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2021 – week 5Upside down = instead of announcing what we plan to do
(& most often find out we do not need to do), we relate what we really did
to healing our collective wound.
At Plukrijp, we offer spaces of transparency and solidarity.
The community allows people to encounter each other
in truth and so develop trust.
The updated list of vegetables & fruit that can be harvested this week is available on our website under the heading “Current Harvest” : https://plukrijp.be/en/op-dit-moment-te-oogsten
This week @ Plukrijp
Rain (finally enough!) &mild weather awoke the seeding impulse in us.
We did:
Seed a ground cover in the closed tunnels: spinach, coriander & salads will give us new greens for spring, when the green cover from autumn 2020 will have gone to seed (April). Cauliflower & broccoli will be planted over this green cover.
Continue to build the water-collector-roof at Hei from recycled materials (thanks Bjorn!) while teaching welding, a very valuable technique for permaculture students.
Continue to build the two new trailers to transport boxes from the farm to the Hei.
Help our neighbors Leon & Carl to clear out a house in the street. Over the many years we have developed long-term connections locally, in respect & conviviality. In the spirit of “you help me, I help you & my waste is your value//your presence opens up doors for my presence”.
Make a design for Ruth’s “Equispirit” coaching place. 4 interns wrote their vision & the total group worked out a plan that we can/will realize at her place.
We shared/watched:
The mini serie “Odyssey” made by Franco Rossi in 1968. Plutocracy, Political Repression in The U.S.A. (2019) by filmmaker Scott Noble.
Interesting Movies & Documentaries
The Odyssey (from Homer’s poem) Franco Rossi (1968)
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjN_merCA0Q
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKcH8ZvqzZw
Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww3291Av4hE
Part 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK5eTjQB6MM
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still read by contemporary audiences. As with the Iliad, the poem is divided into 24 books. It follows the Greek hero Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his journey home after the Trojan War. After the war itself, which lasted ten years, his journey lasts for ten additional years, during which time he encounters many perils and all his crewmates are killed. In his absence, Odysseus is assumed dead, and his wife Penelope and son Telemachus must contend with a group of unruly suitors who compete for Penelope’s hand in marriage.
Plutocracy I: Political Repression in the USA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHWyLx8aV40
Plutocracy: Political Repression In The U.S.A. (2019 – 560 mins, 5 parts total) by filmmaker Scott Noble, is the first documentary series to comprehensively examine early American history through the lens of class. “Absolutely brilliant on numerous levels, Scott Noble’s Plutocracy is the story of the American working class… .
Part I, “Divide et Impera” focuses on the ways in which the American people have historically been divided on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex and skill level.
Plutocracy: Divide et Impera (Divide and Rule) includes sections on Mother Jones, the American Constitution; the Civil War draft riots; Reconstruction; Industrialization; the evolution of the police; the robber barons; early American labor unions; and major mid-to-late 19th Century labor events including the uprising of 1877, the Haymarket Affair, the Homestead strike and the New Orleans General Strike. The introduction examines the West Virginian coal wars of the early 20th Century, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain.
Plutocracy II: Solidarity Forever
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/plutocracy-solidarity-forever/
Income inequality may be a hot topic during the current American election season, but it’s also a stark reality that has plagued the country for hundreds of years. That sad history foreshadows what many are still grappling with today. The feature-length documentary Plutocracy II: Solidarity Forever is a studious and well-produced portrayal of America’s long-standing clashes between the working-class and the industrial beast.
The film, which is the second part of an ongoing historical series, covers the seminal labor-related events which occurred between the late 1800’s and the 1920’s. Its subtitle refers to a 1915 song composed by Ralph Chaplin as an anthem for unionized workers. The film itself is the cinematic version of that anthem, as it allows us a comprehensive understanding of the need for these early labor unions, and the enormous sacrifices of its members to ensure fairness, safety, and equality in the workplace.
