If you haven't heard about it already, check out Bitcoins. This is an open-source, P2P currency that is making a very real attempt to do an end-run around the banking industry and create a "people's currency". Can they make the Fed obsolete? Probably not, and if they are successful, I'm sure the government will crush it....
...but for now, why not give it a try? You can find our Bitcoin address in the right-hand column of this page.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Warren Buffett's Radioactive Ronin Pillage Iowa
Months after massive earthquakes and Tsunamis crushed
Japan, the "Fukushima 50" toil on. Crawling through darkened tunnels
dangerously close to overheating radioactive reactors, the remaining nuclear
power plant employees at Fukushima Dai-Ichi struggle to stop the worsening
catastrophe that is spreading deadly toxic pollution across their already
crippled homeland. The Fukushima 50 know that they have already sacrificed
their lives. They know that the exposure they have already experienced will
kill them.
Like samurai committing nuclear seppuku, radioactive ritual
suicide, the 50 are driven by a sense of honor and loyalty.
Meanwhile, at the Iowa state capital, lobbyists for
MidAmerican Energy continue to push for passage of Senate File 390, a bill that
they say will send the message that "Iowa is open for business for nuclear
power". They also work from a sense of loyalty, but not like the Fukushima
50. They are corporate ronin, political samurai with no loyalty other than to
those who pay them to pillage.
Warren Buffett, who's Berkshire Hathaway Company controls
MidAmerican Energy, has been obsessed with nuclear power for many years. In
2007 Buffet made an unsuccessful play to build a nuclear plant in Idaho. More
recently, Buffett was outbid by French state-owned utility giant Electricite de
France (EDF) for a 49% share of Constellation Energy's Calvert Cliffs III
nuclear reactor. Now, Buffett hopes that the third time will be the charm for
his nuclear ambitions and he wants to make his nuclear dream come true in Iowa.
Senate File 390 is a bill that seeks to raise MidAmerican
customer's electric rates to cover the cost of Mr. Buffett's dream. Despite the
fact that Fukushima now rivals Chernobyl as history's biggest nuclear power
plant catastrophe, Buffet's Iowa statehouse ronin fight on, hiring more
lobbyists to fight back the increasing resistance from "the little
people".
Before Fukushima, MidAmerican anticipated easy passage of
their bill, counting on republicans to vote "for" nuclear power
(which they generally would do just to piss off democrats) along with a cadre
of "pro-business" democrats (re: those who took MidAm campaign
money). They were confident that
the tired, gray-haired, granola-eating "no-nukes" enviro-dinosaurs
could surely be no match for the giant stick they swing at the Iowa statehouse.
Surprisingly though, even since Fukushima, the groundswell of opposition has
come not as much from enviros as from those who object to MidAm's financing
scheme.
AARP (American Association of Retired People) state director
Barry Koeppl was quoted in an April 11th article in the Des Moines Register as
saying; “We oppose Senate File 390 and House File 961 because those bills
substantially shift the cost and risk for nuclear power construction to ratepayers.
Rather than rely on shareholders to finance a new power plant, this legislation
shifts the billion-dollar-plus costs to ratepayers for a possible nuclear power
plant, years before the plant is built, or the plant design has even been
approved.”
Apparently, AARP is not alone. Word has it that MidAm lobbyists are now feverishly counting
votes- including republican votes. It seems that Iowa's new crop of Tea-Party
Republicans also have problems with state government approving what amounts to
a rate-payer funded subsidy for MidAms admittedly sketchy plans. Republican
leadership is finding that some of the tea-partiers may be making good on their
promise of less government- and the new influx of radical freshmen republican
legislators may be a knife that cuts both ways.
This new alliance of populists from the far left and right
may be a harbinger of things to come. Not unlike it the U.S. House where
far-left Dennis Kucinich and far-right Ron Paul agree in a surprising number of
cases concerning issues of personal freedom, the fight against nuclear power on
economic grounds may illustrate that there is more common ground to be found in
the future when "the little people" stop listening to corporatist
Republican and Democrats talking points.
