Into the Woods – Page 168 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

John Twelve Hawks and the Vast Machine

It’s been a long time since I’ve kept up with what’s new in science fiction. In the early 1980s, I ran a very popular and very literate computer bulletin board (remember those?) called Science Fiction Writers Network. Some of the big names were regulars there, including most notably Orson Scott Card, who won both the Nebula and the Hugo awards for his 1985 classic, Ender’s Game. I even helped throw a congratulatory dinner for Card to celebrate. What a Golden Age that was.

And what an innocent age it was, when only nerds had computers and knew what to do with them. A friend of mine used to shake his head at me when he saw me in front of the computer, saying, “One of these days it’s going to tell you what to do.” It was a joke then, but he was right: Our computers have been turned against us.

That is the theme of John Twelve Hawks’ Fourth Realm Trilogy. The books are The Traveler (2005), The Dark River (2007), and The Golden City (2009). The Traveler was a New York Times bestseller. A little Googling reveals that 20th Century Fox is making a film version of The Traveler, for release, I believe, in 2012. I was too distracted by my job responsibilities in San Francisco to notice these books when they first came out. But the buzz about good books continues long after they’re released, and eventually you hear about them. Plus, if you wait, you get to read the whole trilogy straight through, instead of having to wait for the next book. I became aware of John Twelve Hawks’ books from a comment on my recent post about privacy on the Internet.

All summer, I’d been hankering for a fast-moving science fiction thriller, a hot read. John Twelve Hawks’ trilogy really hit the spot. I rushed through the three books in not much more than three weeks because I didn’t want to put them down.

The story is set in the here and now. The plot has to do with what Twelve Hawks calls “the Vast Machine” – the international system of surveillance and computer snooping that now spies on all our lives, in the name of security. The main character, Gabriel Corrigan, comes to understand who is spying on us and why, and he sets out to defeat “the Vast Machine” and organize resistance to it.

Twelve Hawks’ writing style is very cinematic, with the characters always on the move from city to city or in exotic places such as the underground rivers of London or the rocky skelligs off the west coast of Ireland.

John Twelve Hawks is a pseudonym. His identity is not known, and he lives off the grid. He communicates with his editor using the Internet or over an untraceable satellite phone with a voice scrambler.

There is a long history of fiction that draws our attention to the state of the real world. The most obvious example, of course, is George Orwell’s 1984. Much of Charles Dickens’ work is in this category. Dickens’ brought some reforms against the horrors of 19th century industrial England: its squalor, its filth, its debtors’ prisons, and its wretched working class. Visionary authors often see these things before the rest of us.

Cui bono?

If I have a complaint about John Twelve Hawk’s books, it’s that he limits his theme to issues of surveillance, Internet snooping, and the secret databanks that know who-knows-what about all of us. As I see it, the people who are bringing us the Vast Machine have a much larger agenda having to do with corporate exploitation of people and resources, corporate usurpation of government, and endless war. Twelve Hawks knows that the stuff on television is not news but is, rather, a pig circus of propaganda created to distract us, misinform us, and turn us into insatiable consumers.

What in the world is really happening today? Most people have no idea. The international intelligentsia are well aware of the fact that Americans are now the most propagandized people in the world. The people of the former Soviet Union at least knew that they were being fed propaganda, and some of them were quite skillful at working out whose interests the propaganda served. But in the United States today, Americans relish their propaganda and actually pay to get it (through their huge cable bills), and propagandists make enormous profits. The meat and potatoes of American propaganda is Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. Though it’s run by Roger Ailes, a media consultant for three Republican presidents, and though Fox News actually has contributed to right-wing political campaigns, and though, to my lights, Fox has been wrong about everything that matters since it came into existence in 1996, a poll in January 2010 found that Fox is the most trusted of the television news networks (49 percent trust Fox). This blows my mind. I often think that the ignorance of the American ignorati is as incomprehensible to the intelligentsia as the intelligence of the intelligentsia is incomprehensible to the ignorati. But that is how propaganda works. It flatters ignorance, appeals to prejudice, stokes fear, makes everything simple and black and white, and is always going on about god. By the way, it was not Sinclair Lewis who said, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” But whoever said it (Harrison Salisbury?) was right.

I was amused a while back after I left a comment on a newspaper web site making fun of the spectacular wrongness of someone who was repeating Fox News talking points. He shot back at me an insult about what I “watch” to get my news – some loony left network like CNBC or MSNBC, no doubt, he said. What I found amusing was that he thinks I “watch” something on cable to get news. In fact I don’t watch anything at all. I read.

Most Americans have neither the time nor the skills to try to figure out what’s really going on in the world today. Even the Tea Party crowd, though they are blinded by propaganda, sense that something is terribly wrong. But because they watch so much corporate and right-wing propaganda on Fox they get everything exactly backward. Government is not the problem. Corporate power and corporate greed are the problem. Corporate propaganda constantly demonizes government, because government (including the judiciary) is the only entity that has a chance of restraining corporate corruption, corporate predation, corporate exploitation, and the corporate takeover of government.

