Festive Halloween

Zombies took over the stock market in Am*dam today. Bloodied undead brain-eating specters traversed the distance between the Vrankrick squat bar and the Am*dam Stock Exchange via a couple ATM machines (the side picture, taken by Robin is at an ATM).

Often yelling "Where is my money?" these anti-capitalist activists crawled, clamored and crumbled thru street markets and various banks until the were met by 3 police in front of the Stock Exchange. Local passers by were quite good natured as a whole and some high contrast spectacle occurred (See Kassia's blog for the best photo).

The Stock Exchanged closed itself and the police closed the road, accomplishing the protesters objectives for control of the space, without them having to risk arrest to achieve these goals.
Yet again the power of costume dress.

You can see more and bigger photos of this protest at Indymedia

Time Compression

"Why dont you know how to cook?" Robin chastised me a couple of days ago. I've actually been feeling unusually guilty about it. Almost all my intimates make something of a deal out of cooking. Hawina, Patty, Caroline, Tree, Angie and Sky are all quite good cooks and care about it, in most cases as a community building tool. But by dinner, my guilt was gone.

Dumpster diving Video Will Be Here

We invaded Emily's Straat. The open air street market today early enuf to successfully dumpster (having missed it twice this week for being late). There was lots of produce to pick from and the vendors responded well when Lena asked in her high dumpster style of long pointy leather boots, frilly blue short skirt and bright Polish smile.

The lovely Lena and i argued about how much we were taking. Even tho it is not illegal, i still believe in a hit and run strategy, which is why i was so happy there were so many of us. But Lena was convinced we would use an eggplant each. So we captured ample tomatoes, mangoes, plums, papayas, cucumbers, kiwis, green beans, peppers, oranges, lemons and lots of avocados.
We were quite discriminating, because there was so much to choose from we could be picky.

Karden (a soft spoken, but clearly clever young German activist) spoke directly to vendors and collected many of our treasures. Karden went to the market most afternoon for years where he used to live in Germany and he developed relationships with the vendors, who stopped throwing their waste away and just put it aside and gave it to him directly, which he was appreciavite of and they in turn felt generous. Creating this type of ongoing relationship with street vendors and elevating the status of trash is perfect for TrashWiki. Karden will likely come with me to Gorleben next week.

It was a huge dinner, which when you added the two bottles of wine and large bar of chocolate cost 1.50 Euro/person. And the reason that i feel fine about not cooking, was that i facilitated getting the big group out there, encouraging scouting which increased our haul and coordinated the massive prep cooking effort. But what really got me was when i tried to find someone to be the chief cook from our 11 person group, there was not really any candidates. Robin arrived back from work and i pressed him into cooking, him reminding me he had cooked for the last 3 days as well. Then he cooked the eggplant (which i think we ate one of), but i basically got the rest of the dishes started and prepared, with lots of help. It is not cooking, but it is organizing which creates meals from self identified non-cooks. That is close enuf for me.

We had a helicopter land right in front of the Casa today, when we were all going to the afternoon market. We saw it land in the playground across the street. a lone local policeman cleared the playground as they were landing. A guy in a bright orange suit jumped out with what i assume was a medical bag and was nearly instantly picked up by a cop on a motorcycle and was whisked off. The time compression was amazing - if all the connections were that fast, you could conceivably have a doctor by your side within 20 minutes almost anywhere in the city. Nitia the photographers image will replace this one, when he sends it to me.

As the helicopter took off, we were just under it and the wind blew through our hats and hair. And within 60s of the take off, dozens of kids were back on the playground, running around and jumping. The Dutch are not just time compressing, they are space compressing.

Surreally, moments after the helicopter took off we walked by two kids about Willows age who had a quite realistic remote controlled helicopter toy, which took off right before us. Nitia got pictures. After a perfect and controlled take off and rise to perhaps 3 meaters, they drove it into the side of a nearby building and it crashed to the ground.




i dont know who this woman is, except that she identifies as from the Dennis Collective. She sent me a couple of nice pictures and said she was reading my blog. Kassia thinks it is not Israel, because there is too much graffiti. I think it might be Greece. Mark and Nitai - who flew in from Jerusalem today to the Casa, both think it might be Israel, tho the front right Temple is unusual. Nitai, who lived in Jerusalem for 15 years, thinks it might be Nazareth.


Earlier in the day, when i asked Nitai how the war affected him personally he said it heightened his awareness - and while he would not wish it on anyone, it does make him more serious about how he lives. "But at the end of the day, it is all about my last name, Peace." He is Nitai Shalom - from Israel, Poland, the US and Iraq. An ambassador for peace.

