Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.

Greek riots: Up to 60,000 people take to streets to protest against government | Mail Online

some great pics here of the resistance to the ‘austerity package’ today. as usual, the monied class aren’t the ones taking cuts.

• Strikers and protesters banged drums and chanted slogans such as “no sacrifice for plutocracy,” and “real jobs, higher pay”. (via)

Up close: A flaming bottle flies towards a has-masked police officer who steps back to avoid being hit

• Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.
• Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.
• The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.

(“Your papers, please.”)

• The World Future Council was founded by the Swedish writer and activist Jakob von Uexkull in reaction to politics across the world being dominated by short-term, economic thinking. The idea for a global council was first aired on German radio in 1998. It hit a chord, with German TV immediately expressing an interest in broadcasting the Council’s sessions. In October 2004 the organisation was officially launched in London with funding from private donors in Germany, Switzerland, USA and the UK. Since 2006, the organisation is based in Hamburg, where the World Future Council is registered as a charitable foundation. Further offices are located in London, Brussels, Delhi, and Washington D.C. The Council met for the first time in May 2007 in Hamburg.

an interesting group of policy makers and social engineers.

• For almost ten years Harry Markopolos tried, and failed, to alert regulators and investors of Bernie Madoff’s $65 billion dollar Ponzi scheme.
• In his new book “No One Would Listen”, Markopolos writes of how he and a group of colleagues spent years gathering information about Madoff and sending it to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Initially they hoped it would level the playing field by eliminating a successful rival they believed was engaged in fraud, later it became a mission to bring down a man they believed posed a risk to the entire financial system.
• For Markopolos, a former hedge fund manager and forensic accountant, trying to bring down a man he considered one of the most powerful on Wall Street was one fraught with risks, for his career and family.
• In an extended interview Markopolos speaks about his book, his investigation, his frustration with the regulators and how he feared for his own life.
• Markopolos said he was living under a “death sentence” for ten years. Believing Madoff’s client list included drug cartels and organized crime, Markopolos went to extremes to protect himself and his family, even going so far as to devise a plan to kill Madoff.

The FederalJack Free Ebooks Archive.

Declassified Federal Docs, FOIA Requests, Fiction and Non-Fiction Books, Survival Manuals and more.

Stock up, 2010 is going to be a bumpy ride.

Universal Healthcare Map

Public universal health care around the world (as of December 2009).

BLUE = Single-payer universal health care (16)
GREEN = Public universal health care through other means (51)
GRAY = No universal health care or no data

Just to help put things in perspective, via Wikipedia

criminalwisdom:

WINDMILLS AND WIND MOTORS : HOW TO BUILD AND RUN THEM (1910)
From the Internet Archive, a book on how to build windmills and wind motors. Via No Tech Magazine.

The Boneyard: 22 Billion Dollar Military Cemetery

• The 2,600 acre facility, officially known Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, is home to thousands of outdated aeroplanes and helicopters mothballed by the United States Air Force and other allied forces.
• The 60 year-old facility, the size of 1,300 football pitches and sprawled across the desert in Tucson, Arizona, houses the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) and is America’s only storehouse for out-of-service aircraft.
• Some of the dismantled aircraft include B-52 flying fortresses, F14 Tomcats, seen in the Tom Cruise 80s blockbuster film “Top Gun”, and the A-10 Thunderbolt “tank busters”.

• The European single currency is facing an ‘inevitable break-up’ a leading French bank claimed yesterday.
• Strategists at Paris-based Société Générale said that any bailout of the stricken Greek economy would only provide ‘sticking plasters’ to cover the deep- seated flaws in the eurozone bloc.
• The stark warning came as the euro slipped further on the currency markets and dire growth figures raised the prospect of a ‘double-dip’ recession in the embattled zone.
• Claims that the euro could be headed for total collapse are particularly striking when they come from one of the oldest and largest banks in France - a core founder-member.
• In a note to investors, SocGen strategist Albert Edwards said: ‘My own view is that there is little “help” that can be offered by the other eurozone nations other than temporary, confidence-giving “sticking plasters” before the ultimate denouement: the break-up of the eurozone.’
• He added: ‘Any “help” given to Greece merely delays the inevitable break-up of the eurozone.’
• The French bank’s warning was echoed by Mats Persson, Director of the Open Europe think-tank, which campaigns for reforms in Brussels.
• He said: ‘The eurozone is facing a fully-fledged crisis. The Greece episode has made it painfully clear how flawed the euro project was from the very beginning.
• ‘Even if Greece receives a one-off bailout it would not solve the real problem, which is the huge differences in competitiveness between the eurozone’s richest and poorest members.
• If these differences are to be evened out, the EU would need a single budget and common taxes so it can redistribute resources.

(Single budget and common taxes for all of Europe? How about a ‘euro army’ while we are at it…)