. Not a person, but a pawn.

On why a historical return to laws on trespass and strong property rights are best suited to deal with GMO’s, clean water, pollution, etc…

I do not believe we need laws regulating GMOs any more than we needed laws to regulate pollution. If historic trespass law had been properly administered, we would not have needed either the Environmental Protection Agency or the Clean Water Act. When you pour something in the river that crosses my boundary, you are liable for it. For sure, businesses that pollute should be held liable for the total cost of the clean up. If it bankrupts them, so be it. In fact, I would say that the corporate officers should be held personally liable for those violations.

The old adage “your fist ends at my nose” actually works for a lot of things. The first time Monsanto’s life form went across a fence and adulterated my plants, they should have been held liable for their fist hitting my nose. And I shouldn’t have to sue them; the district attorney should prosecute it just like a bank robbery or a murder. If that had been done, GMOs would never have been released on the planet to wreak the havoc they are currently wreaking.

Our culture has become such a pawn of these large interests that today, not only is Monsanto not liable, but the farmer whose plants become impregnated with Monsanto’s patented life forms is liable for the privilege of allowing the promiscuity to occur in his fields. It’s unspeakably outrageous. Why the libertarians and conservatives can’t understand what this blatant disregard for property rights is doing to our jurisprudence and the basic American dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness I can’t fathom. We are supposed to be secure from trespass in our persons and property—that’s the whole point of warrants for search and seizure. Granting Monsanto the right to roam the countryside with its property and violate the security of land and persons is unconscionable in any functional civilization.

Read the rest of the interview here.

America and much of the Western world is drowning in laws, lawsuits, and endless red tape.

Everyone knows it, but almost no one is doing anything about it.   As laws get more and more plentiful they strangle our freedom of choice.   They strangle our ability to be human.  It is a never ending process.    Some tragic event will happen and good intentioned people will try to “fix it” by passing new laws.  By creating more bureaucratic procedures.

The human mind is an awesome tool but it needs freedom to function properly.

If your job was to come up with a set of procedures to keep airports safe you might conclude that a passenger, who sets off the metal detector and is waiting for a pat down, is approached and makes contact with another passenger who has already passed through screening, they might be passing an explosive device or a weapon between them.  The person who had already cleared the screening could get a hand-off from the person waiting to be searched.   This could be a serious problem.  If the passenger getting the potential hand-off is uncooperative when approached then you have a potentially serious situation.    So you might put something in the procedure manual to deal with this situation.   Crack down.  Lock down the airport if you have to.

But what if the passenger getting the hand-off is a 4-year-old girl hugging her grandmother?

Then I guess you warn the crying “uncooperative suspect”  and yell at the grandmother.   “We are going to shut down the airport if you don’t grab her”  That’ll solve everything.  I feel so much safer now.

But these guys are just following procedures.  If they don’t they could get fired.  And then they have no job and no way to feed the kids back home. What to do?

When we hear about TSA agents harassing passengers it is easier to just think about ourselves. To think that we will just follow the rules so we can make it to our flight on time.  We will show up early, take our shoes off and let them pat us down.

When we see countless other examples of inefficiency and bureaucratic bullshit we just adapt.  Humans are good at that.  And a frog in a pot of water can adapt to the increasing temperature too.  That is until he is dead!

It is easy to turn the other way.  It is hard to do something.  How do we as individuals stand up against TSA agents when we just want to get on with our lives. Who wants to deal with that shit?

How do you “fix” the IRS, which has the power to seize your property, freeze your accounts, and soon maybe even seize your passport?  A system that is so vast that no one can really understand it.

How do we keep from being the ones who do nothing while evil is triumphing.

Here’s an answer:

Turn your back.  Leave.  The system cannot exist without your willing participation.

You can do something without having to put yourself at risk.  In fact you can actually mitigate your risks and have fun, save money, diversify your assets, prepare for the future and not be the “good man doing nothing”

By leaving you cast a vote that says I’m not going to take it.   You don’t have to leave permanently either.  Once you have a place, in Panama for example, paid for and growing fruit.  Once you have a foreign bank account, you have access to a world of opportunities.  Once you have some savings in precious metals, you can live in the US with a greater sense of freedom.

