Focus On The Family Continues to Send Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It

I have to wonder how or why Google blithely gave my email address to people with whom I want no contact.  Why, for instance, have they given my email address to Focus on the Family, a right-wing white supremacist arm of the American evangelical church?  From the screenshot below, one can plainly see that FOTF does not care about religion per se, nor about the worship and obedience to Christ, but only about helping the Rethuglican Party during this year's midterm elections.  

Let me "speak the truth in love" as Ephesians 4 says - but I must warn FOTF that my love is tough love.  You thugs supported the presidency of Donald Trump.  You are utterly corrupt religious parasites and you have no business trying to tell me how to vote.  Don't call me; I'll call you if I ever want to hear from you.  But here's a hint - you probably shouldn't waste time hanging around your phone.

Why Is Focus On The Family Sending Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It?

It's odd, but over the last two weeks I have received a number of spam emails from Focus On The Family, a right-wing, white evangelical organization whose leaders were vocal supporters of Donald Trump and whose leaders have also been friendly toward Vladimir Putin in the past.  I have tried to unsubscribe from their emails, but this does not seem to be doing any good.  So let me use this blog to send FOTF a message: I reject you and your toxic and false brand of religion.  Please stop sending emails to people who don't want to hear from you.  You'll never convince me to vote Republican.

An Unsurprising Surprise (Coping With Nasty Weather)

There are two kinds of surprises in life, I suppose.  The first kind is the sudden event that no one could have foreseen, and the second is the sudden event that could have been foreseen by anyone with decent situational awareness.  Of course, the greater a person's situational awareness, the greater the proportion of events which the person can put into the second category of surprises.  Take lightning, for instance.  Anyone who is outdoors during a thunderstorm should know that he or she can be struck.  But sometimes lightning can strike out of a clear blue sky.  Before the advent of radar and satellite weather imagery, such events could be considered a genuine surprise.  Today, not so much.

Anyone who has watched the political climate in the world and particularly in the United States can see that we have been having some stormy weather.  The latest instance of this is the savage hammer attack against the husband of Nancy Pelosi by David Depape, a 42 year old male drug user aligned with QAnon, anti-Semitism, and right-wing conspiracy theories.  While shocking, such events as this are hardly surprising.  Unfortunately we live in a political climate which has been engineered to produce just such events.  Those who did the engineering are those defenders of white supremacy who are genuinely terrified at the prospect of the emergence of a world which they will have to share on an equal footing with all the other people in the world.  These people were energized into action by the gains of the American civil rights struggle of the 1960's, and have been working tirelessly ever since to roll back those gains.  Their energies were kicked into overdrive by the presidency of Barack Obama, as white supremacists vowed to themselves that they would create a world in which such power-sharing could never happen again.  

We know the result of their efforts.  Under Donald Trump, we got an acceleration of the social and environmental diseases which are typical of Republican, conservative governance: an increase of mass shootings due to easy access to guns, an increase in wealth and income inequality, a shredding of social safety nets, an acceleration of climate change (including life-threatening wildfires on a massive scale), a cannibalizing of government, an increase in persecution, oppression, and outright murder of people of color, and an increasing destruction of the ability of the United States to make large-scale coordinated responses to large-scale emergent threats.  This is why in 2020, so many nonwhite nations in the developing world were so much better than the United States in their response to COVID-19.  

Now the Republican Party is continuing to field political candidates who are nutcases.  We should not be surprised by the political violence we are seeing when we also see these nutcases openly calling for physical violence.  (See this, this, and this also.)  And the Republicans are trying to win elections by their usual strategy of lying.  They say that America is being swept by a dangerous crime wave under the Democrats, even though there is no evidence of this.  (In the city where I live, there are candidates for City Council who are trying to say that our city is suffering increased crime.  If that's the case, I haven't noticed.)  They say that the American economy is suffering under the Democrats.  However, this statement is refuted by the findings of institutions such as the Brookings Institute and the Center for American Progress.  They blame President Biden for the high gas prices we have seen across the United States in 2022.  However, their blame is dishonest, as the reality is that even without the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, global oil production cannot expand further.  In fact, Saudi Arabian oil production is either very near or at its peak.  And if we buy Russian oil, we finance the evil deeds of a would-be emperor, a dictator and murderer named Vladimir Putin.  The high price of gasoline (petrol for those who are British) should be seen as yet one more proof that the world is going to have to change its way of living very soon.