This is one of Nitai's Photos

Quite Handy

In 1991, Wam Kat convinced me that e-mail was the future, he was right and i've never gone back (tho i still write some love letters on paper).

One of my favorite tools is tinyurl.com. It creates short web addresses for these tremendous strings you sometimes get. When there is a webpage that is hard to get to TinyURL can help rescue you and they just made this utility more handy, by giving you the option to propose your own name for it. These are the ones i have created so far:

TinyURL.com/paxusblog - this blog

TinyURL.com/paxusTO - my Twin Oaks vanity website

TinyURL.com/polyfingerbook - The polyamory primer - "With Open Hands"

TinyURL.com/constructionkit - Super meme construction kit - thoughts on self replicating ideas and cultural constructs

TinyURL.com/forgetnuclear - Amory Lovin's latest short article slamming nuclear power.

TinyURL.com/forestdance - Pictures of the amazing "Dancing Forest" near Kaliningrad. Lucifer says they dont know why these trees do this.

What you can do with 700 people

Sky and Kassia just watch some pretty intense stuff go down in Copenhagen around the states attempt to shut down the long standing large community of Christiania.

But the back story is classic. As i understand it when the negotiations between the city and the community break down, the state comes in and reclaims part of the property. These actions were in response to the police destroying a house. Over 700 people showed up and the result is they repulsed the police. But building was largely destroyed.

Of course the other thing you can do, if you have some skilled fraction of those 700 people. Is you can come back the next day and rebuild the building. Which the Christianians are doing.


Christiania is much mroe famous for its cargo/multi passenger bike designs than it is for protests.

Radical Hospitality

"How can the house have a bike?" Kaudry asks me as we walk home from the gezellig squat cafe at the Partick Fredrick Straat. I am wheeling one of the Casa Robino collective bicycles as we walk thru the well lit and rainy streets of Am*dam. She has just hitchhiked in from Estonia. 5 rides, 48 hours, one difficult driver who would not let her out, nearly no sleep. But her question does not come from exhaustion.

I explain that Robin has a hospitality mission, which she already knows, because he is putting her up and they have never met before. That part of that mission is to provide durable resources to the guests of the house. He does not think of these as his bikes, he thinks of them as our bikes - more precisely, the houses bikes. Sky repaired them all three before he and Kassia went to Copenhagen, their care and upkeep relies on the generosity and handiness of the endless cycle of guests who come thru the Casa.

It seems a somewhat foreign notion to her. i mention that it is like communism, recognizing that it is a weighty word from a person from Estonia. I tell her i was in Estonia, in 1991, when they kidnapped Gorbachev and her country declared independence. I spare her the longer version of our exciting escape with our Lithuanian bus drivers switching seats while driving to make sure we did not have to stop. Of Russian helicopters circling the Riga radio station and us hearing the animated Latvian news announcer reporting on the invasion getting cut off in mid-sentence and replaced with classical music as the tyrants stormed the station. Nor did i speak of us passing Russian tanks which closed off the very roads we were on moments after we passed. We rushing towards the west, to escape the unknown fate of the dissolving Soviet Union. She was perhaps 3 then, it is ancient history.

Earlier, back in the squat cafe i am talking with the charming German anarchist Kristian. He is completing his PhD in security architecture. He tells stories of how military police who are beating protesters in Geneva were shortly before using the same tactics in Kosovo. He points out that when we use civil liberties arguments to try to stop this type of repression we are disabling our ability to access a more revolutionary and rightious position, that the very idea of military police being turned on their own population is wrong. Rather than they screwed up by being too oppressive in this particular case.

He is telling me about the "New Anita" which is the cafe/bar which he helped remodel 3 years ago. Which somehow has managed for 2 decades to operate right off a main street in Am*dam without a liquor license, by negotiating with the authorities. These days are ending here, but they are well established now. A German woman sings a haunting song, in English - simple in lyrics, rich in expression. She is behind the circular bar, which Kristian and friends designed cleverly to double function as a stage for performers.

Kristian tells me that the New Anita is filled with artists types. "As opposed to activists?" i ask. And we agree that we wish they were the same group, yet somehow they are mostly not. And i flash on the brilliance of Casa Robino again. Where the activists and non-activists share the same crowded little space. Where the ideas of people dedicated to making the world a better place, come up over Cruesli with people who are just looking for a place to stay for free for a few night.

