Ron Paul stands for a lot of things that I think are nutty, like his untried libertarian utopian ideas. Under normal circumstances, I would never consider urging my American neighbours to vote for a libertarian.

These are not normal circumstances.

The US has reached a point of political-economic crisis – you cannot separate the two – and as a result the responses are limited and non-ideal. In a crisis you must take decisive action or events may overwhelm you – they may anyway, as a crisis is by definition somewhere between bordering on chaos and all-out anarchy.

At this point, the urgent need is to neutralize the power of corporations and the rich over the US government or nothing else will matter. Yes, climate change, peak oil, the current depression, and so on are all serious crises. The sad fact is that they all exist to the extent they do largely because of corruption in the United States government.

Until this corruption is rooted out, there is little chance of serious action on climate, on oil dependency, or of the US and world economy recovering. If you disagree with me, please show me what President Obama has done that will make a real difference with these crises.

You can trade an Obama for a Romney/Gingrich/whoever and things will get worse faster, but either way the crises we face will not be addressed.

Ron Paul has some scary ideas and libertarianism is untried utopian lunacy, but because of the extent of the corruption in the US government, he’s the only candidate who has a chance of stopping the American slide – and they’re going to drag a lot of us with them – into a police-state plutarchy.

I don’t say this lightly; electing Ron Paul is potentially a dangerous step but far less dangerous than hoping for change from Obama or any of the other Republican candidates. Ron Paul is anti-empire, anti-police-state, and pro-Constitution, which Americans desperately need to remember matters before it’s too late.

OBL has been reported dead. This leads me to three possibilities:

1. He really is recently deceased, meaning prior rumours were wrong. If so, points 2 and 3 hold for the US/World generally and Canada specifically.
2. US: There goes a big part of the justification for being in Afghanistan. Americans are sick of being at war, no matter what Bill O’Reilly and the CEO of Halliburton want to think. This is the perfect opportuinty for Mr. Obama to say Afghanistan should become a UN peacekeeping mission – of which the US is not a part - or simply to annouce a timetable for withdrawal. Either way, everyone is relieved. If the Afghanis really do not want to be dominated by the Taliban, then they need to prepare to stand up and destroy them. As the uprisings in the Middle East have shown, only if the people unite against an oppressor can they have a chance to be free.
3. Canada – There goes a large part of Stephen Harper’s fear-based agenda. Not that the whole thing was based on fear of OBL and Al-Queada by a long shot, but OBL was the foundation upon which the War on Terror was built. Canadians are sick of this war and would like to go back to peacekeeping. The only fella tha’s likely to do that is Jack Layton. The official death of OBL can only hurt Harper and boost the NDP. The timing could not be worse for Harper.
4. The fourth possibility is this: It is possible that previous reports of Mr. Bin Laden’s death were correct, and it is just now being officially reported by the United States. If so, points 2 and 3 still stand. The only danger is that Americans somehow discover that Mr. OBL had been dead for some time and their government knew it.

UPDATE: While I have no reason to doubt the official U.S. version, it is awfully convenient that bin Laden was buried at sea.

In the event of an election, poll results point to the Conservatives either maintaining their minority or even sliding into a majority, despite the recent scandals. Given that, combined with the desire of the opposition to pull down the Harper Government™, the Liberals would be further ahead to seek either the leadership of a minority government or another attempt at a coalition.

Here are the issues:

1. The Conservatives find themselves mired in a serious of scandals, and, for an historic first, actually in contempt of Parliament.
2. Given #1, the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc will look mighty duplicitous themselves if they don’t vote “non-confidence” in the Harper Government. (Note that this applies even if these parties use some trickery, such as having some MPs get ‘strategic flu’ and not show up to vote in a confidence motion.)
3. However, the polls show that if an election is called, at worst the Conservatives will win enough seats to form another minority, and might even get enough to form a majority.