This corporate takeover of government may be almost complete, as is clear from the difference between Barack Obama’s campaign rhetoric vs. the way he has actually governed. No backroom deals, said candidate Obama. And then one of the first things he does as president is meet secretly with the health insurance industry to make sure that health care reform is a bonanza for corporate interests. Candidate Obama talked about the importance of “net neutrality” to prevent corporate domination of the Internet, but recently we learned that President Obama’s FCC was meeting secretly with Google and Verizon to work out deals that would permit corporations to strangle the Internet to get obscene profits by turning the Internet into yet another delivery system (like cable) for corporate propaganda and brain-dead entertainment. All that subversive, independent stuff would be pushed aside, starved for bandwidth, and drowned out. The Washington establishment is always talking about “stakeholders.” The stakeholders are always corporate, and the important meetings are always secret.

Open source intelligence

How does one get past the propaganda? First of all, one turns off one’s television. And then one becomes a practitioner of open source intelligence. Ironically, the same Internet that permits corporate and government snooping on private citizens is the best tool we have for open source intelligence. That is one of the reasons that corporate interests want a corporate takeover of the Internet – we’d have to consume what they throw at us, while our ability to seek our own sources would be strangled. The kind of sources that can inform an open-source understanding of the state of the world are the kind of sources that Fox-watchers are usually completely ignorant of. When these open sources do get media attention (for example, WikiLeaks), the propaganda machinery will immediately step in to demonize it, marginalize it, and, if possible criminalize it. Because elites now work almost entirely in secret (while denying privacy to the rest of us, as John Twelve Hawks points out), leaks from whistleblowers are now our best hope for breaking through the razor wire of secrecy behind which elites hide.

Though the daily newspapers in the United States are now little more than zombies, there are still organizations and people with a commitment to truth. An important part of an open-source regimen are books and articles by authors who haven’t sold out or become lazy.

For example, Janine Wedel’s Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market, helps us understand how, because of privatization and outsourcing, the public and private sectors have been blurred so much that corporations now write their own regulations. Wedel also showed us what the Neocon cabal which brought us the invasion of Iraq has in common with the elites who “privatized” public assets and seized money and power in the breakup of the old Soviet Union.

Naomi Klein, in a magisterial article in the September 2004 issue of Harper’s, “Baghdad year zero: Pillaging Iraq in Pursuit of a Neocon Utopia,” shows us how the invasion of Iraq was a business product, jointly created by government and corporate forces, in which the publicly owned wealth of Iraq (mostly oil) was to be divided up among corporate players, with the intention of turning Iraq into a utopia of deregulation and profit. The profits would be private, of course, and the costs were to be socialized and paid for by the American people. The fact that people would die (thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis) meant nothing. Everything they said to sell the war was a lie.

The Washington Post is a zombie, but they got in a rare good lick with the recent series, “Top Secret America,” in which they show just how vast, secretive, and costly is the surveillance and snooping machinery put in place after 9/11. Nor is this mostly a government apparatus. Much of it is outsourced to private interests and corporations that reap huge profits while gathering, and abusing, data on private citizens.

In John Twelve Hawks’ plot, the elites who control the Vast Machine actually create crises to scare people and make people more willing to accept constant surveillance. There are, of course, all sorts of conspiracy theories about 9/11. But even if those 9/11 conspiracy theories are fevered and false, it is nevertheless true that elites have learned to use crises to gain more power, as Naomi Klein shows us in The Shock Doctrine.

Rolling Stone magazine, with reporter Matt Taibi’s “The Great American Bubble Machine,” brought us much new information about how Wall Street, with its allies in government, ripped us off first with the financial bubble and then again with the bailout.

In the Aug. 30 issue of The New Yorker, Jane Mayer unmasked the Koch brothers, whose combined wealth (oil) is exceeded only by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. It is largely their millions and millions that pay the “think tanks” that develop the corporate propaganda that is then handed over to Fox News for dissemination. It is this propaganda that tricks hardworking Americans into not merely supporting, but actually agitating and demonstrating, à la tea party, for the corporate agenda. Why are Americans so blind that they don’t even understand their own economic interests? Partly it’s the propaganda, of course. And partly it’s self-delusion. Something like 20 percent of Americans think their earnings are in the top 1 percent, and something like 27 percent more Americans think their earnings will be in the top 1 percent someday. Americans are so eager to identify with the rich and consume like the rich that they support wealth transfers that have brought us back to 1928 levels of wealth and income distribution.

And yes, bloggers also contribute to the open source intelligence project. For example, there are bloggers who carefully pore over government data dumps that are usually buried and ignored. For example, have you become suspicious that Wall Street is now plotting with its bought-and-paid-for friends in government to find ways to suck up as much as possible of Boomers’ 401(k) savings? I’ll leave that as an exercise in open-source intelligence for you readers, though some of the story may come to light in hearings at the Department of Labor scheduled for Sept. 14 and 15. Start your search with the keywords “lifetime income options.” As is often the case, right-wing bloggers are onto this issue, but, as usual, blinded by anti-government ideology, they think that government is trying to confiscate 401(k) wealth. They wouldn’t have to dig too deeply into reality (say, reading some of the corporate comments submitted before the hearings) to see that it’s actually corporations who want to engineer this theft, though it would require help from the corporations’ bought-and-paid-for friends in government who would have to rubber-stamp the corporate-written regulations.

