And hear our most excellent home-grown, all-Vermont Funk band, Electric Sorcery !! Playing 2:00 PM at the historic Gathering Inn, Hancock, Vermont !

The doors of sound have been ripped off the hinges by Electric Sorcery who routinely electrify Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Towns are regularly woken out of their slumber by the by the wicked sound of this power trio.

Electric Sorcery takes psychedelic music firmly rooted in the 70s and adds their own special twist. Funky rhythms and psychedelic guitar riffs come together to create an intriguing sound that is sometimes very heavy.... This is a fun listen and anyone who gravitates towards the psychedelic sounds of the 70s needs to hear this… - SeaOfTranquility.org 

Meet & Eat    Greet & Drink

Saturday, September 25, from 2 – 4 PM  

1295 Route 100

Diagonally opposite the Hancock Hotel

Please bring your concerns, your hard questions, and your ideas.  The Independent vision for Vermont is all about you, your families and communities !

by Jane Dwinell

The great Liberty Street Yard Sale is now over for 2010. This fabulous Montpelier institution provides bargains and a chance to meet and greet your neighbors. Nearly every house has goods for sale, and the street becomes a serious traffic jam about 10 o'clock. It seems like everyone has too much stuff they don't need (yet could really use some of those items their neighbors don't want: the trash-to-treasure paradox of the yard sale!).

Building up the formal local economy is a big part of the work to transition to greater resilience. But the informal economy, too, is tremendously important. The informal economy includes things like the timebank Onion River Exchange or the neighborhood dinners that people take turns hosting in parts of East Montpelier and other places.

It also includes all manner of sharing. I enjoyed interviewing Janelle Orsi, co-author of The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life & Build Community, who had suggestions for how to share everything from child care to cars. 

And in today's New York Times,  Laurie Woolever writes about sharing cooking and cleanup without group living. She introduces the concept in an intriguing, before-and-after-commercial way:

Dinnertime in our home, once a source of great pride and pleasure, became a rather lackluster affair after the birth of our son in 2008. Mostly it involved repurposing takeout leftovers or, on a more ambitious night, mixing chunks of frozen vegetable purées, meant for the baby, with macaroni and cheese. It was family dinner in the sense that it was marginally edible food, consumed together in the home, but prepared with the same care and passion I brought to refilling the cat’s water bowl.

But in February, everything changed. My husband and I became part of a cooking cooperative, and suddenly we were eating tagliatelle Bolognese, eggplant Parmesan or chicken adobo, all of it homemade, and only a fraction of it cooked by me.

She outlines a couple approaches to a cooking co-op, or dinner swap:

* At regular intervals, each member cooks a giant meal, divides it into refrigeratorable or freezeable portions, and swaps it for other apportioned meals with the other members. Woolever's group does this, and members take turns hosting the swap, which is accompanied by socializing and (what else?) eating.

*  Members each take a day to make hot food and deliver it to all the other members' homes at dinner time. This model seems more demanding to me--I think it would be difficult except where members live near each other and have regular and similar mealtimes.

There can be problems if people don't like each others' foods, so Woolever advises people to find folks with compatible cooking and eating habits and dietary restrictions. 

In our monthly neighborhood dinners, generally the host provides the entire meal and drinks, and the guests show up with plates, cups, bowls, and silvereware. That way the host has less cleanup afterwards. We discussed a potluck model a few years ago, but most of us felt it was a bargain to get a meal with no cooking at all 11 times a year in exchange for making the entire meal on the 12th time. It takes me maybe 4-5 times as long to make a meal for the neighborhood as to make a potluck dish, so our model cuts my annual prep time in half. Similarly, making dinner once a week for five people or families would be significantly faster, I think, than making five dinners for myself.

Maybe I'll give it a try. 

BirdInTheHand

Folks,

As of Friday morning, I am officially on the ballot for Vermont Senator for Addison County!  Thanks to you all for your hard work and great ideas.  Your contributions have served to get the Independent word out there, encourage people to register to vote, even built a parade float.

But I’m not gonna do an NPR on you and beg for even more funds.  Funds’ll come, somehow.  What’s really needed is organisational help.  I’d like to set up a community forum in Addison County every month until the election.  A forum in which people from all walks of life can address the candidates directly with concerns, questions, and even vent steam together with neighbours on how broken the system is.  If you know something about community organising and publicity, please contact me directly, robert@senatorwagner.com.

Chris Hedges:

Collective, suicidal inertia rolls us forward toward national insolvency and the collapse of empire. And we do not protest. The peace movement, despite the heroic efforts of a handful of groups such as  Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Green Party and  Code Pink, is dead. No one cares.
...

