G4T: ADVICE ON STREET SURVIVAL AT NIGHT

VIA SURVIVING IN ARGENTINA: KEEPING YOUR KNIFE SHARP

ARTICLES FROM RESILIENT COMMUNITIES... GET READING THEN GET TO DOING

Community Thursday: What’s More Precious than Gold?

February 2, 2012

Gold is zooooming again.  On this run it may hit $2000. Why?  An increasing number of smart people think/believe that the world’s economic and financial system is in deep trouble. What kind of trouble?   You know the list:  Global economic depression.  Financial contagion.  Sovereign bankruptcy.  Hyper-inflation.  Financial collapse. So, why are people buying gold?  Personal [...]

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Why We Need Resilient Communities

February 1, 2012

Here’s a basic (no frills) reason for why we should build resilient communities.   Do you have another simple reason?  If so, please share it. _________ It should be clear, as we watch the gyrations and excesses of global markets, that no organization/state/group has any meaningful control over its direction. The same is true for [...]

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The SKILLS GAP

January 31, 2012

When starting a new venture, every entrepreneur goes through the same process. You look at your assets.  What you have on hand.    You then make estimates of what you need to accomplish your goal.  The difference between what you have and what you need is the gap you need to bridge. When we’re building [...]

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Maker Monday: Rebuilding rich soil with HugelKulture

January 30, 2012

Maker Monday is about people pioneering ways to produce locally.  Here’s something I wrote last year, but I wanted to share with all of my new friends on resilientcommunities.com. Reclaiming Dead Soil We have a problem.  Most of the land we live on (even in rural communities) is barren.  Dead. What does this mean?   [...]

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Community Thursday: Local motors and Resilient Manufacturing

January 26, 2012

The great part of doing original research on resilience, is that I get to hang out with amazing people both online and off.   You know, the smart people that are actually making a better, resilient future that’s worth living in. Here’s an example of someone doing exactly that.  I recently had high energy lunch [...]

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Should I get an education or a degree?

January 25, 2012

I’m often asked by young people either on the cusp or already in college:  should I get a degree?   What’s the resilient choice? That’s a tough question. In 2008 some economists demonstrated that a college degree was typically worth $300,000 over a lifetime of work. Unfortunately, 2008 was a lifetime ago.  In 2012, the [...]

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3 Global Disruptions to Watch and a Tip

January 24, 2012

I’m going to give you a tip on how to think about disruptions at the end of this article.  First, here are three disruptions — events that can cause cascade failures in global networks — that are at the top of this month’s scan: A war between the US/Israel and Iran that can disrupt oil [...]

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Maker Monday: The Printrbot $830 k Success Story

January 23, 2012

This week, I’m going to be talking about Printrbot, a DIY personal fabrication company that has a pretty amazing story.  It’s part of a new series I’m running called Maker Monday.  A series on the people (makers) who are pioneering methods and technologies needed to manufacture things locally. However, before I start that Maker Monday [...]

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Take Control. But what does “Control” Really Mean?

January 20, 2012

One of things I strongly advocate, if you want to thrive during the turbulent teens, is to take control. It shouldn’t matter what the global economy or your government is doing (even though in most cases, their dysfunctional behavior is working against you 24×7).   All that really matters is that you are in control. [...]

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Heavy weather and the new normal

January 16, 2012

I often tell people that the mid-century will be about “old people in big cities who are afraid of the sky.”  Bruce Sterling, the science fiction author, on how global demographic trends, climate change, and urbanization will define our future. I live in New England. I’ve lived there for most of my life (I come from [...]

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http://www.resilientcommunities.com/

TECHNOLOGY MARCHES... EVEN FASTER THAN I THOUGHT: VIA GLOBAL GUERRILLAS THE 199 DOLLAR DRONE COMBAT PILOT

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/02/mr-drone-and-the-199-universal-dronepilot.html

Mr. Drone and the $199 CombatPilot

IF there is anyone on this earth that has a claim to the title of Mr. Drone, it's Chris Anderson (the only other contender is one of my favorite writers/biologists: E.O. Wilson).
This is one of those increasingly common cases where a person's hobby (expert amateur) becomes much more important than the work they get paid for (which in most cases is typically dull and fits within the category of: we do what we must so we can do what we want...).
In contrast, his love for drone technology in combination with his prodigious skills as a media front man, has radically accelerated the emergence and the democratization of autonomous drone technology.
For example: The ArduPlane.  A conversion kit that, in the language of the promotion, can:

Convert any RC airplane into a fully-autonomous UAV!

Or the ArduCopter, ArduRover...
For all of that, one of the coolest projects he's helping along is the ArduPilotMega.
What is it?  It's a fully functional Universal DronePilot.  It has a triple core autopilot.  A complete motion sensor package that includes precision pressure, GPS, magnetometer, etc.  2 way telemetry.  Mission planning system.  Flash data storage.  And best of all for you scriptkiddies out there: it will soon include Python for acrobatic/maneuver programming.  

vs.