It could be asked how we who have been historically oppressed let ourselves fall into such a dangerous situation in which an organized group of narcissistic, fascist, supremacist oppressors could become such a threat to the rest of us.  Why, for instance, did we not organize ourselves for our own collective good to build our own nonviolent power?  Why was so much time wasted?  Why did we not create strategies to effectively deal with the increasing concentration of power - media power especially! - which took place from 1980 onward?  Fox News should never have been allowed to become such a powerful cult.  But asking such questions at such a time as this seems almost like asking too late - as if we were a party of golfers who had continued our play even as storm clouds gathered and we found ourselves stricken down by a bolt from heaven, a bolt we should have foreseen, and now those of us who survived were asking ourselves why we had been struck.  A more urgent question is the question of what we should do now.

I myself don't entirely know the answer to that question.  But I do have the following suggestions.

• First, have the right world-view.  According to the world-view which I hold, we live in a moral universe ruled by a righteous Creator who has promised that the soul that sins shall die (Ezekiel 18:4) , that everyone who exalts himself will be humbled (Matthew 23:12), that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), that whatever a man sows, this he will also reap (Galatians 6:7), that those who make themselves great by destroying or oppressing their fellow human beings will themselves ultimately be destroyed (James 5:1-6).  This is why I am confident that those who violently push white supremacy will ultimately fail.  Even now, I see the outworkings of damnation propagating through these people.  Some signs of this propagation I cannot reveal now - although those who read sociological analyses of American society can spot the trends.  Even secular sociologists and economists have lately noticed how those who pursue certain goals are  frequently destroyed by the very means they use to pursue those goals.
• Second, focus on building your own internal power so that you may reduce your dependence on the dominant society.  I am thinking of a passage from Recovering Nonviolent History by Maciej Bartkowski.  (Disclaimer: I really like Dr. Bartkowski's book, but I don't anymore like the organization which Dr. Bartkowski belongs to, namely, the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict.  If you want to know why, please check out some of the links in the sidebar of this blog.)  Page 18 of his book contains the following quote: "...the guilt of falling into the predatory hands of [oppressors] lay in the oppressed society, and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility.  Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."
• Third, and most important, maintain nonviolent discipline.  The filthiness of the Right has been made abundantly plain over the last several years.  This filthiness has become a powerful liability to them.  In order to remove this handicap, they have tried to claim that both they and their intended victims are filthy.  Do not give them any help in their attempt to blame both sides for a conflict which they themselves started.  By all means, vote.  However, no matter what happens afterward, do not answer the violence of the Right with your own violence.  Beware of engaging in protest marches, as these can be easily infiltrated by violent agents provocateurs from the Right.  Do not give these people any opening for casting blame on you.  Please do me a favor and read the posts I wrote on strategic nonviolent resistance under the heading "From Dictatorship to Democracy."

A Clarifying of Stance, Part 2

From time to time I check my readership stats, as I want this blog to be informative and I want to gauge its impact.  I noticed that over the last few days, people have been exploring some rather early posts in my back catalog.  I am flattered by your curiosity, although I must warn you that some of my perspectives have changed over the years, due to the acquisition of newer information which superseded some of my early assumptions.  So today's post is a bit of a grain of salt for you who are exploring those early posts.  As a sign I once saw on a co-worker's desk once read, "I don't always agree with everything I say."

Generally, I do agree with everything I have written from the end of 2016 onward.  I also agree with some of the statements of the very early posts of this blog, namely that the modern industrial societies of the First World are running up against limits to growth.  These limits consist of resource limits and the cumulative effects of environmental degradation.  No reasonable person can disagree with this.  There is one other theme that I explored in parts and pieces throughout various posts from the start of this blog until now, namely, that there is a powerful, well-organized movement among the wealthiest and most privileged people to roll back all the civil rights gained by the world's poorer people - especially those who are nonwhite - during the 20th century.  I'd like to suggest that this movement would have emerged regardless of the emergence of resource constraints and their effect on economic growth.  Therefore, those of us who have become once again targets of oppressors must learn to thrive while navigating a threat environment.  My posts from 2017 onward have largely explored the question of how to do this.