Kaudry will learn about communism here. Not the kind that ruthlessly oppressed her country for decades, but instead the kind that great memeticist Marx envisioned. [Robin rightly objects, it is not communism, but anarchism - no state and no private property.]

And long after she was long in bed, and Robin and Anu and i had finished our wild rambling conversation - so common after midnight here. And Kasper had sent back instructions from Syria on how to start my first wiki. i very appropriately, got the first few pages of SharingIsDaring.com up and running.

It has all the feel of the beginning of a revolution.

Eight Lanes and High Class Problems

The traffic pattern in this city is quite clever. Very often on middle sized center city streets there are 8 lanes of traffic, four in each direction. Most of my Yankee comrades are doing a double take here, because i have failed to identify these lanes: 2 sidewalk pedestrian, 2 dedicated bike lanes, 2 for cars and trucks and faster motorbikes and 2 for trams, active emergency vehicles and taxis which are carrying fares.

The effect is liberating. You can almost always cross the street, because generally these lanes are separated and there is not consistant traffic in any given lane. Bicyclists dont need to wear helmets and can go at a bike appropriate speed safely, worrying only about passing other bikes. The cars most often dont need to pay much attention to either the trams or the cyclists. The tram lanes are generally clear, tho the trams run as frequently as every 6 minutes during peak hours and adding taxis to these lanes gives the taxis a tremendous time advantage in traversing the city and make them faster than the trams or other cars and are operated by professional drivers.

There is also some level of color coding, the bike lanes are typically crimson in color. Thanks to Sky for the above picture. which shows better than anything on Google images the 4 distinct types of lanes in each direction.

Of course my darker green friends will not be happy about special privileges for affluent taxi riders. But for me what is key is the structure is already in place for peak oil driven petrol price spike. And the local gasoline prise is already $6.30/gallon here (something like $4/gal higher than the US?) And if gas doubles here, then the traffic/ridership on 6 of the 8 lanes will get a bit heavier and we will have fewer personal cars. Very civilized. In most US cities, doubling gas prices will have largely inelastic effect on personal car use, in part because there is little capacity of these streets to convert to other traffic modes - what you will get is pissed off car drivers.

The problem with Am*dam is that there are too many possibilities. i recently produced a document called Plan 9 (email me or enter a comment if you want a copy) which outlines 10 different projects i am excited about (Honest Seduction snuck in there as the 10th after the document was named.) And i sent this to some friends asking their help in paring it down with me. Already some great responses have come in, including an offer funding. But the problem is that there are still ideas not in Plan 9 that i am considering - like the urban farmers and sky dry (look for the 5 minutes of Bambi entry) which were being wonderfully thrown around at the Casa last night.

As the CEO of Federal Express said to the Cornell investment committee (when he and i both sat on the Board of Trustees, back in 1979) when we were looking at holding bonds which were yielding nearly 20% or selling them at a significant premium: "That is a high class problem."

Todays dangerous idea

Mike and i are going back and forth about nuclear power and its desirability. I appreciate Mike because unlike a some pro-nuclear folx (and a fair few anti-nuclear folx as well) he is civil is his approach (and we are not talking engineering here).

So here is our challenge. To take the nuclear debate off these personal blog pages and put it up for the public to see. There are some features for this system that make sense:

1) Supports people loging in and making public postings
2) for there to be multiple topics determined by moderators (cost, climate effect, safety, pollution, waste, etc)- in conjunction with the group
3) For it to be possible to pull down posts which are abusing
4) For there to be user profiles - or links to them, no anonymous postings

So a possible would do it as a wiki - where people could go in and edit and enhance arguments that support their position. The problem is that the wiki format is not well suited to issues that are argumentative. At least i thin it is not. You dont want someone to simply pull off or deface the arguments they dont like. But perhaps it is a all registered wiki with somewhat harsh rules for posting - destintly different from Wikipedia in this sense where experimentation and crashing around is encourage.

There are other web formats that we have been using for project support which might be appropriate. I'll check with me group mind expert and lover Tree about groups and tools that are out there. I know she has worked with these groups that specialize in contentious issues. Time for nuclear advocates and opponents to work together to present our best arguments and let the people decide (or the leaders, if we have to do it that way).

i will brush this up in a bit. But it is beautiful today in Am*dam and that is too rare to sit inside on a computer. Come on Mike and the other pro-nuclear folx reading this blog (who i am sure if we do this right, some of them i will call my friends) let's make this happen!