In mentioning bloggers, I mustn’t leave out Glenn Greenwald, a Constitutional lawyer and blogger for the online magazine Salon. Everything Greenwald writes is required reading. He is scrupulous in his adherence to reality and tenacious in his demands for accountability for our ruling elite, no matter which party is in the White House.

I already hear a chorus of complaints from those with right-wing tendencies who may have read this. I’m just repeating left-wing talking points, they say. I’m just citing left-wing sources, they say. OK. I identify as a leftist. This is because I identify with working people and I believe that income should be redistributed down, not up. Ruling elites always have and always will redistribute wealth up if they can get away with it. In the Middle Ages, peasants put up with it because they were powerless and were told that it was god’s will. The untouchables of India put up with it because they were powerless and were told that it was the cosmic order. Only in America have the exploited classes cheered for their own exploitation, thanks to state-of-the-art propaganda and the promise of more cheap stuff to consume. In the American democracy, we were not supposed to ever have a ruling class, but now we do, because our democracy has been bought off with corporate money. I willingly concede that, back in the 1980s especially, some people on the left became unmoored from reality and bought into almost nihilistic views of the world. The entrenchment of the impenetrable and fraudulent postmodernist Michel Foucault in academia is my favorite example, just because it’s so much fun to pick a quote at random from a Foucault book and then ask someone to read it aloud and then try to say what it means. It was a mere fad that petered out. If the Foucaultian airy-fairiness of the left caused any lasting damage, I’d love for someone to point that out to me. Facts only, please.

But that was then, and this is now. The right wing in the United States has long been enamored of self-serving ideas that are detached from reality. For example, even George H.W. Bush derided Reagan’s supply-side policies as “voodoo economics.” That would be the same voodoo economics that wrecked the economy under George W. Bush and made the rich much richer. These days, the right wing just makes stuff up. It lies and distorts, and they’re rarely called on it. Who’d have time, anyway, to set the record straight on a 24/7 stream of lies, distortion, propaganda, and angry shouting heads?

The mainstream media, which once upon a time did a pretty good job of keeping people honest in the marketplace of ideas (I spent my entire career with newspapers), is now broken and cowed. The mainstream media have retreated to one of the biggest lies of all: that, left or right, both are equally valid and it’s just a matter of perspectives to be “balanced.” Since about 1996, when Fox News entered the picture and helped bring us the train wreck of the Clinton impeachment, the right wing with its corporate backing has been in looney land. Then, under Bush a few years later, we had the lies and hysteria that sold us the Iraq war. Now there is no left to speak of as far as I can tell, no matter how often right-wingers fling the word “leftist” or “socialist” at any idea that isn’t corporate. If reality is one’s reference, one is immediately demonized as a leftist, as though any criticism of right-wing craziness is coming from a competing ideology rather than reality.

Notice that I have not used the word “conservative.” I adore conservatives, and they are sorely missed today. Conservatives are reality-based people whose voices need to be heard. They might help us get out of the mess we’re in. But conservatives have been purged and drowned out by right-wingers. The players we are dealing with today are not conservatives. They are right-wing radicals. And they’re crazy.

Back to John Twelve Hawks

John Twelve Hawks has laid a fantastic foundation for helping people understand that we’re all being had by the corporate, right-wing agenda. (I use corporate and right-wing almost interchangeably. They differ only slightly. For example, right-wing propaganda is overtly racist, and corporate propaganda is not.) Twelve Hawks makes it clear that we must resist. But the invasion of our privacy is only part of the corporate agenda. The corporate agenda goes much farther than just profiting off the invasion of our privacy. It includes greed, exploitation, and predation in every domain – housing, energy, health care, banking. Winning elections by voter intimidation, swift-boating, and judicial fiat is so 2000. Now elections are to be won by unrestrained corporate propaganda, with the blessings of the same Supreme Court that decided the 2000 election.

I don’t know what form the resistance should take. The democratic process may have enough life left in it to work, if somehow the lies, propaganda, and distortion could be countered by the voices of reality. From past movements that have succeeded, we know that it must be non-violent and that it must involve masses of people. These are projects whose urgency is critical: the project of figuring out, through open-source intelligence, what elites in their secrecy are trying to do; and figuring out how to resist, peacefully and lawfully, with truth on our side.

I end with a quote from the conclusion of John Twelve Hawks’ trilogy. Gabriel Corrigan is speaking. A hacker in the resistance movement has used a virus-like program to make the audio and video of Gabriel’s speech appear on millions of computer screens all around the world:

“Some of you have seen the future clearly. For these people, it feels as if we are trapped in a gigantic mall, frightened but hiding our fear, trudging from store to store carrying objects purchased for some reason – now forgotten….

