We don’t have a lot of folks yet, but here is a recent post from Insurgent American’s forums that suggests the value of these practical exchange threads:

On retirement, my husband and I gave long consideration… what we believed about retirement when we were saving the money isn’t what we believe today. Outside events have changed our thinking: The Iraq war ramifications, Peak Oil, and the US twin deficits seeping out from the Bush/Greenspan years, for instance. And it was frightening to change.

We have three children and three grandchildren who have pretty well lived on our acreage in North Central Texas, the hell-hole of the climate world (which, I’m convinced, was never meant to be inhabited.)

To… consternation… we made the decision not to leave our money in its present IRA form, or even in the portfolio. We’ve taken the tax hit and redeemed our IRAs, purchased 30 acres a bit farther south, cleared some of the land, dug a large lake, allocated land for garden ground reclamation and begun one of the most massive projects of our life. (Smack-dab as we hit 70.)

We’re building a very large multi-family straw-bale dwelling. We began by digging
twenty holes that go twenty feet deep. Into those holes we coiled PEK tubing — through which water can move down, exchange the heat and return up to circulate through the floor and back again — a small science. The tiny bronze pumps that move the water require very little energy and will actually work off a solar panel or gel battery. In our part of Texas the heat exchange will keep the floor approximately 72 degrees year round (no central air-conditioning.) Each hole is worth roughly one ton of air conditioning.

The straw-bale walls have very high ceilings with a heavily insulated metal roof, plus extra insulation above the sheetrock ceilings. The walls are also coated with something akin to adobe which has extremely high insulating value and is fireproof. Windows and doors are low-E, the best we could afford. When it’s done (one half is almost ready to be inhabited) we will do gray water, rain capture, some wind energy, some solar, etc. and get fairly well off the electrical grid.

This is an extremely labor-intensive process. You need to be physically strong, and you require a sort of jack-of-all-trades skill set. But we have that, though we can only work half a day, rather than 8 hours. Some in our family are quite clever at making old machines come to life and do wonderful work.

Our project will take several years to fully complete, but we asked ourselves what we wanted to do with the rest of our lives — play golf, watch TV? Our offspring would have just spent the money, and now they will have this wonderful dwelling that will do them in good stead through the difficult years ahead.

Aside from the construction which we do six days a week, we continue to make compost, pile everything onto our gardening allocation, learn some animal husbandry, get ready to do earthworm cultivation, learn which food preservation techniques work and those that don’t.

Putting a seed in the ground isn’t enough. Each area has its own particular pests that must be dealt with without poison. Just keeping potatoes fresh until the next growing season is a major issue. The making of compost is almost a full-time job.

We’re constantly studying better ways. There are some very smart techniques that have been developed along the years by clever inventors who were abused and stymied by this society. The Internet has found them, or they have found the Internet. We thank them for their creativity. And we thank everyone who makes sites like this one, to keep people thinking and motivated and informed.

We’re making friends with the old-time residents who live on the meandering gravel roads where we’ve moved to. The little community is agog at our structure going up, and they pause to see how the neglected land has cleaned up and all the promise it shows. “What is this Peak Oil you talk about?” they ask.

Posted by stan as Site at 1:31 PM PST

We have a new subsection in the Pedagogy area aka Intellectual Hardball. Its called Jim Craven’s Heuristic Devices. The first piece in this area is called The Number Exercise (an exercise revealing Eurocentrism). Thanks for letting us put this up on IA Jim!

Posted by BrianR as Pedagogy, Site at 7:57 AM PST

As we mention on the page Support this Site, your donations are going to the expense of running this site and its forums. The goal of this post is to describe what we’ll be doing with your money.

Right now, basic web hosting for this site is around $120 a year. That’s pretty cheap. But for IA to grow and be able to financially support Stan and myself, it will take a lot of traffic. By traffic I mean the number of visitors to the site on a daily basis. For a website to sustain lots of web traffic, it requires high quality dedicated web server hardware and lots of bandwidth. (I’d be happy to elaborate the techie details. Please contact me if you like to hear more of my geek speak.)

My goal is to raise enough money for one year of high quality dedicated web server hosting. One estimate of this cost is $500 a month. That comes to $6000 a year.

I think saving for a year in advance is better than going month to month, especially for the first year. Lots of people suggest that ventures like ours can take two years to begin breaking even. If we can raise enough money for our webhosting in advance we won’t have to take the money from our meager living resources. As of right now, I’ve donated 85 hours of my time, the cost of domain name registration, and web hosting costs. I don’t expect to recoup all of my donated time.

If you would like to donate towards the cause of saving for this resource, then subscribe to Insurgent American by using the PayPal link on the right side bar or by mailing a check or money order to Brian Russell, P.O. Box 1721, Carrboro, NC, 27510.

Another way you could donate towards our Tech resources is by giving us dedicated web hosting. If you run a serious web host with 24-7 collocation/managed hosting facilities, please contact me.

Please know that I’m working very hard on this site because I believe in Stan Goff, his ideas, and that we can change the world for the better. I want to see this site succeed so it can help creative people live modestly doing what they love, not amass great quantities of wealth.

The Internet has given us a resource to remove all the middle men. If we build our own place we can work directly with others and support ourselves fairly.

Thank you for your support and trust,
-BrianR

Posted by BrianR as Site at 6:53 PM PST

That’s what I’m asking for as support for this site, and for myself. For the last five days I have been researching and writing a piece for this site on how the Green Revolution was designed and deployed as a weapon of imperialism. It’s already 25 pages long, and it connects a lot of dots for an analysis that supports feminism, re-localization, and permaculture as strategic political practices.

For the past three years, I have supported myself and my family through the largesse of people in the movement against the war. I have had some writing gigs and speaking gigs. I sold books out of boxes. I had a couple of consulting jobs on the side. I’m 55, and I don’t have any advanced degrees. Aside from intellecutal sharecropping and political organizing, the only skills I possess are those from the military. As of February 2007, I will have no means of support. But I can study, think, and write to pass that study and thinking along for other people to study and think a bit further.

This site is committed to the belief that the credentialing of intellectuals within the Academy — while it does not take anything away from those with academic credentials — is an aspect of an intellectual division of labor that keeps organic intellectuals — and there are quite a few of us — out. Out of jobs, and out of public discourse. We need subscribers, quite a few, at $10 a month (or 34 cents a day) to allow us to develop this web site full time, but more importantly, to continue doing what credentialed academics do… without the institutional constraints: Study, think, and write.

We will also gladly accept larger contriubutions. (See the “subscribe” button on the right.)

I have a strong work ethic; and if necessary I’ll take whatever work I have to in February. I’m not standing here with a sign threatening to starve. I’ll work for minimum wage if that’s what it takes to pay bills.

But I’d rather spend the 8 hours a day pulling together ideas, history, and current events as analyses that support “feminism, re-localization, and permaculture as strategic political practices.” Almost everything we have on Insurgent American is open to the public. We are not managers, and we are not capitalists. We are not trying to establish a value-for-value exchange system, but one of mutual support, that bends toward the construction of communities. We have valuable things here, no doubt. But I am appealing to you for plain straightforward support, the price of half-a-cup of bad coffee each day, that might allow me to do this work, and for Brian (the technical shaker and mover here) and other contributors to make this happen.

You’d also be supporting those who can use this site, but who cannot afford to support it monetarily… because the site will develop at a rate corresponding to the time we have to invest in it. We appreciate you dropping by. Please support us; and please use this practical strategic resource.

Thanks.

Stan Goff

Posted by stan as Site at 9:02 PM PST