One last caution.  Many of the people who were writing about the impacts of resource depletion, climate change, and American fragility from 2007 to around 2015 were actually aligned with white supremacy, the Global Far Right, and the Russian government.  I am thinking of how many of these people aligned themselves with the candidacy and later presidency of Donald Trump.  I am also thinking of how their earlier suggestions for dealing with the emergent crises of the early 21st century all revolved around buying a large-acre doomstead somewhere in the western United States and stocking up on guns, gold bullion, and baked beans in preparation for the zombie apocalypse.  Let me just say straight up that these people were and are dead wrong.  Their hyper-individualist responses have actually made them and their society much more fragile.  Look at the hyper-individualist responses to the COVID pandemic in the United States, and compare our shamefully high death rate from 2020 onward to the much lower death rates in many of the more collectivist societies of the nonwhite world and the developing world.  And as for the Russians, I hope that my posts on Russia from 2017 onward have completely erased any pro-Russian bias that exists in my posts that are earlier than 2017.  Please see my post titled, "A Clarifying of Stance" if you want more detail.  Vladimir Putin is a thieving little man in a bunker, and Putin's regime is a good-for-nothing piece of garbage.

The Woodcutter's Dull Ax

If the ax is blunt and one doesn't sharpen the edge,

then he must use more strength;

but skill brings success.

- Ecclesiastes 10:10, World English Bible

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I signed up for a paid audiobook subscription during the waning months of the COVID lockdowns.  For the price of my subscription I get one credit per month which I can apply toward a free download of an audiobook, and I also get audiobooks at reduced prices if I decide I want more than one new audiobook per month.  At first I used my audiobook credits to obtain downloads of fiction (particularly Chinese science fiction), but lately I have been sampling some nonfiction.  So it was that this past month I stumbled across a book called Rest by an author named Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.  

As advertised on the audiobook website, Pang's book invites us to "Sit back and relax and learn about why overworking and under resting can be harmful to yourself and your career."  And the website also informs us that "If work is our national religion, Pang is the philosopher reintegrating our bifurcated selves."  Such statements intrigued me precisely because for the last seven months, I have been working like a dog.  While there are elements of entrepreneurship which I have enjoyed, overwork has not been one of them.  So I gave Mr. Pang's book a listen or two to see what I could learn.  Below are some of my observations gleaned from my listening.

First, a few observations about Mr. Pang.  It seems that he is a member of that sector of the economies of the First World known as the "advice industry."  This "industry" includes many "content" producers whose advice is aimed at aspirational members of the middle and upper middle class.  Some of their offerings are well-researched and contain original and valuable insights, but other offerings have a familiar snake-oil smell to them.  (Think of Norman Vincent Peale for an early 20th-century example, or Tony Robbins or Tim Ferriss for a couple of modern-day examples.  Note also the dissatisfaction which some people are now expressing toward the advice industry as they see its use as a tool of capitalism.)  

But let's get to Pang's book, shall we?  Rest is laid out thus: Pang's thesis statement is set forth in the introduction and the first two chapters.  Then the next six chapters describe the day-to-day setup of the  habits of rest in the lives of elite creatives, drawing on a number of historical examples.  The last four chapters describe the ancillary activities of recreation of these creatives, some of which can be fit into a day-to-day schedule, and some of which are larger activities which take creative people out of their daily routines for a while.

Pang's thesis statement is something that I think most reasonable people would agree with, namely, that appropriate rest is the necessary precondition for excellent work.  When we don't rest appropriately, our work suffers.  As he says, "I argue that we misunderstand the relationship between work and rest.  Work and rest are not polar opposites...Further, you cannot work well without resting well."  Pang rightly points out the contrast between the harried lives of most employees (especially "knowledge workers") and their employers versus the unhurried pace of the lives of the people who were responsible for some of the greatest discoveries and innovations of the modern industrial era.  

Focusing more closely on the harried lives of workers, Pang says, "As a result, we see work and rest as binaries.  Even more problematic, we think of rest as simply the absence of work, not as something that stands on its own or has its own qualities....When we think of rest as work's opposite, we take it less seriously and even avoid it.  Americans work more and vacation less than almost any other nationality in the world..."  Finally, Pang's thesis statement contains the following words: "Rest is not something that the world gives us.  It's never been a gift...If you want rest, you have to take it."

