This [ten-page] paper started as a note to myself as I sought to explore the disparity between my home here in Maine, the forest, lake, and loons…and the rushing maelstrom of the world about me that showed up in the instant on my computer screen.
Call it anxiety adjustment, therapy, or just an attempt to make some sense out of thing.
Perhaps it should have remained in that personal, private compartment, but I also felt the need to share, and so I have. You have to decide the wisdom of that decision.
Nouriel “Dr. Doom” Roubini is slamming the run up in the gold market: it's the new subprime bubble only worse. It's leveraged 25-40x not just 5-10x. It's just another example of the global market's central planning directorate in action. Another massive/bad investment by those with all the decision making power. It may also be a good indicator that gold is part and parcel of the old broken economy and not something that should be welcome in the new one we're building.
Phi Beta Iota: George Soros has this exactly right and has pulled out. What can be understood from open sources in addition to the above is that the gold market is chock full of fraud, including gold certificates issued without gold to back them up; and very likely gold diluted with titanium by the Bank of New York under Tim Geithner. There is also the residual matter of the Black Lily covert gold fund, of the gold to be confiscated from Libya before the rebels figure out they're dupes in a major theft, and finally–the wild card–there are rumors circulating in the gold community that a new methods has been found that will more rapidly discover all remaining gold deposits around the earth.
My colleague Robert Soden was absolutely right: Tomnod is definitely iRevolution material. This is why I reached out to the group a few days ago to explore the possibility of using their technology to crowdsource the analysis of satellite imagery for Somalia. You can read more about that project here. In this blog post, however, is to highlight the amazing work they’ve been doing with National Geographic in search of Genghis Khan’s tomb.
The Bioneers Conference is a leading-edge forum presenting breakthrough solutions for people and planet. Join us on October 14-16, 2011 for the annual conference.
MoblleActive.org recently had the opportunity to test an off-the-grid GSM base station. Kurtis Heimerl presented The Village Base Station (VBTS), (link is a PDF) a low-power means of providing mobile network service without grid power or network infrastructure.
Phi Beta Iota: As best we can tell, OpenBTS is central–vital–to the achievement of Open Society as well as Open Government, and is the only way that we can reasonably scale free to very low cost Internet access to the five billion poor.
A sobering Japanese bookend to the stunning Sprey-Cockburn report which documented Fukushima's increased infant death rates in some cities in the United States (distributed on 16 Aug). Yet another nail in the claim that we can evolve a safe carbon-free economy in the near term. Given the low power density of green technologies, like wind and solar, going carbon-free or moving away from fire — i.e., the invention that launched millions of years human cultural evolution — in the next 30-100 years necessarily involves a huge expansion in nuclear power, because is the only high power-density, non-carbon solution available over the foreseeable future).
Japanese doctors warn of public health problems caused by Fukushima radiation.
by Dahr Jamail
Scientists and doctors are calling for a new national policy in Japan that mandates the testing of food, soil, water, and the air for radioactivity still being emitted from Fukushima's heavily damaged Daiichi nuclear power plant.
“How much radioactive materials have been released from the plant?” asked Dr Tatsuhiko Kodama, a professor at the Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology and Director of the University of Tokyo's Radioisotope Centre, in a July 27 speech to the Committee of Health, Labour and Welfare at Japan's House of Representatives.
Read more….
Phi Beta Iota: We do not agree with Brother Spinney's conclusion. Infinite free energy is available now, particularly in countries such as Chile where a wide variety of solar, geo-thermal, and oceanic forms can be deployed. We have lacked both political will and scientific imagination, as well as the essential focus on distributed self-sufficiency. The “central” generation paradigm is corrupt and will not scale.
Portland Oregon is working on revising zoning regulations regarding urban market farms. Early debate indicates that the protection of traditional approaches to real-estate value (ornamental residences, noise/traffic abatement, etc.) is the priority. Given the scale of the economic crisis that is already upon us, this approach is completely broken. They should be focused on building a simple platform for accelerating a local food economy.
Phi Beta Iota: Portland in particular, and the Pacific Northwest generally, keep popping up as bastions of ethical sanity. The combination of intelligence and integrity visible there is quite heartening.