BALTIC DRY INDEX PLUNGES: PRECURSOR TO ANOTHER CRASH?

http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/BDIY:IND

SUCCESSFUL ANTIGRAVITY EXPERIMENT USING A LATHE, TWO MAGNETS, AND A SCALE

ADVICE ON SOLAR PANELS: PRICES ARE GOING TO GO UP

MIKE VANDERBOEGH RUNS UP AGAINST WASHINGTON MACHINE IN TRYING TO SEE JUSTICE TO GUNWALKER

GOP ‘Sons-A-Bitches’ Going Soft On Gunwalking, Says Blogger Who Broke ‘Fast And Furious’

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Ryan J. Reilly February 3, 2012, 6:27 AM 13978 225 Mike Vanderboegh is drinking Diet Mountain Dew in the cafeteria of the Rayburn building on Capitol Hill, and he is pissed.
Not because his flight from Alabama was almost “as bumpy as [his] first marriage,” nor because he almost got into a physical altercation with an “idiot street urban adventurer” outside the National Archives who said Vanderboegh looked like Newt Gingrich.
The former militia man turned gun rights blogger is angry because he thinks the Republican “sons-a-bitches” on the House Oversight Committee put on the “ultimate display of public limp dickery” during a Thursday hearing in which Attorney General Eric Holder testified about ATF’s botched Operation Fast and Furious.
It was Vanderboegh who in late 2010, following the death of border patrol agent Brian Terry, published the first hint that the federal government told gun dealers to sell semi-automatic weapons to suspected “straw purchasers” they believed were buying them for drug cartels.
Donations from readers of his Sipsey Street Irregulars blog helped him fly out to Washington, D.C. this week for the hearing. Sporting a homemade press pass in a badge holder branded with an NRA logo, Vanderboegh watched from behind the press table as Republicans grilled Holder about what he knew when about the flawed operation in which agents lost track of about 2,000 weapons, many of which have been found at crime scenes in Mexico.
Vanderboegh wasn’t impressed.
“You know what the Republicans just did? They sold out every mother’s son who put their life and career on the line to try to bring this truth out,” Vanderboegh told TPM. “Another display like this and people will forget the whole thing.”
So why did Republicans, at least as far as Vanderboegh is concerned, back off? He suggested it could be as simple as the FBI blackmailing the speaker of the House.
“I submit to you that it is entirely possible that the fix is in,” Vanderboegh told TPM. “It could be as simple as a picture of something like John Boehner with a sheep, you know. Because they’ve done that before. The FBI blackmails people routinely. They always have.”
Few who witnessed Thursday’s four-hour hearing would accuse Republicans of going soft. Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (R-NY) asked Holder “how many more Border Patrol agents would have had to die” for him to take responsibility. It was a question Holder said was “beneath” a member of Congress. Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) narrated a PowerPoint slideshow of decade-old Holder quotes on President BIll Clinton’s controversial pardoning of Marc Rich and questioned his record of being truthful to Congress, a display which Holder said was “among the worst things” he’d ever seen on the Hill. Rep. Mark Walberg (R-MI) compared Holder’s handling of Fast and Furious to the way late football legend Joe Paterno handled the Penn State sexual abuse scandal.
But Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) did ease up a bit on the his previous rhetoric about Holder’s roll in Fast and Furious, saying he “never accused [Holder] of having personal knowledge” of the “gunwalking” tactics used during the operation, instead focusing his energies on why the DOJ wouldn’t turn over certain categories of documents the Justice Department maintains were privileged.
It’s not entirely clear where the investigation goes from here. Both sides have taken predicable positions: A Republican report blamed officials at DOJ headquarters while a Democratic report said the local ATF and U.S. Attorney’s office were at fault. As for solutions, Republicans are calling for officials, including Holder, to resign or be fired, Democrats are pointing out that there’s not even a law that specifically bans gun trafficking.
Issa said that he believed there were “people at Main Justice who ultimately need to go” and spoke about a number of additional reforms he wants in place at DOJ. Oversight Committee Ranking Member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said in response to a question from TPM that he hoped Thursday’s hearing would conclude the investigation but also hoped laws could be reformed to create stricter penalties for gun trafficking.
Vanderboegh thinks Republicans have already shifted the focus of their investigation due to political pressure.
“I don’t say that Darrell Issa is real happy with how this is going, I don’t think he is,” Vanderboegh said. “But I think Darrell Issa is a team player, he’s a loyal guy to the party, and I think that to the extent he allows the investigation to turn away from evidence because it’s inconvenient for somebody, history will probably reflect him pretty poorly.”
Vanderboegh, like many House Republicans, buys into the conspiracy theory that the Obama administration deliberately pumped additional weapons into Mexico in an effort to create the political will to pass gun control at home.
“My sources, after this thing broke, told me that the whole thing emerged in the offices of Rahm Emmanuel,” Vanderboegh said. “They were frustrated that mass shootings in the United States had not generated the political will for more gun controls, so they were playing around with the idea, ‘how do we do this without paying a political price?’”
Such a theory ignores the fact that “gun walking” tactics were used in ATF’s Phoenix office during the George W. Bush administration. But the theory has played an important fundraising role for the National Rifle Association (NRA), which due to the Obama administration’s relative silence on gun related issues has had to work hard to convince donors that the President is a looming threat to their Second Amendment rights.
For Vanderboegh, the fear isn’t just about the Obama administration, it’s about the federal government itself. Talking about his belief that government officials involved in Fast and Furious aren’t being held to the same standard as citizens would be, Vanderboegh leans forward and his voice raises as he taps a neon green soda bottle cap on the table.
“If you don’t quote me on anything in this interview, you quote me on this: if the rule of law does not protect the people from the government, it doesn’t protect the government from the people, alright,” Vanderboegh said.
“The rule of law has to work both ways, or it’s the law of the jungle, and there are people who can see that, and there are people who can interpret that. And there are people who, frankly, have quit listening to me when I tell them to be patient,” he continued.
Pending uprisings against the government are a consistent theme for Vanderboegh. He wrote a novel describing the murder of federal law enforcement officials in the course of a raid on an elderly militia man’s home that he said was intended to serve as “a cautionary tale” rather than a how-to guide. An attack allegedly plotted by four senior citizens was inspired by Vanderboegh’s novel, and the leader of the alleged plot even left comments on his website calling his story “far from fantasy.”
“I don’t control these people,” Vanderboegh told TPM Thursday. “The people in this town are the ones who teach them the lessons that they’re learning. God help them. When the legitimacy of this system finally breaks down, God help them all. Everybody, God help us all.”

