Showing posts sorted by relevance for query BUCKY FULLER. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query BUCKY FULLER. Sort by date Show all posts

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Bucky Fuller


I always liked Bucky Fuller . He is another great unsung American thinker his work is overlooked after his heyday in the sixties.

His book The Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, I read it way back in my formative years as a radical, introduced the idea of pirates as independent captialists
( before I had heard of the primitive accumulation of capital) based on a
free contractual association. In other words libertarians.

A short history of the Golden Age of Piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the origins and role of the pirates in the class struggle on the high seas at the time

During the 'Golden Age' of piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, crews of early proletarian rebels, dropouts from civilization, plundered the lucrative shipping lanes between Europe and America. They operated from land enclaves, free ports; 'pirate utopias' located on islands and coastlines as yet beyond the reach of civilization. From these mini-anarchies - 'temporary autonomous zones' - they launched raiding parties so successful that they created an imperial crisis, attacking British trade with the colonies, and crippling the emerging system of global exploitation, slavery and colonialism.Pirate Utopias (Do or Die)



Pirates and State-Sponsored Terrorism in Eighteenth-Century England
The political, economic, and social elites in England attempted to distinguish pirates from
imperialists during the early decades of the eighteenth-century. Only a few decades earlier, the
state appreciated the terror that pirates spread throughout the Spanish-controlled, Caribbean and
South Sea islands and settlements, but as the English began to colonize some of these territories
for themselves, they used laws, propaganda, and popular literature to vilify piracy and glorify
imperial trade and colonial occupation. However, the moral and social differences between
pirates and imperialists were much less clear. England’s rigid, hierarchical social structure
encouraged marginalized people to leave and become pirates so they might discover and foster
their “deviant” identities. Pirates were known as brutal villains, but many of them acted like
ideal English citizens by publishing their scientific observations and creating societies on board
their ships that put into practice the democratic and egalitarian ideals that were more rhetoric
than reality in the English colonies and in England itself. Many imperialists, on the other hand,
acted as pirates were believed to act: they cruelly traded slaves, greedily and selfishly exploited
natural resources for a profit, and violently exploited indigenous peoples for profit. The borders
between pirate and imperialist often blurred, and although eighteenth-century English society
considered itself democratic and free, the actions of its officials and merchants supported
cultural, social, and economic terrorism abroad as well as within England itself.


Was Bucky a libertarian as
Robert Anton Wilson likes to claim? You betcha. He rebelled, like the pirates he enthused about,determined not to be a wage slave.
And Wilson modeled his character Hagbard Celine after him.


WHO WAS BUCKMINSTER FULLER, ANYWAY?
Inventor? Architect? Engineer? Philosopher? Dreamer? Genius? All or none of the above?
by Amy C. Edmondson

Thus began the fifty-six-year experiment of “guinea pig B”—for Bucky—in which “an average healthy human being” resolved to become a problem solver “on behalf of all humanity.” One can only imagine the reactions of family and friends when the thirty-twoyear-old Fuller announced this. He further determined to dispense forever with the idea of “earning a living,” which to him meant advantaging oneself at the expense of others; if he concentrated on doing what needed to be done, funding would take care of itself. He decided to devote himself, broadly, to the technology of “livingry,” as opposed to weaponry.


Also See:

The Many Headed Hydra





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Friday, July 22, 2022

THE 'OTHER' ALBERTA
Beehives and goat farms: Alberta school shortlisted in global environmental contest

Taylor Perez says she learned more about her passions while tending beehives, goats and fruit trees at her central Alberta high school than sitting through lessons in a classroom.


A BUCKY FULLER GEODESIC DOME RIGHT OUT OF THE SIXTIES

"These are all skills we don't learn in regular classes," says the 18-year-old student at Lacombe Composite High School about 130 kilometres south of Edmonton.

"You're not going to learn how to collaborate with community members by sitting in a classroom learning about E equals mc squared."

Perez and her classmates are buzzing with excitement after their school's student-led beekeeping program, goat farm, fruit orchard, tropical greenhouse and other environmental projects were recognized in a global sustainability contest among 10 other schools.

It's the only North American school to be shortlisted by T4 Education, a global advocacy group, in its World’s Best School Prize for Environmental Action contest.

"The projects are coming from the students' own hearts and passion for taking care of the environment," says Steven Schultz, an agriculture and environmental science teacher who has been teaching in Lacombe since 1996.

"They are going to be our community leaders — maybe even our politicians — and for them to know what the heartbeat of their generation is (is) extremely important."

Schultz says the projects are pitched and designed by students in the school's Ecovision Club, to which Perez belongs, and he then bases a curriculum around those ideas.

The school of about 900 students began reducing its environmental footprint in 2006 when a former student heard Schultz say during a lesson on renewable energy that "words were meaningless or worthless without action," the 56-year-old teacher recalls.

"She took that to heart and a year later she came back and told me that she wanted to take the school off the grid."