Option A: A Liberal Minority

Given this, what are the Liberals and others to do? An election is a big risk for the Liberals. A much better bet would be to ask the Governor General to form a minority government supported by the NDP and Bloc. This gives the Liberals a chance to show they are, at worst, no worse than the Conservatives at governing.

The NDP would likely get more out of the Liberals than they will out of the Conservatives. Mr. Ignatieff would get a chance to show his stuff. The new minority government could immediately gain some goodwill by cancelling some of the more odious Conservative ideas, such as building more prisons when the crime rate is declining, cancelling the long-form census, or muzzling government scientists.

The Conservatives could hardly oppose the idea because they’ve been in a minority position for four years now and, as they keep telling us, Canadians don’t want an election. Well, they probably would oppose the idea of a Liberal minority strenuously, no doubt referring to it as a coalition of socialists and separatists, but that’s a dangerous route to take if they’re not actually a coalition. I suspect that the majority of Canadians – and remember that a majority of Canadians did not vote for the Conservatives – would be quite willing to let the Liberals have a go. So the more vile the Conservatives’ rhetoric about a Liberal minority, the more it is likely to hurt themselves.

As an added plus for the Liberals, Mr. Harper ends up back as the Leader of the Opposition, and there’s a good chance he would quit. As he was the glue that held the Conservative-Reform-Alliance Party (CRAP) together, there is also a good chance that that coalition would fracture. Several very high profile Conservative MPs have already quit (Strahl, Prentice, Day, Cummins), and it’s hard to imagine the party being returned to the opposition and losing Mr. Harper’s iron hand not resulting in further losses and likely a split.

Option B: Coalition Redux

Having said all this, there seems no need of a coalition, but that would depend upon the NDP. They might want to force an election in the hopes of gaining a few seats, although would end up widely loathed if the election ended up in a Conservative majority. However, given the Liberals weak position in the polls, the NDP might want to force the Liberals into a coalition in which the NDP gets a few cabinet posts and some key legislation pushed through.

The Conservatives could be counted on to return to hysterics about socialist/separatist coalitions, and unfortunately too many Canadians are gullible enough to fall for that. However, once the coalition is actually formed and working, what would – what could - the Conservatives do about it? In reality, not much except stamp their feet and cry that the sky is falling. Give the coalition six months of governing, and those hysterical objections would likely come to be seen as just that, further discrediting the Conservatives.

All this said, what will actually happen is anybody’s guess. There is no guarantee that any of the parties mentioned will do what is best for Canada.

Following the multiple partial meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, I find it mind-boggling how quickly the pro-nuclear shills are out claiming that a) nuclear is safe, really, and b) it’s our only hope for a future energy source that is sufficient to meet our needs and not destroy the planet via climate change.

Both are utterly bogus, but you can’t tell the shills that; they are fanatics on a par with the climate change deniers. They believe what they want to believe, and that’s that.

a) Nuclear power is NOT safe

Sorry, lads, but it just isn’t and to maintain that in the face of what has happened and is happening in Japan is just nuts. Numerous dolts are trying to claim that nuclear power is perfectly safe, but that can be disproved with a simple Google search, so I must conclude that people who say this are wilfully dense or are paid shills.

As to the safety record of nuclear power generally, it’s really quite poor. Again, numerous pro-nukers want to say the risk of accident is minuscule. Again, not true. It’s easy enough to get a rough calculation of the odds of disaster: Divide the number of nuclear plants on the planet by the number of major disasters:

According to this site, there were 442 plants as of January 2011. According to Wikipedia, there have been at least 18 serious accidents, so the odds of a serious accident are 18/442 = 4%, or 1 in 25.

Those are terrible odds, and that’s not counting the countless smaller leaks that are routinely covered up by the nuclear industry.

(Note: This is being generous. In reality, the odds are worse because most of these accidents happened when there were fewer nuclear reactors on the planet. And the argument that newer reactors is safer is debatable techno-optimism, given the recent meltdowns in Japan.)