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/republican_sons_a_bitches_going_soft_on_gunwalking_says_blogger.php

MAGNETIC MOTOR... BACK IN THE DAY

2/1 BLOGROLL: SUSTAINMENT LOADS, GUNWALKER SHUFFLING, AND WE'RE STILL F!CKED

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  To Protect and Serve...Friday the 13th Style

  

  posted by Arctic Patriot at The Arctic Patriot - 49 minutes ago

  A case of "we got the wrong door" idiotry. Of course, we're all supposed to weep and mourn when these idiots get "killed in the line of duty". I tell you, if there were a chainsaw ripping through *my *doo...
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  Coastal Gathering

  

  posted by Arctic Patriot at The Arctic Patriot - 58 minutes ago

  Bringeth thine self here, if thou canst. If you can't, and there's not a PATCOM in your area, get to planning. Stand together, or fall apart. Seriously. h/t to Bill.
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  Bob Chapman the Financial survival 01 February 2012

  posted by bobychapman@gmail.com at Bob Chapman The International Forecaster Blog - 2 hours ago

  Bob Chapman the Financial survival 01 February 2012 : ROMNEY DOES NOT CARE... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my blog http://www.bobchapman.blogspot.com for the full Story ]]
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  Supply, Demand, Countermeasures.

  

  posted by Arctic Patriot at The Arctic Patriot - 5 hours ago

  What man can create... Man can also destroy. Right, SSG Mosby? *Resist.*
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  There Are No Markets...

  

  posted by Arctic Patriot at The Arctic Patriot - 7 hours ago

  While I currently have no money whatsoever tied up in a 401k / retirement fund account, I do dabble some in FOREX, and have invested in silver, other physical assets, as well as the means to produce, defen...
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  Bob Chapman : These elections are a Circus

  posted by bobychapman@gmail.com at Bob Chapman The International Forecaster Blog - 9 hours ago

  Bob Chapman on The National Intel Report with John Stadtmiller 2012.01.31 Bob... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my blog http://www.bobchapman.blogspot.com for the full Story ]]
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  Onto Liberty: War Drums

  

  posted by Arctic Patriot at The Arctic Patriot - 11 hours ago

  Onto Liberty links to this article about the possibilities surrounding pretexts for war with Iran. Update- More War Drums beating. I encourage everyone, regardless of your stance on Iran, or on "Flase F...
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  Sipsey Street Exclusive: Now seating Holder, party of one. Grumbling about "Boehner and the rest of those weak-kneed assholes." "They'll do what should be impossible -- make Eric Holder look sympathetic, and worse, innocent." Searching for a real turd in a sewer of rumors.

  

  posted by Dutchman6 at Sipsey Street Irregulars - 13 hours ago

  *"Now seating Holder, party of one!"* *Rumors continue to compete with contradictory rumors but here are a few things I have discovered:* There will be no Fifth Amendment Theater tomorrow of the Phoenix...
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  Early to bed, early to rise makes a man . . . well, I ain't healthy or wealthy yet. And you could get odds on "wise."

  

  posted by Dutchman6 at Sipsey Street Irregulars - 17 hours ago

  *"Go forth, young Gunwalker, and sin no more."* The Charlie Savage headline below about the Democrats "absolving" themselves is priceless for its irony. Don't you have to have moral standing from God to...
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  Mountain Guerrilla: Sustainment Load

  

  posted by Arctic Patriot at The Arctic Patriot - 19 hours ago

  Mountain Guerrilla posts part three of His "Equipping the Guerrilla Fighter" series. Read it, and remember, equipment is person and METT-TC specific. Adapt the principles to your situation. *Resist.*
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  Has Anyone Read This?

  

  posted by Arctic Patriot at The Arctic Patriot - 20 hours ago

  Has anyone read this book? Future: Tense: The Coming World Order? Looks interesting. Added to my wishlist.