“When people believe they have no real power, their only choice becomes what to consume. Our society’s constant emphasis on buying things has nothing to do with the loss of morality. We feel powerful when we buy something, so we are easily manipulated to buy more.

“I’ve spoken about freedom throughout this message, but for many of us the word has lost its meaning. The faces on the television use the word freedom as the justification for war and the expansion of the Vast Machine. The word ʻfreedom’ is used to sell airplane tickets and lawn mowers.

“The Vast Machine carries us toward a world where free thought and the expression of those thoughts becomes difficult – and, sometimes, impossible. And the politics of fear gives our leaders the justification for more control….

“Some of us have had enough of fear and manipulation. In the next few days, we will appear in the chambers of power and in the street. Join us. Stand with us. Who speaks for freedom?”

————-

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La saison de la soupe est ouverte!

Vegan cream of mushroom soup

The low temperature last night was about 50 degrees, and today at noon we were up to only 72. So I decided that today is the official start of soup season.

This was a vegan soup made with mushrooms, minced onions, celery, and carrots. All that was sautéed in olive oil. I thickened the stock with a little whole wheat flour. I added some broken linguini to the stock to make the soup heartier, and I creamed it with soybean milk.

Now if it would only rain.

My mother has been visiting at Acorn Abbey this week, and not much work got done outdoors. Next week I’m planning to shop for a tiller and start on the fall gardening chores.

The sautéed mushrooms go into the stock.

Apple TV: kiss your cable goodbye

Cable companies like Time Warner and satellite companies like DirecTV are some of the most exploitive and hated companies in the country. Apple is one of the most loved companies. With the new Apple TV, Apple will give those nasty companies a rare new dose of competition.

I often ask people how much they pay for cable. Most of the time, I hear numbers like $90 a month or even more. Some people don’t know for sure how much they pay because they’ve bought bundles.

Last week, Apple announced that it will start shipping a new $99 Apple TV box later this month. I had been tempted to buy the older Apple TV for $229. Two things deterred me: the $229 cost (TV is not worth very much to me) and the fact that the old Apple TV box didn’t support Netflix. Isn’t it amazing how Apple knows what I want?

As far as I can tell so far, there are two major changes in Apple TV: 1. The new Apple TV does not have an internal hard disk. Instead, everything is stored on your computer and delivered to the Apple TV box over a Wifi network. 2. The New iTunes 10 includes “rental” of TV shows for 99 cents.

I’m fascinated that the new Apple TV box supports Netflix. Apple must have decided that Netflix is going to own the movie-streaming business, though Apple offers high-definition movies and Netflix does not. Is Apple planning to dominate the Internet delivery of TV shows the way Netflix dominates with movies?

I expect to see a lot of people cutting off their cable or satellite service and instead ordering the TV shows they want from Apple, à la carte. One’s movies would come from Netflix. As for the local stations, they’re totally useless except for their weather reports, and you can get that for free with a small antenna. In other words, higher quality, lower cost, with no money wasted on garbage you’re not interested in. You don’t have to have a Mac to do this. iTunes is available for Windows.

A postscript: I don’t have either cable or satellite TV at Acorn Abbey. The cost is too high, and most of the programming is useless. But I’d happily pay 99 cents for those things that I really want to see.

And a political angle: This is one of the reasons the big companies with near-monopolies on Internet service are so opposed to net neutrality. They want to be able to stifle this kind of competition from companies like Apple.

Keeping Facebook in quarantine

I was surprised at how many people were interested in my recent post on Defending your privacy on the Web. When I posted it, I was afraid that it might be too long and too technical and thus too boring. But in addition to the comments on the blog, I had a number of responses in private email. So I will continue to think about privacy issues and how to get around Big Brother’s spying eyes on the web.

The Washington Post signed up to share data with Facebook several weeks ago. Now I’m appalled to see that the New York Times also is in cahoots with Facebook. Think how nice it is for advertisers if your Facebook data can be used at places like the New York Times to target you with advertising. Facebook knows your real name, who your friends are, what you like and dislike, etc. Targeting ads is not in itself offensive. The problem is having all this information falling into the hands of corporate America, which will use it to build dossiers, including your name, on individual Americans. These dossiers can be sold to whoever is interested — like potential employers, or the government.

How can you avoid this?

The first Facebook rule is this: Never, if you value your privacy, sign in with your Facebook ID to any sites other than Facebook.

Second, punish nosy, intrusive web sites such as the New York Times and the Washington Post by creating anonymous new logins. Here’s how.

1. Go to www.random.org and generate a random string for your sign-in ID, something like “RtAgr4MN”. Why a random string? It’s not necessary, but it’s a nice touch, and it gets you thinking about how randomness protects your privacy. Random data, by definition, contains no information at all.

2. Register at the site with your new sign-in ID, and give a fake (but workable) email address at www.mailinator.com. Your email name at mailinator.com can be the random string you generated in step 1 above. When the New York Times registration page asks you demographic questions about your age, etc., just make something up.