Schultz and students watched a fire burn down solar panels on the school's roof in 2010, an event that further transformed his approach to teaching.

"As their school was burning, my students gathered in tears. That day I realized that students really care about the environment and they really care about the projects that they were involved in."

Since then, 32 new solar panels have been installed, and they produce up to four per cent of the school's electricity. After the fire, students also wanted to clean the air in their classrooms so they filled some with spider plants, including one in the teachers' lounge.

More recently, students replaced an old portable classroom on school property with a greenhouse that operates solely with renewable energy. It's growing tropical fruits, such as bananas, pineapples, and lemons, and also houses some tilapia fish.

Two acres of the school are also covered by a food forest made up of almost 200 fruit trees and 50 raised beds where organic food is grown.

The school also works with a local farm and raises baby goats inside a solar-powered barn that was built with recycled material.

"They breed and milk them at the farm because there are really tight regulations," says Schultz.

"We take the excrement from the goats and the hay and use it as mulch and fertilizers for our garden. The goats also chew up the grass and allow us not to have to use lawn mowers and tractors"

Perez said her favourite class is the beekeeping program with 12 hives that produce more than 300 kilograms of honey every year.

"I love that they have different roles in their own little societies," Perez says of the bees.

She says while working with local businesses and groups as a part of her curriculum, she learned she's passionate about the environment and wants to become a pharmacist so she can continue giving back to her community.

James Finley, a formerly shy Grade 10 student, says the Ecovision Club and environment classes have helped get him out of his comfort zone.

"I made friends, which was a hard thing for me in the beginning. But now I have, like, hundreds," says the 16-year-old, who enjoyed the lessons he took on harvesting.

"Taylor and Mr. Schultz were the main people that made me stay."

Schultz says the winners of the contest are to be announced in the fall.

A prize of about $322,000 will be equally shared among five winners.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sunday, July 3, 2022.

---

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

Fakiha Baig, The Canadian Press

Saturday, May 04, 2024

Embracing the Possibilities of a Second Golden Age of Piracy


 
 MAY 3, 2024



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“Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant–the waves of time leave washed up behind themselves only dry memories of a closed & petrified past.”

-Hakim Bey

“What others see as chaos, a pirate sees as the perfect storm for growth and transformation.”

-Edward Teach aka Blackbeard

In case you haven’t noticed, things have been getting pretty lively on the high seas lately and all available indications seem to point to them getting much livelier long before slack tide sets in. After months of Houthi rebel attacks on international shipping linked to Israel and its western backers in the Red Sea, Iran has decided to get in on the action to avenge their comrades killed by an IDF airstrike on their Damascus consulate.

While the headlines may focus on Iran’s largely symbolic drone swarm into the bug zapper of the Iron Dome, the Islamic Republic kicked off this theatrical display of vengeance by launching a daylight raid on a Portuguese-flagged container vessel called the MSC Aries 50 miles off the coast of the UAE near the Strait of Hormuz. The ship, owned by Zionist billionaire and former Israeli Air Force intelligence officer, Eyal Ofer, was boarded by commandos of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp in a well-choreographed and conveniently filmed raid that involved the heavily armed men repelling on the deck from an idling chopper.

A visually stunning spectacle of propaganda of the deed uncannily similar to the Houthi rebel assault on the Galaxy Leader in November which also began in an MI-17 and ended with the nautical toy of another Israeli oligarch named Abraham Ungur being absconded to Hodeida where it has been turned into a sort of revolutionary chic tourist attraction.

The western intelligentsia will point to these similarities and announce them to be proof that those dastardly Houthi rebels are little more than IRGC agents doing the bidding of the Mullahs. I would actually argue the opposite. It is a well-known if poorly reported fact that in spite of the largely rhetorical support from the Ayatollah, the Houthi rebels have a long and illustrious history of going rogue and disobeying what little advice they receive from Tehran. This included calls to stand down on overthrowing a government in Sanaa that Iran was still attempting to make inroads with.

The Houthis launched their daring maritime spree on Israeli linked vessels during a time in which the rest of the leadership of the Muslim world seemed content to just sit on their hands as the Zionist State carried out the most brazen genocide of the twenty-first century. The result of the Houthi’s degeneracy wasn’t just a blow to international trade, it was boosting an internationally unrecognized militia to a place of ideological leadership on the world stage, and when Iran found itself in desperate need of a propaganda win of their own, they took a page from their alleged proxies’ playbook by launching a largely bloodless drone barrage kicked off by an act of melodramatic modern-day piracy.

The Mullahs aren’t the only swashbucklers getting in on the action either. After nearly a decade off from their last tare, the pirates of Somalia have been using the distraction of international naval forces up north to get back into the game, seizing at least two cargo ships and a dozen commercial fishing vessels in the last few months. In other words, the chaos is spreading like oil on water and the corporate overlords back home in Babylon are besides themselves. The very fabric of globalism seems to be under siege and every Navy on earth appears to be at the mercy of what essentially amounts to a bunch of toothless peasants with old fishing boats and nothing left to lose.

