The Middlebury Institute for the study of separatism, secession, and self-determination has updated its web site. Check it out. Features include a report on The First North American Secessionist Convention, held November 3-5, 2006 in Burlington,Vermont which has links to two Youtube videos. Plus there is a (still under construction) Registry of North American Separatist Organizations. Several excellent articles are linked as well.
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The Institute is sponsored by noted author Kirkpatrick Sale and Second Vermont Republic organizer Thomas Naylor. Sale's most relevant books are Human Scale and Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. See also VermontRepublic.org and Vtcommons.org.
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Sale, like Small is Beautiful author E.F. Schumacher, were influenced by the wonderful philospher Leopold Kohr author of one of my favorite books The Breakdown of Nations. See my web page with more about Kohr, including this photo of Kohr and me when I met him in 1985. One of these days I'll figure out how to get a .wav copy of the audio I have of the talk he gave, minus the recording buzz.
If future readers wonder why my blog lingered on that cute little butt for six whole weeks, blame it on the sunspot cycle. I'm too bored, depressed, blah-ed out to opine, to go to many activist events, to do much more than read email, surf the web, eat, watch television and put off looking for a job for yet another week. Where, oh, where is the Manic Moore?
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If you think I'm joking when I say "blame it on the sunspot cycle," see my article SUNSPOT CYCLES AND ACTIVIST STRATEGY. I introduce the article by saying: In the mid-1980s, writing in two small radical publications, I predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union and freedom for eastern Europe for the exact month that it did in fact happen. I did not predict it specifically for November of 1989. I predicted it for the height of the next eleven year sunspot cycle. The height occurred in November of 1989. And, as this article argues, this was no coincidence. For sunspots give off solar flares that increase negative ionization on earth--and negative ionizations increases human excitablity and activity. We are now at the end of another sunspot cycle, a bottoming out of human excitability and, if we are lucky, a period of relative peace. The next height of the cycle --and of mass demonstrations, riots, revolutions and wars -- will be around 2010.
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Read the whole article. The red line above is the latest sunspot cycle, starting in the mid-1990s and ending about now. The black and blue lines are the last two sunspot cycles.
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What do I predict for 2010? Assuming nuclear war has NOT destroyed half of humanity -- and even more so if it has!! -- I predict the first great worldwide-networked secessionist uprising. And if we are lucky, the last! The Age of Aquarius in one great Apocalypse of Love?
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Well, those of us who think it's a good idea, better get off ALL OUR CUTE BUTTS and get it going. And that includes yours truly, author of CONSCIOUSNESS AND COMMUNITY: TRANSCENDING GOD AND STATE and webmaster of SECESSION.NET. If we can't motivate ourselves through sunspots we'll just have to do it through love, hope and inspiration.
Our local DC Antiwar Network initiated a March 12 protest against the annual American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference. About 70 activists showed up chanting over and over again our protest theme: CONGRESS, STAND UP TO AIPAC. Hopefully all those representatives -- as well as Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton who had meet and greet rooms -- heard us as they entered the "Congress" entrance. One video features photos of an AIPACer who got a woman protester in a headlock, resulting in the arrest of both. The other features more peaceful aspects of the protest. Click here for the first of five longer videos by William Hughes.
Click here for photos of that event and the March 17th March on the Pentagon. Coincidentally St. Patrick's day. I was busy selling buttons and never made it past Constitution Avenue. The march is over but My Buttons are still doing their work!
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