3. So that you won’t forget your new sign-in ID, edit the name of your bookmark to the site so that the bookmark name includes your sign-in ID.

4. For an extra level of anonymity, do Step 2 using Tor, the Onion Router. If you don’t yet know what Tor is, do some reading on the Tor web site. Tor is actually very easy to install and configure. Tor is much like a single-hop proxy server such as proxify.com, except that Tor uses multiple hops to hide your real IP address. Tor also is a free, open-source system. That is, corporations don’t own Tor.

I’m assuming that you’re already using the privacy steps I outlined in my previous post on privacy and that, when you sign in to a data-collecting site such as Facebook, you do so only in a separate browser. And of course it isn’t just Facebook we have to watch out for. It’s any of the sites whose revenue model is based on collecting, and reselling, personal data on its users. This includes Google and Yahoo, but the riskiest sites are the “social networking” sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which are clearly making a big push to get themselves enmeshed with popular web sites such as the New York Times.

As much as we might like Facebook, remember that it makes its money by collecting and selling information about you. As for Twitter, as far as I’m concerned it’s completely useless, and I have no idea why anyone goes there. But Twitter was developed, of course, to profit off snooping just as Facebook does.

Rolling back the clock … if only for a summer

Ken Ilgunas with the chickens, June 2010

Summer is over. Ken went back to school yesterday.

One of the disappointments of getting older is that most young people care so little about how the world used to be, or whether in some ways it might have been better. I have often said that I will measure my success at Acorn Abbey according to how well I can roll the clock back to 1935. How many young people would understand what I mean by that? Young people are transported by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, both the book and the movie. But how many of them grasp that the Lord of the Rings is a critique of industrial society or that the Shire is a representation of the Late Victorian England in which Tolkien grew up? Tolkien was born in 1892.

Ken is the only young person who has ever asked me, why 1935? What was it about 1935 that is worth going back to?

I see 1935 as the peak of a sustainable American economy, with a healthy mix of industry and agriculture. In 1935, Americans’ level of consumption was reasonable and sustainable. In The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Wendell Berry talks about how our homes have become centers of consumption, where nothing is produced. We leave home to work. In our homes we consume astonishing quantities of energy, food, gadgets, and throwaway stuff and produce a similarly astonishing quantity of waste. In 1935, it wasn’t like that. Homes were centers of production as well as consumption. Non-city households were able to produce most of their food. Most people worked at home.

Modern homes can’t even produce their own entertainment. It comes in on a wire. People used to have pianos. Piano ownership peaked around 1930. Everybody had to have one. In 1930, the most expensive item people bought other than their house was their piano. By the end of the 1930s, that had changed, and cars displaced pianos as the most expensive item other than the house.

During the boom of the 1920s, there was a huge migration of young people off the farms into the cities. In the 1930s, this reversed, and young people went back to the farms. [Rural Poor in the Great Depression, Bruce Lee Melvin, et al.]

I was not alive in 1935, of course. I was born in 1948. But most of my earliest memories from the 1950s have to do with the places in which my relatives lived. These were family farms in the Yadkin Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains, all of which had been running at full tilt in 1935. In the 1950s, many of my relatives still kept cows and churned their own butter. They had chickens, pigs, mules, tractors, pastures and fields. I saw how it all worked, and it must have fascinated me as child, because those images of productive households are burned into my memory.

I was born 56 years after Tolkien, so my witnessing of the industrialization of the United States picks up five or six decades after Tolkien’s witnessing of the industrialization of England. As The Lord of the Rings Wiki says, “The industrialization of the Shire was based on Tolkien’s witnessing of the extension of the Industrial Revolution to rural Warwickshire during his youth, and especially the deleterious consequences thereof. The rebellion of the hobbits and the restoration of the pre-industrial Shire may be interpreted as a prescription of voluntary simplicity as a remedy to the problems of modern society.”

During the course of our lives, we our all blown around, sometimes even battered, by economic forces and economic trends, but we rarely pause to think about it. We are no less battered today than the young people who moved off the farms in the 1920s, only to move back again in the 1930s. In the 1950s, I witnessed how my father moved his family away from a small-farm lifestyle to a more suburban lifestyle. When I got my first job in the early 1970s working for a newspaper in Winston-Salem, N.C., even though I didn’t fully realize it then, the economy that supported that newspaper (not to mention the economy that supported old Southern cities like Winston-Salem) was based on manufacturing. By 1991, when I moved to San Francisco, manufacturing was dead. Winston-Salem was in decline. Whether I knew it or not, it was an economic wind that blew me to San Francisco, during the trough of a recession. Lucky for me, the California economy started to roar again by 1995. When I worked for the San Francisco Examiner from 1995 until the Examiner closed in 2000, we were riding the dot-com boom. After the dot-com boom, San Francisco rode the housing boom. When the housing bubble broke, I didn’t particularly want to stick around San Francisco for the lean times. Instead, I read the tea leaves: Just as in the 1930s, economic winds were blowing me back to the farm.