The shills often then retreat to the position that nuclear is safer than coal, but this is hardly difficult and not-at-all comforting. We simply have to stop buying into the idea that we have no choice but to trade off the greater evil for the lesser.

b) It’s nuclear or collapse!!!!

This is simply scaremongering by the shills to prevent us thinking sensibly about other options, like heaven forbid, conservation. Or passive solar combined with geothermal storage. Or storing excess wind/solar/wave/tidal/whatever in molten salts, pumped hydro, hydrogen, and whatever else we come up with, none of which risk making large areas of one’s country, and perhaps a few neighbouring ones, uninhabitable by humans for the next 100,000 years or so.

The fact is, we have non-nuclear options and we need to start exploring them. There may well be a further economic collapse as the price of oil increases, but building hundreds more nuclear plants everywhere is a highly risky ‘solution.’ There are better ways to go.

And by-the-way, Japan’s wind turbines survived the earthquake and tsunami.

UPDATE: An interesting article, from the Toronto Sun, of all places. It contains this gem:

The potential power, energy and financial returns were calculated for the indirect subsidy that is currently provided to the U.S. nuclear industry in the form of liability caps, with providing the same level of indirect subsidy to the solar photovoltaic manufacturing industry in the form of loan guarantees. The startling results show even if just this one relatively minor subsidy was diverted from nuclear power generation into large-scale solar manufacturing, it would result in both more installed power and more energy produced by mid-century. Such a policy would increase the cumulative solar industry over the 500 TW-hrs mark in just 10 years and by the end of the study the cumulative electricity output of solar amounts to an additional 48,600 TW-hrs worth more than $5 trillion over the nuclear case.

There has been much debate whether the United States is in for inflation or deflation. It seems that it’s going to be – it is now – both.

Some things will deflate in price, while others will increase. This sounds obvious, and an average of certain of these items is used to determine an overall inflation, or possibly deflation, rate. However, certain rather important items are left out of the calculation by the government today, including housing and fuel.

In reality, the price of housing is deflating, while at the same time the price of fuel is inflating. If these were included in the calculation and balanced each other out, the inflation rate would show no inflation or deflation, and so all seems well.

In reality, this is very wrong. If house prices keep deflating – and why wouldn’t they? – then more and more people are going to be underwater in their mortgages. Equity for every homeowner and property owner has been evaporating by the trillions, and it’s not coming back.

Wages are also deflating. When the unemployment rate is as high as it is, then barring unions or other restrictions, employers are going to replace higher-paid workers with lower. Some are actively firing and replacing, while others are simply taking advantage of the job market to pay less when hiring.

Food prices and transportation costs are increasing. Some of this is due to the ‘high’ price of oil, which is currently ~$90 per barrel, more than four times it’s historical level and a prime reason the U.S. economy is still in recession.

So we have two key items deflating and two other key items inflating. Do they balance each other out? Maybe on paper.

A couple of days ago I said that the young, disaffected, and technically savvy had found a way to strike back. A way to keep freedom alive.

Since then, two significant events have occurred:

1. Anon took down the sites of numerous financial institutions that were blocking funds from reaching Wikileaks.
2. It was easy.

A lot of executive types, whether corporate or political, should be very, very worried right now. Scared shitless is cruder but more accurate. They may have finally pushed too far.

This was not a real attack. This was a warning shot. It could have been much, much worse. That (along with a guilty conscience) should be what concerns those at the top with something to hide.

I honestly hadn’t realized it was so easy. According to sources on Reddit, many Internet browsers have an option to refresh the screen at a specified interval. All Anon and friends had to do was open a bunch of browser windows, go to the desired site, and set the refresh interval. If you get enough people doing that, the site cannot handle the load and goes down.*

This can be taught to anyone in a minute or two. The written instructions could fit in a Twitter or text message.

If enough people band together, any website can be taken down in seconds. Mastercard.com, Visa.com, and various others went down in just this way – and it started with 40 people. More people joined in until there were 4,000. (It could be far more now; as of this writing, Mastercard.com is still down. It has been down all day.)

