“Police would park near the store, note the license plate numbers of those who made purchases, and then get search warrants to go through their homes looking for pot….

And no, I’m not kidding. Just ask the guy who was hassled back in 2011 for purchasing equipment used for . . . wait for it . . . tomatoes: ‘The last time I checked, it wasn’t illegal to grow a tomato plant, but it makes you wonder. … I understand that a lot of people use hydroponic equipment for illegal ways, but that’s just like saying everybody who buys a gun is going to be a criminal and murder somebody.’”

Somebody should tell the NRA about this!

Don’t think it was (zombie) Julia Child: “Stinking, nasty bloody pressure cookers, I hate them!” – Julia Child
page 57 of Julia Child by Laura Shapiro

I think Julia would have used traditional pipe bombs.

At an early The Natural Step conference I read that poem. Donella Meadows, gone too soon, came up to me and showed me the copy that she was carrying. If I hadn’t read it, she would have.

Saw Chris Hughes at Harvard the other day, talking about what he is doing at The New Republic. Smart and energetic young guy but everything he said was Internet 2.0 boosterism from five years ago. Pretty rote and unimaginative. I was surprised.

The event was videotaped for CSPAN so you should be able to see it for yourself sometime soon and make up your own mind.

US newspapers aren’t interested in their readership. When the Internet gave them the opportunity to build an interactive community with their readers, they passed and have kept on passing. They don’t even realize the opportunity, even today. Too bad.

I hope you are up and around soon but worry that what you have may be some kind of computer virus and that we all may be infected now. That Terence Malick movie may have turned into a Steven Soderbergh film or maybe even the Resident Evil series.

I learned on a Baldwin but now have an old Chickering upright.

Can’t say that I listened to a lot of Liberace but everything I heard was more than a little over the top. Particularly his “double boogie woogie.”

I prefer Horowitz doing “Stars and Stripes Forever” or Chick Corea playing with the Harlem String Quartet.

Tell me that she’s doing performance art, a riff on Gilda Ratner’s Emily Latella complete with costume. Please tell me that because otherwise I can’t believe this idiot is gainfully employed as a writer.

P2P investigative journalism:
crowdsourcing legislators’ opinions on talkingpointsmemo
emptywheel’s consistent bird-dogging of security issues
ProPublica
anonymous
wikileaks

All different aspects and approaches.

If you wanna deal with climate change on a P2P basis, you could do worse than start an open design process on more efficient cookstoves to reduce black carbon and concentrate on reducing the other short term climate forcers like tropospheric ozone. Poorest first, folks, poorest first.

Solar IS Civil Defense is another way to build resilience into the developed world and can be coupled with basic electricity for the quarter of the world’s population that does not yet have access to electricity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0mjqjgZ64E

Went to another panel at MIT recently, on Occupy. It was interesting that none of the panel and none of the audience mentioned that Occupy had jumped from street demo to shadow government with their latest initiatives in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. That’s quite a distance to travel in such a short time on Gene Sharp’s list of non-violent tactics.

Attended the 11/6/12 MIT panel on your book. Here are my notes.

To my mind, the discussion was less about the electoral politics we usually associate with that word and more about how peer-to-peer [P2P] networks are already being used among diverse populations for civic activities and many other things. When Susan Crawford, founder of OneWebDay, paraphrased Kevin Kelly by saying “The internet was built by love. It’s a gift,” (The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed), I thought of the idea and the story behind the title of the book You Can’t Steal a Gift about jazz players Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Milt Hinton, and Nat King Cole by Gene Lees (Lincoln, NE: Univ of NE Press, 2001 ISBN 0-8032-8034-3):

Phil Woods: “I was in Birdland, stoned, as I often was in those days. Dizzy and Art Blakey kidnapped me. Took me home to Dizzy’s and sat me down and said, ‘What are you moaning about? Why don’t you get your own band?’…
“I asked them if a white guy could make it, considering the music was a black invention. I was getting a lot of flak about stealing not only Bird’s music but his wife and family as well [Woods was married to Chan, Charlie Parker's widow]… And Dizzy said, ‘You can’t steal a gift. Bird gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.’”

Recent work in behavioral economics shows that we

“do things because we like it, because it’s interesting, and because it serves a larger purpose.”
Source: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink NY: Penguin Group, 2009 ISBN 978-1-59448-884-9
Peer to peer networks are already based upon a common purpose. A common, unifying purpose along with a measure of autonomy, and a chance for mastery seem to be stronger motivators than money or other extrinsic rewards.
Voluntary cooperation on common projects also fits into Gandhian economics as swadeshi, local production. Daily practice of swadeshi was the basis of both Gandhian nonviolence and economics. Can we think of Linux and Wikipedia and the other usual suspects examples of global/local P2P as swadeshi systems?

Mutual exchange within a system of voluntary cooperation was the heart of Kropotkin’s proposed system of economics:

He believed that should a society be socially, culturally, and industrially developed enough to produce all the goods and services required by it, then no obstacle, such as preferential distribution, pricing or monetary exchange will stand as an obstacle for all taking what they need from the social product.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/…
Clay Shirky, in his book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (NY: Penguin Press, 2010 ISBN 978-1-59420-253-7), wonders:
“But what if the contributors aren’t workers? What if they really are contributors, quite specifically intending their contributions to be acts of sharing rather than production? What if their labors are labors of love?”
If work becomes sharing, then we might be approaching a gift economy in which reciprocity and fairness become more important. Anthropologist Marcel Mauss wrote that there is an obligation to give, an obligation to receive, and an obligation to repay in gift economies but that’s only the beginning of complications. Economies, whether capitalist, Communist, socialist, anarchist, gift, or barter are more complex than any single human mind.
If we do want to talk about P2P and other kinds of networked politics, I would first examine why grassroots/netroots party politics has not yet generated grassroots/netroots governance despite being successful at electing Governors and Presidents. For example, Deval Patrick of MA won his first term in 2006 with a masterful grassroots/netroots campaign that bubbled up with as well as trickled down. The two way communication lasted through the transition when Patrick installed a business as usual staff and got into trouble about curtains and Cadillacs with the Boston press. When Obama ran in 2008 with Davids Alexrod and Plouffe, who both worked on the Patrick campaign, I wondered if the same thing would happen.

I do not know of any politicians who are currently trying to govern as well as campaign with a grassroots/netroots P2P network but, if P2P continues to be effective within the civic and business spheres, there will be.

Occupy was moving in this direction from the very beginning – the graywater treatment system at the kitchen in NYC, the bicycle and solar generators, the recycling of organic wastes to community gardens. I had hoped that they would explicitly begin to move toward sustainable (economic) refugee camps as an example of what is possible for other emergencies and disasters, technology and techniques for those who’ve lost everything or never had anything in the first place.

Tried to connect with people in NYC, Providence, and Boston about this when the camps were still going on but it didn’t happen. Maybe it will begin to happen now. Although I have my doubts as the OccupySandy webpage’s link to 350.org is 404 and 350.org’s webpage doesn’t have any link to Occupy at all, at least, last time I looked over the weekend. Why do we keep missing the simplest things?