But I didn’t have a farm. Most of those we once had have been lost.

In my family, there is a precedent for starting a small farm from scratch. It was around 1935 when my father’s family’s home in the mountains of Virginia was destroyed by a fire. My father would have been about 18 then. Rather than rebuilding there, they moved to the Yadkin Valley and acquired about 10 acres of land from a relative. They built a small farm. I spent a great deal of time there when I was a child. I can still see clearly every inch of ground. I can still see the house and each outbuilding in detail. I can remember my grandmother’s cow, which she once let me try to milk. I can remember gathering eggs for her, and carrying in wood for the stove. I can remember what everything smelled like.

Ken Ilgunas is the only person who ever asked me about that little farm and what kind of infrastructure it had. Ken is the only young person I’ve ever known who has shown any curiosity about the economics and routines of family farming. I can walk around my grandparents’ farm in my memory and find answers to the question: What was considered essential on a family farm in 1935? There was a small house with three bedrooms, built from local logs and wood from local sawmills. There was a wood cookstove and a coal-fired heating stove. The house had a large, floor-model Philco radio for entertainment, though no piano. The enclosed back porch was a sort of laundry room. The front porch was where you went to cool off when the weather was hot. Attached to the back of the house was a concrete platform with a well and an insulated well house. Water was drawn from the well by cranking a windlass and raising a bucket with a rope, a chore I loved to do for my grandmother. The well house was where milk was kept (jars were immersed in a trough of cool well water) and where canned foods were stored. These were the outbuildings: a small barn with two stables and hay storage in the loft; a tobacco barn for curing tobacco; a woodworking shop (my grandfather was a carpenter); a woodshed; a large chicken house; a granary where animal feed was stored; a garage. Most of the 10 acres, except the fields and garden area, was fenced for a pasture. There was a small orchard. There was a wood-fired outdoor stove made of brick that was used for heating water for laundry. This was a small, newly built farm. The nearby farm on which my mother grew up was much older and larger, around a hundred acres. My mother’s family farm had the same kind of buildings, though larger and with the addition of a smokehouse for curing hams.

On Ken’s blog, some commenters sometimes accuse Ken of being somehow fraudulent for his determination to revisit and rethink, in how he lives his own life, all the givens of industrialization. This revisiting and rethinking is not an easy project. By default, most young people don’t much question the world they were born into. What’s not to like about a life of consumption? Quite a lot is not to like, of course, such as enslaving ourselves to buy things or indenturing ourselves with debt.

I’ve known a lot of brilliant young people. But I have never known a young person other than Ken who was willing, even driven, to rethink everything before putting on the heavy harness and stepping onto the treadmill of industrial (or post-industrial) life. How did he do this?

He did it by reading and thinking, and by seeking experiences that wouldn’t interest most young people, like working in Alaska for several summers. Instead of becoming a creature of popular culture, Ken has, through his reading, kept company with some of the greatest minds of the past and present. He is a sterling example of why a liberal education is of such great value, though it won’t help you make money on Wall Street. From talking with Ken, it’s clear that this project of reading and rethinking has been going on since he was a boy. His graduate studies at Duke are a continuation of that process.

His summer at Acorn Abbey also was part of that process. I don’t think it necessarily means that he’ll become a monk or a farmer. His intense need for exploration and adventure will produce a lot of creative tension with his cloister instinct. But Ken realized that, by the accident of when he was born, he lacked certain experiences that industrialization has robbed us of: how to start a farm, how to grow at least some of your own food, how to build things, how to fix things, how to use hand tools. Ken also got a taste of the cloistered life, because we lived like monks, with much silence and much reading along with the labor. I told him that it’s a shame he can’t get course credit at Duke for what he learned this summer.

Ken’s hard work at Acorn Abbey this summer brought this place much closer to becoming the productive tiny farm that I want it to be. The work he’s done here will be visible for many years to come. It’s amazing what two adults working at home can accomplish. All my grandparents made their livings at home and still had time to sit on the front porch and smell the gardenias.

And I’ve added a second way to measure my success, in addition to how well I’m able to roll the clock back to 1935. That measure of success is whether people like Ken Ilgunas want to be here.

Bat visitor

Photo by Ken Ilgunas

It was dusk, and Ken and I were at the supper table. The table sits beside a window that faces north. All of a sudden Ken was gesticulating and pointing toward the window. The word he was whispering was so out of context that it took me a few seconds to figure out what he was trying to tell me: that a bat had just alit on the window screen.

The bat stayed there for almost an hour as though it was resting, and by 9 p.m. it was gone.

A gothic cottage certainly ought to have its bats.

Shiitake mushroom garden

Ken Ilgunas with the mushroom logs — all done except for the deer protection

Acorn Abbey has only five acres. But on those five acres, it’s amazing how many microclimates there are. Only an acre is open to the sun. That’s where the house and garden are. There are four acres of woods, with a small stream flowing between two steep ridges. Now what can we grow down in the bottom where the two little streams meet, where the sun never shines and where it’s always damp? Shiitake mushrooms, of course.