Plutocracy III: Class War
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/plutocracy-class-war/
Class War offers invaluable historical insights from a panel of historians and labor advocates. Their deeply human narrative is assisted by a briskly edited barrage of stock footage, archive materials, and other provocative imagery.
The early struggles of the working class are placed under a microscope in Plutocracy III: Class War, the third chapter in an exceptionally well produced series which explores the origins of America’s growing economic divide.
Without a doubt, the clashes between worker rights and corporate interests are prominent in today’s political and economic landscape, but they’re not a modern phenomenon by any means. These imbalances, and the wealth inequalities that have resulted in their wake, have existed for generations. The filmmakers provide a searing portrait of the brave workers who fought for true democracy in the early decades of the 20th century.
The film begins with the titan of the labor movement during that period – Mary Harris “Mother” Jones. A galvanizing presence who spent her life inspiring a working class revolution, Jones rallied a coalition of miners from Ludlow, Colorado in 1914. These miners worked under heinous conditions and for little pay in a coal operation owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Their determination knew no bounds; when the company cast the striking miners and their families out of their homes, they defiantly set up a colony of tents and continued their fight for fairness.
Their stand-off ended in tragedy. The National Guard was deployed and unleashed gun fire into the colony, senselessly massacring men, women and children. This appalling event sparked outrage and public protest across the United States.
The bulk of the film examines the impact of World War I on the labor movement, a conflict that saw the slaughter and disfigurement of a generation. The war provided further evidence of the class divide, and would propel labor advocacy efforts among all genders and races.
All of this culminated in the rise of the Socialist Party and the radical International Workers of the World organization, as well as the events of 1919, a year that saw 22.5% of the work force in strike mode.
Inspiring Link
Inspiring Books
Extract:
“In my SEPARATION FROM OTHERS, in private and “alone with myself”, deprived of others, this self with which I am alone is conceived on the logic of private property: it is my own possession, exclusively mine.”
The Art Of Communicating will improve your interpersonal and relationship skills by identifying the power of using mindfulness when talking with others, showing you how to listen with respect, convey your ideas efficiently, and most of all deepen your connections with others.
Everything you speak is either nourishing or toxic to others.
Learn how to communicate well with yourself
if you want to get better at connecting with others.Be consistently compassionate and honest
to nurture others with loving speech.
Inspiring Quote
“in our view, patriarchy is NOT the expression of deep and rooted
masculinity, for truly deep and rooted masculinity is NOT abusive.
PATRIARCHY IS THE EXPRESSION OF THE IMMATURE MASCULINE.
It is the expression of BOY psychology, and in pet, the shadow-or
crazy-side of masculinity. It expresses the stunted masculine, fixated
at immature levels.
Patriarchy is an ATTACK on masculinity in its fullness as well as
femininity in its fullness…Boys fear women. They also fear real men.
….We need to learn to love and to be loved by the mature masculine. …”
From the book “King, warrior, magician, lover” by Robert Moore & Douglas Gilette
Inspiring Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5znh58WITU8
“Games People Play” is a song written, composed and performed by singer/song-writer Joe South. In 1968, the song was released on Joe’s debut album: Introspect. It won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1970.
Whoa–the games people play now.
Every night and every day now.
Never meanin’ what they say now.
Never sayin’ what they mean.
While they wile away the hours
in their ivory towers,
’till they’re covered-up with flowers
in the back of a black limousine.
[Chorus]
La, da, da da, da-da da;
La, da, da da, da-da de…
talkin’ ’bout you-n-me
and the games people play–now.
Whoa we make one another cry,
break a heart then we say goodbye;
cross our hearts and we hope to die
that the other was to blame.
But neither one will ever give-in,
so we gaze at an eight-by-ten
thinkin’ ’bout the things that might have been
and it’s a dirty rotten shame.
[Chorus]
People walkin’-up to ya,
singin’ glory hallelujah
‘n’ they’re tryin’ ta sock it to ya,
in the name of the Lord.