In the mean time, elevated levels of radioactivity are being
found in milk in California. Nuclear experts predict Fukushima may kill as many
as 200,000 from increased cancers in the next 50 years. Spent waste containment
pools continue to fill up at sites across the world. And yet, a majority of
Iowa's legislators appear to be willing to charge MidAmerican customers
up-front for the privilege of hanging out the "Iowa is open for business
for nuclear" sign, and making Warren Buffet's dream come true.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Thursday, May 5, 2011
OBMAG #3- The Cory Doctorow Interview
If you don't know who Cory Doctorow is, you may be living under a rock. Of course, we here at OBSOLETE! applaud anyone who chooses the "Sub Silicis" lifestyle. Those of you who choose to spend time in the digital realm, however, have much to thank Mr. Doctorow for.
The Canadian science fiction writer and journalist is an editor of Boing Boing. He is a leading advocate for liberalizing copyright laws and has worked on copyright issues for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His novels, including Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother and Makers are all available as free downloads under a Creative Commons license.
Doctorow's 2009 book Makers is a wonderful story of Feral Technology, a vision of post-scarcity Amerika where hardware hackers battle the Disney empire for the last scraps of the withered economy, and the resources they mine are the detritus of consumer culture.
Cory sat down for an interview at ICON 35 in Cedar Rapids, IA, where he was the special guest author. We spoke as he prepared shots of espresso in his motel room with an amazing portable handheld espresso maker.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Marina DeBris does her thing- and REPRESENTS!
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Preview: How To Use $180 And Social Media To Travel The Country For A Year
Amy Bugbee wrote a great travelogue for issue #3. This article is from the forthcoming book Politics, Art, Religion, Revolution or the suffering and celebration of life in America, available in November 2011. Look for more info at: http://www.ayearatthewheel.com/
Read the rest of Amy's story....http://feral-tech.com/amy_bugbee.pdf
Want to get your own copy of OBSOLETE! delivered to your door? Use the paypal buttons at the right of the page. Do you have a local indie bookstore or coffee house that would like to offer free copies of OBSOLETE! to their customers? email us and we'll send you a stack.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
OBMAG #3 Preview- Hoodoo:Open Source Religion
Hoodoo: Open Source Religion
Thanks to American popular music, many people have heard the terms “hoodoo,” “juju” and “mojo," but few understand what they really mean. For modern, white, middle class R&B and blues fans, they conjure up exotic images of the Deep South, some shadowy world of African-American spirituality that they don't really "get." Movie fans don't know what “mojo” is, but thanks to Austin Powers, they know they want it. Throughout the history of American popular media, stereotypes abound, ranging from the comical witchdoctor act of Screamin' Jay Hawkins to “Tia Dalma”, the black-toothed, dreadlocked swamp priestess in “Pirates of the Caribbean 2”. But what is hoodoo, really?In a world of hierarchical and regimented spiritual dogma, hoodoo is a feral cat. It lives wild on the outskirts of American religious culture, thriving and propagating out of sight, right in the back yard of organized religion. Organized religion might catch a glimpse of it from the corner of its eye. Organized religion might fear hoodoo. Hoodoo might even live in the same house, as organized religion - it might let organized religion stroke its tail, but it will never wear its collar. Hoodoo is free.
Hoodoo is not Voodoo. Voodoo is an organized religion. Voodoo and its variants practiced in Haiti and in Louisiana, are descended from the West African Vodun religion. Hoodoo, on the other hand, is an amalgam of African and European folk magic traditions, not a religion, per se. Hoodoo can be a noun or a verb. You can "do" hoodoo or "make" hoodoo.
The iconoclastic writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston wrote extensively on hoodoo. Even with her deep understanding of hoodoo, Hurston herself mischaracterized hoodoo as being synonymous with Voodoo in her 1935 classic Mules and Men:
“Hoodoo, or Voodoo, as pronounced by the whites, is burning with a flame in America, with all the intensity of a suppressed religion. It has its thousands of secret adherents. It It adapts itself like Christianity to its locale, reclaiming some of its borrowed characteristics to itself, such as fire-worship as signified in the Christian church by the altar and the candles and the belief in the power of water to sanctify as in baptism.