We bought our shiitake spawn plugs, by the way, from Oyster Creek Mushroom Company in Maine. If you’re interested in starting a mushroom garden of your own, Google for instructions. You’ll also find some videos on YouTube.

This is the first experience either of us has had with mushrooms, so we were following instructions that came with the spawn. We regard this as more of an experiment, or pilot project. We made some compromises. Most instructions for doing this recommend cutting the trees in the winter. We wanted to get started, so we took our chances with late summer. Most instructions for shiitake mushrooms say that oak logs are preferred. I can’t bring myself to sacrifice an oak for mushrooms. We used poplar, of which I have a surplus. Poplar also is nice and straight, so the logs stack well. Most instructions say that any hardwood tree will do. Another mistake we made is that we ordered our spawn a little too soon. It waited in the refrigerator a bit longer than we would have liked. Still, we’re hoping that the process is forgiving and that the mushroom growth is exuberant enough to make up for our compromises. Also, I’m hoping for a boost in that the mushroom environment in Acorn Abbey’s little branch bottom seems close to ideal.

Ken did all the work. Here are photos of the process.

Above: Ken cuts a poplar tree. We used only one tree for this starter project. We don’t have any power saws. Ken used an axe to fell the tree.

Above: Ken saws the tree into four-foot logs.

Above: The tree made 10 logs.

Above: Ken drills holes for the spawn plugs. The plugs are just pieces of wooden dowel, about three-quarters of an inch long. The plugs have been treated with mushroom spawn.

Above: Ken hammers the plugs into the holes in the log.

Above: Ken uses a brush to cover each plug with hot wax to seal in the spawn. The wax was melted on a camp stove.

Above: Ken notches a log for stacking.

Above: All done except for the deer protection!

Above: Ken puts up chicken wire to keep the deer away from the logs.

Above: The branch bottom. This area is almost perfect for a mushroom farm. There’s a small track into the woods suitable not only for the wheelbarrow, but also for the Jeep if needed. To the right in this photo about 20 feet out of sight is a small stream. Behind the camera is another stream. The streams are small, but the larger of the two runs year round. The smaller stream sometimes stops in extremely dry weather. But the humidity here is always high, and except in winter the thick hardwood canopy blocks almost all the sunlight.

Above: Mushrooms grow everywhere in this area. Even in dry weather, the mushrooms grow in the branch bottom.

Above: All done and ready for the deer. The instructions say that we can expect mushrooms in five to 12 months. The logs should produce two harvests a year for three to five years.

Two Bambis at dusk

Two Bambis (white spots and all) came wandering out of the woods behind Acorn Abbey at dusk this evening to steal my clover. I did not see their mother, but I doubt that she was far away. The photo is blurry because the light was poor. The photo was taken through a window of Acorn Abbey. Notice how dark the woods are under the canopy.

Almost as green as Ireland

I was expecting a miserably hot, dry August. But instead we’ve had a long run of rainy weather. About 7 inches of rain has fallen here in the last nine days. Everything is emerald green. The cloudy weather has held the temperatures down. The high for today was about 77. The meadows are boggy, just like Irish meadows. We’ve had several flash flood watches, but so far no serious flooding.

All these photos were taken in the Dodgetown area about 3 miles from Acorn Abbey.

The 2010 tobacco crop

Defending your privacy on the Web

The social and political classes in George Orwell’s novel 1984

We’ve all been told that there is no such thing as privacy on the Web. That is true. Still, we are not helpless. Recently I got quite angry after I learned about a whole new category of privacy threat on the Internet — shady private organizations that collect data on you and then give it, or sell it, to the government. Glenn Greenwald posted an article on this a couple of weeks ago.

This motivated me to put a little time and research into figuring out how to attain a reasonable level of privacy on the Web with a reasonable effort. I was not interested in what I’d call a paranoid level of privacy. That would take a great deal of effort and would make it much harder, and less fun, to use the Internet. But surely, I thought, there is a reasonable level of defense that anyone could achieve with a little study and some changes in how you set things up on your computer.

There are three broad categories of privacy and security risk on the Internet:

1. Illegal activity. This would include password “phishing” scams, spyware, viruses that take over your computer and turn it into a “bot” under the control of spammers, etc.

2. Activity that is legal but extremely intrusive. This includes efforts to track you and identify you on the Internet, the better to target ads to you or to sell you something. This is extremely common, and it’s getting worse.

3. Tracking aimed at the ability to build dossiers on millions of Americans, names and all, that can be sold to the government or otherwise used against you. It was this type of activity that Greenwald (Greenwald is a Constitutional lawyer) was writing about in the link I posted above.

For category 1, your best defense is to keep your computer up to date with security fixes of the type that are regularly released by Microsoft and Apple.

For categories 2 and 3, there is much you can do to defend yourself by making some changes in how your configure your computer.

I’m going to list some steps that I took — and that you can take — with a brief description of the privacy threat and how the threat can be reduced. Please appreciate that I can’t answer questions about how to make these changes on your computer. Instead, you should do your own research and learn about how to manage these things. Then you’re on your way to empowering your own self defense.