They’re gonna teach you how to meditate,
read your horoscope, cheat your fate.
And furthermore to Hell with hate
Come-on and get-on board.
[Chorus]
Look-around tell me what you see.
What’s a-happenin’ to you and me?
God grant me the serenity
to jus’ remember who I am.
’cause you’ve given-up your sanity
for your pride and your vanity,
turn your back on humanity;
Oh and you don’t give a da da da da da.
[Chorus x 3]
-Joe South
Wisdom
Commit as many mistakes as possible,
remembering only one thing:
don’t commit the same mistake again.
And you will be growing.
– Osho
Humor (?)
A bank is a place that will lend you money
if you can prove that you don’t need it.– Bob Hope
Economic vision by Peter Schiff
In November 2006, economist Peter Schiff stood up in front of over 200 mortgage brokers and Wall Street bankers and told them the impossible was about to happen: The 21st-century housing boom was not a new paradigm where home prices rose indefinitely, but an impending disaster, a ticking time bomb months away from exploding. Sure enough, Peter Schiff was right. In October 2008, the subprime collapse plunged the global financial system into chaos. The S&P500 index fell 57%, Iceland and Greece’s banking systems almost failed, and the Eurodollar system, the semi-secretive global marketplace that helped architect the crisis, broke in two.
But although Schiff proved to everyone inside the Wall Street machine — the analysts, the media, the brokers, and the bankers — that they got it wrong, they did not give him the praise he thought he deserved for predicting the crisis. Not only did Wall Street’s proponents fail to give Schiff a platform to explain how and why the crisis occurred and what caused it, they never invited him back, exiling the popular gold bug from mainstream financial circles.
Instead, Schiff spent his time growing an audience via YouTube, speaking at various conferences, and appearing on alternative media outlets, including Russia’s state-controlled news station, RT. And despite getting de-platformed, his audience grew. Word spread of Schiff’s scarily accurate subprime predictions, and how anyone who followed his advice up to and throughout the 2008 financial crisis had made it out alive. Feeling confident, while markets and Washington D.C. remained in panic mode, Schiff made another prediction. He declared that America was about to experience an economic reset, a purge of all the abnormalities, deformities, and defects in the system; the start of a new American cycle based on sound money and sensibility.
Twelve years on, however, to the delight of the elites — and now most hardcore Bitcoiners, Schiff couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead of a great economic reset, the old system has not only recovered but thrived. We embraced the rise of the fake economy, enabling the government and central banks to embark on a journey toward economic madness, leaving the money printer on overdrive. Over many years, we’ve witnessed the consequences and effects, but nothing illustrates the cheap money era more vividly than the media reporting ever-crazier headlines. “Bitcoin reaches 300% gains year-on-year” this week, “Elon Musk becomes the world’s richest man without ever turning a profit,” the next. As these types of stories have become the norm, it’s now smart to suggest that we’re nowhere near a new paradigm, that the madness has only just begun.
We’re in a unique situation where everyone knows we’re in a gigantic bubble. The people know it. Wall Street knows it. The elites know it. Everybody believes that everyone else knows money printing and economic stimulus fail to boost economic prosperity, but together, we’re complicit in the lie. Because the prospects of easy gains from cheap money trump all logic and reason, we’ve justified this system to ourselves. Never in history has an economy existed on so much fallacy.
But this is not just America’s economic delusion but the world’s. The global financial system’s increasing interconnectedness has forced every other superpower into partaking in the U.S. government and Federal Reserve’s economic suicide. Since every major economy has adopted this flawed system, when America falls into chaos, the world falls along with it. Events such as the unwind of hot money during the 1997 Asian Debt Crisis and the collapse of subprime securities in the 2008 financial crisis prove the system has yet to be fixed, and the only force preventing its collapse is governments and central banks injecting trillions of liquidity into the system, keeping the system stable and the cheap money narrative in play.