Belief in magic is older than writing. So nobody knows how it started.
The way we tell it, hoodoo started way back there before everything. Six days of magic spells and mighty words and the world with its elements above and below was made. And now God is leaning back taking a seventh day rest. When the eighth day comes around. He'll start to making new again.”
As Hurston states, nobody does know the true origin of hoodoo. There is even debate about the etymology. Some say it is derived from the word “hu'du'ba” (magical retribution), which was brought to America by African slaves of the Hausa tribe. Others claim that it is Irish origin- from the Gaelic Uath Dubh (pronounced h-úŏ doo)- meaning a malevolent being or unlucky person. Perhaps it is a primordial sound, like Om, a verbalization of something common to human experience, transcending etymological pigeonholeing. Some historical facts are known about hoodoo. The combination of African and European folk magic was born on the plantations of the Antebellum South and later grew and spread among sharecroppers and the rural poor. Later, as the U.S. became industrialized, hoodoo took on a more urban flavor and became more commercialized. According to Hoodoo in Theory and Practice by Catherine Yronwode (pronounced "Ironwood"), many of the Old Testament and Hebrew mystical elements were mingled into hoodoo by the Jewish-owned chemists whose mail order beauty and healthcare businesses served the black community. "Cat" Yronwode, who also owns and operates "Lucky Mojo Curio Company" writes: "... the agents who sold these items for manufacturer-distributors like Valmor-King, Lucky Heart, Hi-Hat and so forth were usually part-time beauticians and hoodoo root workers. They would come to your house to fix your hair (selling you the cosmetics and hair preparations they had bought wholesale) and they would also do psychic consultations and perform rootwork and conjuration, using the curios available from the same sources. They kept a stock of goods on hand, but they also carried their company's retail cosmetics catalogues and curio catalogues with them, and you could order both types of products through them and have the items drop-shipped directly to your home. " This also explains some of the traditional importance of the beauty parlor and barber shops in black and immigrant communities.
For some, hoodoo might be seen as a spiritual pyramid scheme, but in some ways, hoodoo is analogous to open source software- it is a spiritual program that shares common source code but is not proprietary. It can be adapted to run on any religious operating system, and it can add functionality not normally allowed by religious programmers. One church, priest or practitioner does not own it. Hoodoo can co-exist along side Voodoo, Catholicism, Protestant beliefs or other folk traditions. It is a religious “hack”- a tool to modify the source code of religion and make it work for the spiritual hacker. Hoodoo practitioners save prayers to God for big-picture matters of salvation. Day-to-day matters of love, luck and finances are all matters for direct spiritual action through spell casting, spiritual cleansing and “rootwork”.
A December 28th, 2010, article in the Wall Street Journal brought attention to the recent rebirth in interest in hoodoo, which they attribute partially to tough economic times and partially to the rise of Internet retailing. The article points out that...“Today's hoodoo revival is again being driven primarily by white retailers, and that has some blacks criticizing the commercialization of ancient rituals for a quick profit. “ Historically though, internet marketing is just an extension of the mail-order curio business that supplied practitioners on the early 20th century.
Hoodoo is an interesting combination of ancient traditions and modern technology. The revival has some echoes of the “New Age” craze of the 80's and 90's, but the multi-cultural roots and blue-collar heritage give it decidedly more dynamic character and sense of humor than the crystals and chimes bourgeois-Zen set. It's rituals reflect it's heritage- sweeping and scrubbing floors, growing and harvesting wild plants, preparing charms, known as “mojo hands” or “gris-gris”.
One of the most important elements of hoodoo, like any magical system, is that of personal empowerment through ritual. These rituals, although rooted in tradition, are an art and the practitioners are artists who attempt to take direct action on their spiritual lives. Critics and skeptics may laugh at the idea of burning candles or carrying a "High-John" root to attract money or using magnetic toy Scotty-dogs in a love spell. However, humans live in a semantic and symbolic space, and the reality tunnel of the individual is defined by their belief. One individual may feel better about their life when they buy "Fair Trade" coffee, another may feel safer with a gun in their house. Humans are fetishistic by nature, whether the "Toby" is a crucifix or an iphone.
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