Wind Generators: 60W of freedom.

Maybe you need a little bit of power to play your music to cover up the sound of the wind whipping around your house. Going offline mandates that you're going to economize on the energy that you need anyway, the less you require, the easier it is to provide for yourself. Some people believe that it is possible to live on 60W of available energy/day---which is what this wind generator will average with 15 mph winds. You'll still need batteries and control systems and towers, but hey, this will look really cool behind your Hexayurt or Tiny House. Small "netbook" style computers use 40W chargers. An LED lightbulb may only use 12W to provide 60W of "incadescent" light. Now you've got 8W left to splurge on--aha, you can tune your computer to use about 8W.

Heating things up with electricity is probably the last thing you would want to use it for, if you have enough sun power to boil water, use a thermos to keep it hot for cooking or tea later. If you're feeling cold, adapt with one of the oldest human technologies: clothing. That is, heat yourself, not your space. Depending on where you live, wind power can supplement solar power 24/7, because yes, you can have wind at night.

This Week's Offline Societies Post

Japan dominates the news this week with smoldering or steaming nuclear reactors damaged by the earthquake and tsunami disasters. Nuclear power and the environment will be debated globally more than ever... until the next shiny thing distracts us. (Sadly, that is human nature.) Other nuclear reactor disaster plans are being scrutinized everywhere.

Who's behind the recent Republican Legislation? Not that offline anarchists worry much about who's in office or not in office, they care only about their personal security vs. nature.

The Rasta Man vs. the State How the State is hijacking a man's property for with a weed cleaning bill the State performed while Rasta Man was away from home.

All of these stories a lot more to find in this week's OSP.

http://paper.li/offsoc/activists

Why so many books?

Books are special. They require no batteries or electricity. They have no digital rights management (DRM). They're the distilled knowledge and research accumulated by the author. They are portable and easily shared with others. When there are many people in an Offline Society, the burden of purchasing them can be spread across the members who then share the books, like tools, in a library.

Much of the "old knowledge" is only available in books anyway--you can't download them to your Kindle. Some of these books will be used. Collect them. Improve on them, and republished with your local improvements and pass them down forward though the future generations.  Books are recommended because they last.

Surveying: Which way do the sun and water go?

Surveying is something you see often with permaculture designs--because you absolutely need to know where your land is oriented with regards to the sun and which way the water will flow.  Obviously, this isn't taught in school, you'll have to teach it to yourself.

    

Closed Loops Diagram with Fish, Chicken, Eggs, Fruits & Nuts and Vegetables…

From time to time, I like to make graphs of systems--they're helpful for teaching others how these sustainable systems interact. For city-dwellers, they may only have vague ideas where things go or come from, because everything comes to them from the store or goes away from them in pipes---and of course, everything costs money.  This diagram doesn't try to encode the frequency of production (e.g. chicken meat is not a daily event, and with planning a bi-monthly event unless you are keeping many chickens) or maintenance (e.g. fertilizer from the biogas digester is taken out only when its refueled, which is every 3-6 months.)

Since I've recently learned how insanely easy it is to make your own cheese, the next one of these diagrams may include some dairy cows. I'll probably make a vegan/vegetarian variant of the same diagram with equivalent nutritional systems supporting that lifestyle as well. Having the diagram also is giving me ideas of classifying what kinds of tools and space are needed for each system.  The only part of this system that can't be built in one year is the food forest. The rest of them: chickens, gardens, composting,  biogas digesters, and aquaponics are all certainly doable within the first year of founding.

Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, April 9 & 10, 2011

Saturday, April 9, 2011, 10am – 6pm

Sunday, April 10, 2011, 11am – 5pm

San Francisco County Fair Building
Golden Gate Park, 9th Ave and Lincoln Way
San Francisco

For more information visit www.sfbookfair.wordpress.com

Think the book is dead? Well think again. Now in its 16th year, the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair is one of San Francisco’s largest book events, drawing thousands of attendees and featuring over 55 vendors, an Art Exhibit and two days of author readings and panels. Writers who you’ll be able to hear this year include Rebecca Solnit, SF Poet Laureate Diane DiPrima, Jim Miller, Larry Bob Roberts, Ken Knabb, Jeff Conant, Penelope Rosemont, Andrej Grubacic, Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Dennis Cunningham, Michael Harris, Cal Winslow, Critical Resistance, Diane Di Prima, Christopher Hutchinson, Jeffrey St. Clair, Allan Ruff, Sin Soracco, Terry Bisson, Nick Mamatas, and Crimethinc. Panels include ‘Politics and Sci Fi”, “Capital and It’s Discontents” and “Yiddish Anarchists”.

Bike Valet Parking and a Kids Space will be provided by UA in the Bay and the Café will be serving food from Arizmendi Bakery and Other Avenues Food Cooperative.