We have been lead to believe central bank policies would eventually fix the economy. Now we know that’s never going to happen, but we’ve accepted it. We’re not trying to fix it. Instead, we’re trying to prop up our mistakes rather than start over. Politicians, Wall Street, and Fed officials have become more concerned about what will happen to their reputation if the vast chain of financial instruments and derivatives becomes unstable and breaks apart — the gargantuan amount of leverage on top of more leverage just to prop up assets that the financial elites have conjured out of thin air. It’s no longer how we can improve the system but how we can stop the next collapse.
Preventing this collapse has zombified the economy so much that we’re starting to become too reliant on the system. We’re starting to think, do, and act the same. We want those in power to tell us what to do, what to invest in, what to consume, what to think. Forget the things that will help us find a solution: responsibility and thinking outside the box. Waning responsibility means no one can think of a solution.
Instead, we remain trapped in an endless loop, a bubble supercycle with each iteration causing more abnormalities than the last. Public and private debt rises. Wealth inequality increases. And we experience collective episodes of societal unrest. To paint over existing cracks, the elites in charge implement more destructive policies so they’re not held responsible for the greatest debt collapse in history. And even if they did take the plunge, no human knows how to return such a complex system back to normalcy, let alone has the political will to let that happen.
Nobody knows, for sure, what will break this trend, but what we do know is that we’ll have to face another round of madness before it ends. COVID-19 has concluded the last cycle in the bubble supercycle, and since late 2020, we’ve moved onto the next. The fake economy has started to show signs of life once again. Stocks have recovered from their lows, GDP forecasts have turned positive, and economic indicators have reached record highs. But don’t be fooled, this is not a new era or a new paradigm. We’ve just delayed the inevitable next peak in the bubble supercycle.
This peak will be identical to the last cycle. When economic growth rises to a level that Fed officials deem “satisfactory”, we’ll go through the same theatrics once again. The authorities will convince themselves, once again, that their failed policies have started to work, that the flawed economic system has fixed itself despite turning off its main energy source: the money printer going “brrr”. They will rip off the bandaid, and liquidity will start to drain from the system, letting real economic forces take shape. Interest rates will collapse, risky assets will plunge, and commodities will tank, but only until they reopen the liquidity floodgates, with the farcical boom and bust starting over once again.
But until then, providing we don’t run into a black or white swan event, the next fake economic expansion powered by the biggest injection of monetary stimulus on record will prevail. This decade will be known as the Great Moderation, similar to Japan’s Lost Decade back in the 1990s, only with a stark difference. As the economy continues to nosedive, instead of everyone enduring the shared hardship of falling asset prices, using linguistic alchemy and perception management, the elites will be able to find the Goldilocks zone where they double, even triple, their wealth while sweeping the harsh economic realities under the rug.
It’s a scary prospect that this scenario could repeat itself for many decades to come, but we’ve got to accept that it may happen. Make no mistake: 2020 was the crisis that the bears, the doom-and-gloomers, and the Cypherpunks wanted to ignite change; the economic collapse that was supposed to break the system and bring about a revolution. Though, just like in 2008, the elites managed to bridge the financial dam and kick the can down the road. “They didn’t care if they created a bigger disaster, they just wanted a bigger disaster, later,” Schiff said in his glory days, and that’s all that matters. Here’s to another decade of navigating more economic madness, another decade that will make the last ten years appear sane and rational.
World Population 2007-2021
2007
If we would all want to live together in one village, what would that look like?
We would live, per 100 inhabitants, with:
57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 Americans (North & South)
8 Africans
52 Women for 48 men
70 “colored” people for 30 “whites” (but aren’t we all the same flesh and blood under that skin?)
2021
62 Asians
10 Europeans
10 Americans (North & South)
18 Africans
49 Women for 51 men
80 “colored” people for 20 “whites”
High time we finally learn to live TOGETHER, beyond gender, race, income&occupation.
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Sowing and harvesting together