If 4,000 people are enough to take down the websites of the largest companies in the world, imagine what happens when these instructions spread to tens of millions of pissed-off young people, who are looking at a bleak future and at the same time being told to behave by people who have made a hell of a lot of money off the status quo.

Now, it is true that so far only the public-facing sites for the banks and credit card processors have been downed. As I said, this was a warning shot. If kept up for a long time, their online presence – in which these companies have invested many millions and through which many people sign up for credit cards and such – would be useless.

If Anon gets to the inside somehow, by which I mean something vital like payment processing servers or company emails…wow. The former would put the company out of business – zero income – until resolved. It would also be a huge hit to their reputation and reliability, and would cost them business in the long run.

Or imagine if they did this; how much of that would it take before a credit card company went out of business?

I don’t think that those in power are going to stop trying to squash WikiLeaks. But whether they succeed or fail they are going to be exposed. And the more draconian, repressive steps they take to silence WikiLeaks, the stronger the response will be from Anon and a growing legion of angry people who are mad as hell and are not going to take it any more.

Keepers of the status quo, you have been warned. Repent now, or suffer the consequences.

*****

* This is called a DDoS, or distributed denial of service attack, and I don’t think there are ways to stop it. After all, the goal of a company is to entice and impress you with their website, and they need the site to be public to do that. Perhaps adding massive redundancy in servers, but if >4,000  can take down Mastercard.com, wait until millions pile on.

Freedom with a capital damn ‘F.’

You may not agree with everything WikiLeaks is doing, but you must admit that it is necessary. Our governments, in particular the U.S. government, have gone too far. They are keeping too many secrets, and a secretive government cannot be trusted. The truth must come out.

Many Redditors are donating. Others may be helping with the current hacking of those banks and other institutions attacking Assange and WikiLeaks.

(To digress slightly, I really think governments and corporations are going to be in for a very rough ride. Once a few million young people realize they can make a difference by hacking to help WikiLeaks, why would they stop there – whether or not Assange is freed? Why would they not start choosing targets for transparency? If I were the CEO of CitiBank or Goldman Sachs I would be very worried right now.)

A whole lot of people want to do something but don’t want to risk arrest. So let’s do something.

Post your ideas on Reddit; upvote the best, and let’s donate to make the best happen.

Choose formats that are in the real world. Internet freedom is not enough, not will it last without wider freedom. First they came for Julian Assange, and I did not speak up, and so one day they came for the web….

I tried to choose messages that would be appealing to conservatives, because we need them on our side. It’s not conservatives versus liberals, or right against left. It’s those who value liberty against those who lust for money and power, and original conservative values are very much for freedom. I also picked formats that are IRL – we need to get our message off the net and ‘out there.’

If this takes off, we’ll need to coordinate donations and route them to the areas that donated. Does anybody have a suggestion for the best way to do that?

My suggestion for a relatively inexpensive way to get the message out:

Billboards, bus stop ads, any organization with digital advertising boards.

Benefits:

• Relatively cheap
• Message stays for at least a month, not one day like a newspaper ad or a few seconds like a TV spot
• Unavoidably visible to millions of drivers and passengers in good locations; you can’t miss them
• Local – donate to one in your area
• Makes a statement
• Sound-bite size – easy for MSM to briefly cover…while repeating the message

Suggested messages:

• “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”  - Thomas Jefferson
• Let Freedom Ring – subtitle: Support WikiLeaks
• The truth will out – support WikiLeaks
• It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Looking at you, Koch brothers.
• “A man does what he must – in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures – and that is the basis of all human morality.”  - Winston Churchill
• “There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nothing hidden that will not be made known. Everything you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight; what you have whispered in locked rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops.”
  – Luke 12:2-3  - Love this one; found it on Daniel Ellsberg‘s (the Pentagon Papers leaker) site.

As someone on Reddit said today, he just realized we are witnessing history in the making. Wilileaks has exposed our governments, and they don’t like it.