You  leave by physically leaving the country and you can also “leave” by becoming more resilient.  You can turn your back on impersonal, corrupt systems by becoming more self-reliant. By no longer needing them. If you were to live completely self-sufficiently you would not need to earn any money.  And guess what…You wouldn’t owe any taxes either.

How else can you turn you back on the system? What are your thoughts?

If you want some fuel for your mental fire try reading The Death of Common Sense, by Philip Howard.  It is guaranteed to piss you off, and very possibly inspire you to make some changes.

Have a great day!

The thing that we’ve always loved about the place is the natural beauty for sure.

It’s hands-down one of the most stunningly beautiful areas in all of Panama.

But there’s also a really hard-to-define “vibe” that makes the place captivating: A totally eclectic mix of surfers, international entrepreneurs, young families, and outdoors-oriented nature lovers that mix easily with the local Panamanian community.

It’s a place where you can hang with these folks in the early am…

Then go do this for an hour or two…

And then go horseback riding with this dude in the afternoon.

But what really intrigues me about the place is that projects like Eco Venao, as well as many others in the area, are at the cutting edge of resilient living and they don’t even know it. And that really gets to the “vibe” I’m talking about.

Here’s what I mean: We stayed at the two bedroom house below called La Casona. Looks pretty modest doesn’t it? And yet the entire time we were there, I couldn’t help thinking to myself that I would have no problem living in a place like this full time. It would be a perfect primary home for my family of 5 (Wife might disagree vehemently of course, but set that aside for the moment).

Why? The local design of the place takes into account something Panamanians in these parts implicitly understand, that many of us westerners just don’t get: First, when your living room looks like this…

…what conceivable reason would you need for a 15 room McMansion with a two car garage?

No, you need a place to sleep and cook. The rest of the time you’ll be spending in your “living room” watching the howler monkeys and hummingbirds, running around barefoot as our kids did all weekend, or simply sitting on the patio staring transfixed at the ocean below.

So, what would a resilient home like this cost? That’s the big question. I spent some time talking with the manager of Eco Venao and he said the construction costs to build a modest place like La Casona (I estimated about 2000 square feet) were about $60 per square foot or $120,000 all in.

Okay, but let’s say you wanted to go really resilient… Like “off-grid” resilient. What would the costs be then?

Solar? It’s hard to estimate, but my best guess is that the installation costs would be around $25,000-$30,000 for a solar system to cover all of your electricity needs. You would need a backup generator for particularly cloudy days, but that should mostly cover it.

Important point, and this gets to the second point Panamanians get that westerners don’t: A home like this does not include air conditioning, but the reality is that if you designed your home correctly to take advantage of passive cooling — as many Panamanian locals here do –  you wouldn’t need it, even in a tropical climate like Panama. La Casona for example, had great big ceiling fans that kept us perfectly comfortable during our stay and large roof overhangs that kept the interior cool.

Water source? We actually just dug a well for a separate project and the cost was around $6000. I’m rounding it up to $10,000 here just to be obscene.

What about the land costs? Even here, they are all over the map. If it’s ocean front it can be $30 per square meter or much, much more. But if not, it’s still possible to find land for $3 a square meter or less with ocean views. So, lets assume $6 per square meter for a hectare of land. A hectare is 10,000 square meters or roughly 2 ½ acres. That’s $60,000 for more than enough land to also landscape a killer organic garden to go with your killer resilient home.

So, a sample “back of the napkin” budget for a resilient home along these lines would look something like this:

Land cost (10,000 sm @ $6 sm): $ 60,000
Building cost (2000 sf @ $60 sf): $120,000
Well: $ 10,000
Solar: $ 30,000
Total: $220,000

I don’t know about you, but for a modest home with an outdoor “living room” on 2 ½ acres that’s off-grid, with your own water source, and plenty of land to grow food, this seems pretty damn reasonable.