I would be a liar if I didn’t confess that I get off on this kind of karma. I mean, the specter of the Jolly Roger is literally mocking the glorious “rules-based order” of the Yankee maritime death machine as ancient history repeats itself. But could the world really be on the cusp of another Golden Age of Piracy? Perhaps, but perhaps we should consult the tea leaves of history before getting too carried away with ourselves.

The era frequently referred to by historians as the Golden Age of Piracy occurred between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when stateless bands of outlaws challenged the monopoly on force maintained by the Westphalian Nation State on the high seas. While most of these pirates were far more motivated by profit than the ideologues of the Axis of Resistance, the factors contributing to this era of lawlessness should ring strikingly familiar to anyone paying attention to current events.

The original Golden Age of Piracy was largely the product of the first signs of European imperial decline brought on by their own colonial overreach in the New World. Scores of seasoned sailors and privateers were left skilled but unemployed in the wake of the War of Spanish Secession. Meanwhile, the sheer quantity of plundered goods being shipped to-and-fro the colonies was becoming downright ungovernable as the colonies themselves devolved into corrupt rogue states in their own right and Europe’s navies were stretched paper thin attempting to contain it all.

Today’s pirates may differ somewhat in motivation and tactics but all the other ingredients for another era of lawlessness on the high seas are present and accounted for. Both the Houthis and the Iranians are veterans of America’s failed War on Terror, becoming experts in asymmetrical warfare battling Wahhabi jihadists that our nation created just to destroy. Meanwhile, neoliberal globalism has turned every ocean on the planet into a thousand lane highway too jam packed with ill-gotten booty to ever be sustainably policed, and the imperial powerhouse of America’s Atlantic cartel is rapidly losing control of increasingly reckless colonies like Israel while our bloated naval forces are busy trying to sabotage Asia’s assent to economic dominance with so-called freedom of navigation drills in the South China Sea.

Yes indeed, the pieces for a historical repeat are all there and so are the motivations. Big picture wise, the actions of the Mullahs, the Houthis, and the Somalians can all be seen as a sort of revolt against the machinery of state capitalism motivated by a totally valid thirst for revenge. Today’s global economy has absolutely nothing to do with free trade. It is a corrupt and totalitarian system operated from the top down by a conspiracy of multinational conglomerates and nuclear armed navies who have all but invited piracy by conducting their own crime spree on the high seas defined by acts of mass violence and brazen thievery.

Iran and Yemen are both the victims of brutal blockades just like the one being conducted against the Gaza Strip as we speak. These sadistic terrorist campaigns have subjected impoverished populations to gruesome acts of savagery just for attempting to access their own waters for trade and subsistence fishing. Between 2015 and 2022, the Houthi controlled nation of Yemen was bombarded by a genocidal onslaught at the hands of America’s proxies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Over 377,000 people were slaughtered and more than half of them died from starvation and disease as a result of a blockade made possible by America’s rules-based order.

Somalia has similarly been decimated both economically and ecologically by the Western Mafia’s fixed trade practices which have aloud massive corporate naval behemoths to deplete their fisheries with industrial trawlers and render the remains toxic by treating the Indian Ocean like a giant toilet for their industrial waste. Under these circumstances, it’s hard not to see modern piracy as an act of self-defense by a largely unaffiliated coalition of people under siege by a pirate empire in decline and, thank Kali, their tactics appear to be working.

The Houthi campaign off of their embattled coastline has effectively rerouted international trade, forcing no fewer than twelve international shipping conglomerates to suspend transit in the Red Sea entirely and delaying shipping times by up to nine days while raising costs by 15%. This has affectively implemented a tax on the global oligarchy for aiding and abetting the slaughter of over 30,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and America’s attempts to bomb the Houthis into submission over it have been an abject failure.

In case you haven’t noticed, I happen to be something of an unapologetic collapsitarian anarchist. This basically means that my entire worldview is defined by searching for revolutionary opportunity in inevitable crisis and I can’t help but to get a little bit giddy at the opportunities that a Second Golden Age of Piracy could bring with it. This may all start with rogue states taking potshots at empire but if that empire continues to collapse beneath the barrage of a billion potshots the oceans will be left wide open to a diverse ecosystem of stateless actors of every stripe capable of affecting truly free trade in the only place it has ever existed: the black market.

Amidst the last Golden Era of Piracy and its latter-day cousin off the Barbary Coast, thriving autonomous communities of proto anarchists emerged in which all genders were equal, most consensual transgressions were forgiven, and merchants were governed only by codes upheld by their suppliers in nautical syndicalist democracies.

Nobody would ever confuse Edward Teach with Mikhail Bakunin any more than you would the Ayatollah with Hakim Bey, but the chaos that men and women like Blackbeard ushered in turned the open seas into a breeding ground for revolutionary opportunities. With Uncle Sam now walking the plank, I see no reason not to hope for a sequel.