This is a blow to Vermont liberals, lefties and democrats who have buried their heads in the sand to keep pretending that their Obama walks on water, folks who have buried any and all opposition to the ongoing wars, torture and domestic loss of liberties in exchange for a smile and a promise of 'change'. The Left can't ignore the only recently announced White House approval for a controversial expansion of offshore oil exploration. And now, in an ecological catastrophe of global proportions, the feds are even slower to respond, than the Bush Administration responded to Katrina. The Black Swan was popularised by Nassim Taleb in his recent book by that name. Taleb regards almost all major scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments as 'black swans'—undirected and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of Black Swan events.The Black Swan has its origins in a centuries-old scientific assumption that ‘All swans are white'. Just because nobody but Australian aborigines saw them until recently.To me, the Black Swan Event is a catastrophe that causes a chain reaction, in a world of global energy and food dependencies. It relieves the tension of that which is ready and waiting to happen, but hasn't happened. Academic snobs don't see it, but are experts at covering their tracks, afterward. Party politicians can't see it and even if they could, it's not within their daily protocol of memorised answers to pre-arranged questions by the mainstream media.The 'tension' is Peak Oil, if you haven't heard of it here's what it's about. Once that tension is released, centrally planned economies such as the fiat currency and debt-based US Empire simply break down. The centralised nanny-state with drones checking for protesters productive workers born in Mexico & pot plants (as despair, domestic violence & rape multiplies) simply doesn't work. The USSR disintegrated overnight. All empires go... once whatever dependency it was that fuelled its overstretch... goes. The tension... releases.What remains are localised economies based on minimal energy usage, the way the human race lived for most of its existence. Vermont is one hopeful example of a small, governable entity. Vermont was a independent republic until 1791. We can be free again! Imagine Free Vermont, and vote for Dennis Steele for Governor. Engage in, and promote, local food production.So what's the Black Swan? It's all over the newspapers, predictable in hindsight, but strikes to the heart of the Empires energy plans. The bastards will have to invade Venezuela now (at the very least, maybe Bolivia for good measure), just to continue fuelling the military overstretch, hundreds of bases worldwide, and the never-ending wars. All of which consume approximately half the oil said to be consumed by the US. Think of it, half the oil! This is the Empire's next move: US builds up its bases in oil-rich South AmericaFrom the Caribbean to Brazil, political opposition to US plans for 'full-spectrum operations' is escalating rapidlyThe rest of this post I dedicate to Michael Ruppert, whom I just interviewed for Montpelier's local paper, The Bridge. Ruppert will be touring Vermont in May, screening his film Collapse and dealing with questions and concerns from audiences. This tour is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing, the Vermont Independent Candidates, Radio Free Vermont, Vermont Transition Towns, and others:

• May 13 – Burlington Contois Auditorium, City Hall 7:30 p.m.
• May 14 – Montpelier Unitarian Church, 7:30 p.m.
• May 15 – Brattleboro Brattleboro Union High School, 7:30 p.m.
• May 16 – Woodstock Woodstock Town Hall Theater, 7:00 p.m. Features screening of film and Q&A with Michael Ruppert afterward

Click here for more information on the tour!'The oil slick is now the size of Delaware. It will be Ohio-sized within days. Florida has declared a state of emergency. All commercial fishing in the Gulf is threatened. All widlife is threatened. And when and if the slick gets to NOLA it will have a disatarous impact on energy production and the brave, battered, courageous people who live there. Coastal refineries may have to close... What might happen if the oil ignited? Oil should be at $100 before the end of next week. I suspect between $150 and $200 (maybe higher) this summer.'Worse: Napolitano and Salazar are already talking about huge claim funds. Massive class-actions against BP are starting. Insurance claims may well dwarf Katrina. The economy of the entire Gulf Coast is in jeopardy. From what I heard there is no real plan to stop the leak and no estimation as to when that will happen. (I might have missed that.) What happens when the slick hits Cuba? The rest of the Caribbean?'The current fradulent Wall Street bubble will pop in shorter order than anticipated.'Within about a week, man's greed and reach for energy have found natural and unyielding limits. Two coal mine disasters and an oil slick that will cause as yet unknown catastrophic damage, loss of life and property. And yet there are still those in this movement who think we need to argue with people who believe there's plenty of easy oil about anything.'It would be so poetic if history recorded that this was the event that marked the cliff edge of human industrial civilization. Maybe then someone will get the point. Maybe then we will find our hundredth monkey... And maybe Mother Earth will have poisoned us with the substance we have so greedily raped her -- and killed each other -- for... You want oil?... I'll give you oil.' 

“We need merely replace the common right of access with a state duty to collect revenues to serve common needs and replace other taxes.” – Mason Gaffney, economist

It is important that we charge rent for surface-water use in Vermont. The majority of surface-water rent would be collected from hydroelectric, public supply, and thermoelectric  power generation.

Why rent?

by Dana Dwinell-Yardley

Do you know where you are? Do you know where you're going? Do you know how to get there?

These are good questions, often asked when examining one's life goals or larger purpose. But today I'm asking them in the most literal, physical sense: do you know where you are, right now? If you wanted to go somewhere else — somewhere you hadn't been before, perhaps — how would you figure out which way to go?

Okay, now turn off your electronic devices and answer again.

by Jane Dwinell

I just picked and ate my first radish. Really. No, I'm not that good at all-season gardening in Vermont — though I have managed to have fresh greens eight months of the year with a little work, the right weather, and cold frames. I'm in New Orleans, where I am starting anew on another urban homestead. (This blog is still local, don't worry: Common Sense's other half, my daughter Dana, is staying in Vermont.)

Besides publicly celebrating our kids (expendible, to Leahy) in the National Guard being shipped off to Iraq and Afganistan, he didn't bother to check if it was constitutional, or unconstitutional; legal or illegal. 

Watch as Nixon says, 'When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal'. 

Now watch as Senator Leahy (Democrat) says the same thing about his own branch of government.  This is a black eye for Vermont, folks. The world is watching us!  This man has no right to represent Vermont; he's plainly a collaborator with the worst elements in Washington.  Please vote against him next election, and demand his resignation in the meantime!  

When CNSNews.com again attempted to ask which provision of the Constitution gives Congress the authority to force Americans to purchase health insurance, Leahy compared the mandate to the government’s ability to set speed limits on interstate highways--before turning and walking away.