But the true historic event that may come of Wikileaks is that it’s something a lot of young developers can do. Easily. They can become Leakers. Destroy Assange and WikiLeaks and you will move the young, disaffected, and technically savvy, who have realized voting changes little of importance, to start another site to host the files. In fact, probably a peer-to-peer filesharing site, so that there are thousands – millions – of sites.

The cats out of the bag now. Knowledge is power, and suddenly the big guy just lost some to the little guy. And the harder he tries to grab it back, the worse he’s going to look and the more legitimate the Leakers will seem.

UPDATE: And I forgot the obvious next step – attacking the attackers. Fighting fire with fire. Young developers can – and now are – hacking the sites of those who attack WikiLeaks: http://www.antemedius.com/content/payback-bank-froze-wikileaks-funds-hacked.

Apologies for recent infrequent posting. I’ve been working mainly on two things:

1. That “Get a free house idea” mentioned in a previous post. I may have an opportunity to be a developer/builder, which would get me that mortgage-free solar house.
2. The Way Home book and presentation. The presentation is in the works for April at the University of Victoria, and New Society Publishers (many of which books should be on your reading list) wants to see the manuscript for the book.

These two things have been consuming much of my time! I will be back soon; first article up will likely be on why what was previously considered a middle class lifestyle is now not possible for most people.

Brian

Here is the ideal post-collapse (meat) meal.* For future hunter-gatherers, here’s an easy meal when you just want to warm yourself around an open fire on a cool spring evening, drinking some mead and laughing with family and tribe. (Update below with recipe in English.)

My wife and family are from Colombia, which means that my wife’s mother retains memories of and skills from a more self-reliant age. She can turn milk into cheese using only the sun and a powder called “Milkset,” for example. And every now and again, my wife, who has the memories but not the skills, because like most of us in the developing world, her generation never had to use them, still occasionally goes back to her roots.

This dish – Lomo al trapo – likely has very old roots. It’s the sort of thing people have been cooking for thousands of years, because the requirements are simple: cloth, string, fire, beer, salt, hunk of meat.

The instructions below are in Spanish below (here’s the original), but essentially here’s how it goes:

1. Lay out a square of cotton large enough to wrap a hunk of meat.
2. Spread 1 kg of salt over the cloth.
3. Soak another cloth in beer and lay it over the first.
4. Put the meat in the middle, wrap it up and tie it.
5. Cook for approximately 30 minutes per side over an open fire.

I can imagine people cooking this back in the middle ages and even much further back for a small feast.

It looked delicious, and I’m told it was. (As a vegetarian, I didn’t partake in the meat portion of the meal.)

* If you’ve read other articles on this site, you’ll know that I normally write about what we can expect in a future of declining oil supplies, climate change, and worse-than-useless leaders.)

Lomo al trapo

UPDATE: Lomo al Trapo – Beef Tenderloin in Cloth (English recipe)

Comensales: 6
País: Colombia
Tiempo de preparación: 15 mins
Tiempo de cocción: 40 mins
Tiempo total: 55 mins

Preparación:

El lomo debe ser bien fino, largo y sin nervios o grasa.
Mojar el trapo de algodón y cubrirlo con un kilo de sal; colocar el lomo en el centro, y cubrirlo con el resto de la sal. Cerrar bien la tela, cuidando de que la carne quede bien cubierta de sal; superponer los bordes largos y doblar hacia adentro los extremos. Atar muy bien con hilo de cocina, ajustando cada 5 cm. para evitar que se escape la sal.

Colocar en la parilla, cuidando de que las brasas no quemen la tela; cocinar por 8 minutos de cada lado, si le gusta bien jugoso. Si no, extender el tiempo de cocción a 10 minutos para término medio; y 12, si lo desea bien cocido.

Al voltearlo, se nota que la sal se solidificó por efecto del calor. Para retirar la carne, hay que romper esta capa de sal, y quitar bien con un cuchillo lo que puede haber quedado sobre el lomo, el cual debe estar seco por fuera y tierno por dentro.