Vendors this year include:

• 1984 Printing
• AK Press
• AnarchTee
• Berkeley Copwatch
• Bibliomania
• Black and Red
• Black Cat Press
• Black Powder Press
• Black Rain Press
• Bolerium Books
• Bound Together Book Store
• Bureau of Public Secrets
• C.A.L. Press
• Communicating Vessels
• Corvus Editions
• Crimethinc Dispatch
• Eberhardt Press
• Endless Canvas
• Flash
• Free Radio Berkeley
• Hackbloc
• I D P
• International Indian Treaty Council
• IWW
• J L Hudson
• JustSeeds
• Kate Sharpley Library
• Killer Banshee Studios/Fly
• LA-ABCF
• LAGAI
• Last Word Press/Last Earth Distro
• Little Black Cart
• Manic D Press
• Medusa’s Muse
• Microcosm Publishing
• NMG Prodctions
• North American Animal Liberation Press Office
• Peace Supplies
• PM Press
• PNS/NAMRoaddawgz Homeless Youth Drop In
• Prisoners Liturature Project
• Project Censored
• Reach and Teach
• Regent Press
• Research Publications
• San Francisco Bike Messengers
• See Sharp Press
• Slingshot Collective / Long Haul
• The Green Arcade Bookstore
• thoughtcrime ink/Black Cat Press

For a complete schedule go to www.sfbookfair.wordpress.com or call 415.431-8355.

16th Annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair
Saturday and Sunday, April 9 & 10, 2011
San Francisco County Fair Building
Golden Gate Park at Lincoln Way & 9th Ave.

For more information go to
www.sfbookfair.wordpress.com

Knife Shopping for Non-Nerds

I passed by a “swords and blades” store the other day and realized: That's what a Head Shop for Nerds is. So there won't be any katana's or samurai swords here either—especially no Klingon Bat'leths! Those are right out! And, no Rambo knives. Not that cliché again. Just simple folding knives as tools. I have a rule that it can't cost more than $25—because you can seriously drop a lot of coin on these things as if they were luxury items. They're tools, they can be worn out or lost—they must be replaced like them. I don't claim these to be the best knives, because like hammers, they all need different shapes for different jobs.

There you go, three simple knives, tools for defense or the field, when you need to cut something. They're all folding knives so that you'll actually carry them with you (you know, like, in your pocket?) without looking like Batman and they're all cheap. If you  happen to forget that you were going to get the anal fisting at the TSA you won't be crying about having to drop your nice $90 Kershaw knife in the stupid bin. That is, if they don't arrest you first.

The Lost Arts of Food Preservation Shelf

Everyone likes their food, naturally. What people don't like is spoiled food. If you're offline and your refrigeration fails, that can be a crisis if all of your food is only preserved via cold. You can lose a lot of food if you have a power failure or equipment failure. Naturally, we got here not because we had frostless freezers since the bronze age, but we had knowledge of how to preserve our food for the future using salt, smoke, and other techniques.

Food preservation really opened up when we discovered pasteurization and an understanding of basic microbiology--that is, knowing what kinds of bacteria or molds can spoil food. Canning will require you to get some new kitchen tools for safety, because  handling jars of delicious liquid-sugared napalm demand it.


    

Solar Greenhouses: Fresh Food in Winter

I saw a greenhouse kit in Costco recently (one of a few) and I thought that certainly someone must have done it better. They have. Solar greenhouses aren't just designed to capture solar energy, but also store it and distribute it well over time and in different zones for different kinds of plants.

What is especially telling in these older books is the desire to maintain these systems without the use of oil-based energy for heating them in the dead of winter.

   

The Anarchism Shelf

"Anarchist" is one of those words that has shocked people for generations--most especially when the people degenerate into bouts of social rage, unable to control their lives lashing out at anything that seems to be the oppressor. Vandalism, bombs, etc---if there were angry people, the media and corporations placed them in the "anarchist" box so the rest of the world would ignore them.

In most cases, most people hear the label and tune out. What they never hear beyond the name is that, actually, there have been a lot of people thinking about "no-leaders" for a very long time. What they've thought of has been cast into different variants of anarchism.  For obvious reasons, no public school education directed by the state will ever promote anarchism in the curriculum, it is up to you to decide to pursue it.

    

The Thinking Shelf

It was a weird shock to me when I had my first critical thinking course in college--this was immensely useful! Why didn't they teach this to me in public school? Aha, but there lies the rub---public schools aren't there to prepare you, they're there to delay your competition in the world, keeping you ritualized and ignorant of things you need to survive.

The first book "Effortless Attention" is very "dry" becuase it is a collection of reaserch about attention and its physical effects. If you want to know why you feed tired or irritable after working hard with non-physical labor, this is the book for you. The next book "Critical Thinking" is about the tactical software of questions and standards we should use while thinking.

It's funny that there
are books to teach you
thinking. Yes, you
have to practice it!

       

A Summary of research
about the physiological
and neurological effects
of attention.