What am I missing? I’d love to hear from you…

I’m into episode one, and it’s both captivating and infuriating. Warning, revisionists, apologists and incorrigible Keynesians like Paul Krugman do make an appearance, but on balance a pretty thorough and insightful look at how we all got screwed.

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part One on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

What does it do? It scours the state, searching high and low, leaving no stone unturned, to make sure those practicing “dietetics and nutrition” are properly licensed.

And thank goodness for that, because we simply can’t have unlicensed dietitians and nutritionists willy nilly encouraging folks to eat right. Imagine the chaos.

So, let’s say you wanted to open a consulting practice in North Carolina to counsel clients on good eating habits and diet choices. Well, if you didn’t get a license first from the NCBDN, you’d be breaking the law. Such evil doing it seems, is a dire threat to the health and well being of North Carolinians.

But let’s say you’re simply a blogger. How about a blogger who writes about how he radically changed his diet and conquered diabetes? And let’s just say for the sake of argument that you also encouraged your readers to adopt the same healthy eating habits.

Well, according to Charla Burrill, the director of the NCBDN, you’d be violating Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes. You’d be “practicing nutrition” and “providing nutrition counseling”, you see… And for that, you’d need a license… Or else!

In fact, unless you completely rewrote your blog, you could be sued by the licensing board, and if you refused to rewrite the naughty bits, you might face up to 120 days in jail.

According to the Carolina Journal, that’s exactly what happened to Steve Cooksey:

[When] Steve Cooksey…was hospitalized with diabetes in February 2009, he decided to avoid the fate of his grandmother, who eventually died of the disease. He embraced the low-carb, high-protein Paleo diet, also known as the “caveman” or “hunter-gatherer” diet. The diet, he said, made him drug- and insulin-free within 30 days. By May of that year, he had lost 45 pounds and decided to start a blog about his success.

But this past January the state dietetics and nutrition board decided Cooksey’s blog — Diabetes-Warrior.net — violated state law. The nutritional advice Cooksey provides on the site amounts to “practicing nutrition,” the board’s director says, and in North Carolina that’s something you need a license to do.

Unless Cooksey completely rewrites his 3-year-old blog, he could be sued by the licensing board. If he loses the lawsuit and refuses to take down the blog, he could face up to 120 days in jail.

The board’s director says Cooksey has a First Amendment right to blog about his diet, but he can’t encourage others to adopt it unless the state has certified him as a dietitian or nutritionist.

What did the Board find so objectionable about Cooksey’s site?

We can see for ourselves, because Ms. Burill, in typical bureaucratic, schoolmarmish, petty tyrant fashion printed out the officious pages from Cooksey’s blog, marked up the offending areas in red ink, and forwarded them to Cooksey with an admonition to rewrite the dirty parts or face the bureaucratic wrath of the NCBDN.

Incredible isn’t it?

Here’s the point: Whether it’s the moronic scribblings of Ms. Burill, the absurdity of cosmetology boards threatening jail sentences for hair braiding businesses that practice their trade without a  license, or even knucklehead cops shutting down children’s lemonade stands for not being licensed, the stories of busybody government nose pickers killing Americans’ entrepreneurial spirit are growing by the day.

And there’s no reason to put up with it. There are still countries all over the world that welcome hard working entrepreneurs with great ideas. Even those that don’t, typically still don’t have the vast, smothering government bureaucracy that is found all-too-often in America today, so entrepreneurs are largely left alone.

If you’re entrepreneurial or have a great business idea, it’s worth broadening your horizons and researching where those ideas and your entrepreneurial spirit are still welcomed. There are still many countries where you won’t run afoul of “Nurse Ratched’s” like Ms. Burill. Panama is one of them, but there are many others as well.

And speaking of Panama… Our family instruction manual for living in Panama is almost complete. And it offers real examples of fantastic business ideas that expats here have started all on their own, and with a minimum of crushing rules, regulations and bureaucracy. Stay tuned, because we’re really excited about it.