1. Use two browsers. One of the ways that snoops can figure out your identity is to snitch your identity from sites that you sign into. I am particularly wary of Yahoo, Facebook, and Google. If you are signed into them, they know who you are. Clever tracking cookies can then identity you by name on other sites. For example, recently the Washington Post’s web page started displaying a new feature that shows (among other things) what you and your friends on Facebook have been reading on the Washington Post web site. The Washington Post was quick to put out a disclaimer about why this is no threat to your privacy. You decide. As far as I’m concerned, it’s yet another reason to ignore the Washington Post, which (to my judgment) is no longer a real newspaper but merely a mouthpiece for the Washington establishment.

So here’s what I did. I use a Macintosh, and my regular browser is Safari. I downloaded Google Chrome to use as a second browser. One browser is my “identity” browser, and the other is my “no-identity” browser. When I sign in to Facebook, I do that in the “identity” browser, Google Chrome. But I don’t go anywhere else in that browser. Someone could glean my identity from Facebook and track me all day, but they’d only discover that I didn’t go anywhere but Facebook.

I do the rest of my browsing in Safari. But when browsing in Safari, I never sign in anywhere. The other important step is to delete all your cookies. Now, cookies may do a couple of things for you that you like, like enable a web site to remember that you’ve been there before. But it’s actually pretty easy to browse happily without those minor conveniences that cookies can give. Mostly, cookies are there to support the business models of the web sites you visit, whether legitimate or snoopy. But I don’t care about anyone’s business model on the web. I care much more about my privacy. Delete your cookies frequently, even once a day. If you haven’t looked at your cookies in a while, you may be stunned to find that you have thousands of them. Cookies are being used more and more, and mostly they are being used against you.

2. Use a DNS other than your internet service provider’s DNS. I cannot explain here what DNS is or tell you how to change your computer’s DNS settings. You must do your own research and understand it well enough to make this change for yourself. My ISP is Verizon. But that doesn’t mean I have to use Verizon’s DNS. I use Google’s free, public DNS. Though I am increasingly suspicious of Google’s commitment to privacy, their written privacy policy for their public DNS does explicitly say that they won’t match your DNS lookups with other data that Google may have about you. They also say that they destroy their DNS logs on a regular basis. Based on what I know at this time, I’d rather have my DNS data logged at Google rather than Verizon. And besides, Google’s DNS service is better than Verizon’s. Here is a link to information on Google’s public DNS.

3. Get Adobe Flash under control. I’ve mentioned previously how Adobe Flash has become one of the most obnoxious players on the web. It’s for good reason that Apple’s Steve Jobs is doing battle with Adobe over Flash. Flash eats your bandwidth with unwanted fancy ads. It eats up your computer’s processing power, and, if you’re on a laptop or a handheld, will run down your battery quickly. Even worse, Adobe Flash operates totally outside of your browser’s security features. Flash’s default security settings are wide open. By default, Flash can set its own “Flash cookies,” which are much harder to find and delete because your browser doesn’t know about them. Flash permits web sites to store data on your computer. Flash even may permit some web sites to use your internet bandwidth for “peer assisted networks.” My guess is that, 10 years ago, Flash already had everything that is of interest to you as a web user. Their development effort, clearly, is focused on giving advertisers and the operators of web sites the tools they want to track users, gather data on users, and focus advertising on users. I don’t care about any company’s revenue. I care more about my privacy. So I took these steps:

a. Get a Flash blocker plug-in. For Safari, I use ClickToFlash. There are different Flash blockers for other browsers. Do some Googling for “flash blocker” plus the name of your browser, and you’ll find a way to keep Flash from running in your browser unless you explicitly give it permission.

b. Delete your Flash cookies. You may have hundreds or thousands of them. On the Macintosh, you can find them in the file system at ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects. Drag them all to the trash. They are not benefiting you in any way. They are only benefiting someone’s revenue model. If you use a computer other than a Mac, Google for “flash cookies” or “flash shared objects” and see if you can’t find some instructions. Remember, I can’t help you with this. I’m only suggesting that it’s something you might want to research for yourself.

c. Change the default settings of Flash on your computer. To do this, you must go to Adobe’s web site. Lock it up as tight as possible. None of those features benefit you in any way. They all benefit those who want to track you or make money off you. I believe that Adobe intentionally makes it difficult to change the privacy and security settings in Flash. Adobe is one of the meanest players on the web today. They do not deserve our support.

4. Use a proxy service. Using a proxy service full time, at least in my judgment based on what we know at this time, is probably more trouble than it’s worth. Still, if I wanted to do something on the web that might be considered suspicious or that I think might attract attention (for example, visiting the WikiLeaks web site), then I would use a proxy service temporarily. Again, you must do your own research, but proxify.com is a good place to start.

Good luck and happy browsing. And please remember, I can’t answer questions or help you make these changes on your computer. I’d rather see you empowered to handle your own self-defense on the Internet. It’s a jungle.