A problem arises when we move from Pang's thesis statement to the chapters describing the day-to-day routines of history's greatest creatives.  The problem does not lie in the efficacy of the routines themselves.  In particular, the observation that the best creatives spend no more than four or five hours a day working deeply on their craft has been validated by the research of K. Anders Ericsson and others who studied the role of deliberate practice in producing expert performance.  Similarly, there is abundant evidence for the benefits of establishing morning routines, taking daily walks in order to clear one's head, taking naps during the workday in order to recharge, and getting enough sleep each night.  The research cited by Pang also validates the larger ancillary activities of recreation which he describes in the latter part of his book.  (I really, really like the idea of sabbaticals!  I've got to get me one of those things...)

The problem with incorporating these things into the daily lives of a significant number of workers is that they fly in the face of the culture of late capitalism which has been created and is being maintained by the world's richest people at the present time.  Therefore, these habits and practices are countercultural - and those who seek to practice these habits expose themselves to the possibility that they will suffer for trying to do such things.  Take doing only four or five hours of deep, focused work per day for instance.  I can truthfully tell you that I have never worked for an employer who would have agreed to such an arrangement.  From the time I obtained my bachelors degree until the time I quit my job to start a business, every employer I have ever worked for insisted on at least 40 hours a week, broken down into at least eight hours every day.  In those workplaces where the technical staff were unionized, we were allowed only two ten-minute breaks per day and one 30-minute break for lunch.  In the non-union places, 40 hours a week was not enough.  I remember one coworker of mine who worked 50 to 55 hours a week on a regular basis and who was kept alive by regular doctor's prescriptions.  I worked for another office whose local client base was shrinking due to mismanagement, and whose bosses offered me the chance to keep my job only if I was willing to travel extensively.

Take naps also.  For a long time employers frowned upon employees sleeping anywhere within sight of their managers.  This meant that if you needed a nap, you sometimes had to get into your car and drive a couple of blocks away from the office to sleep.  Admittedly there has been something of a shift in corporate culture over the last decade, in that a number of corporate offices now have designated "wellness rooms" where workers can retreat in order to decompress.  However, the first time I worked in a place that had a wellness room, I was told that the big boss in my office would allow employees to use the room as long as they didn't sleep in there.  This restriction applied even at lunch.  What a doofus!

In other words, I don't think Pang's book adequately accounts for the functional, structural factors which have driven rest from the lives of many American workers.  To be fair, the introduction of his book does mention the structural factors of "automation, globalization, the decline of unions, and a winner-take-all economy."  He also mentions the continuous increase in living expenses (especially housing expenses) which makes people hostages to longer hours and longer commutes.  But the tone of his book - especially of the introduction - implies that our failure to engage in the kind of deep rest he advocates is a result of our own ignorance or wrong attitudes, as exemplified in the following quote: "When we define ourselves by our work, by our dedication and effectiveness and willingness to go the extra mile, then it's easy to see rest as the negation of all those things...When we think of rest as work's opposite, we take it less seriously and even avoid it."

Because the radical adoption of the habits of the creatives cited by Pang is such a threat to the present order (especially in the U.S.), I think Mr. Pang fudges a bit in his advice to people who want to apply these habits to their own lives.  When I say that he "fudges", I mean that he sometimes takes the radical embodiment of a radical idea and whittles it down to a size and shape that does not threaten the established order.  For instance, in his chapter on sabbaticals, the radical idea of taking extended time off is weakened by citing modern executives who take two weeks off per year and label these breaks as sabbaticals.  I had to laugh at this, as the first job I had after I served in the military as a young adult was an assembler at a defense plant.  The plant was a union shop and new employees got only two weeks off, plus one week of sick leave.  Big whoop-de-doo.  There are other examples of what I would consider fudging in Pang's book, but if you want to spot them, you'll have to read the book.  

A couple of last observations.  In his choice to cite those creatives who were gentlemen of means in Victorian England, Pang elides the fact that these people had time to set up their lives for maximal recreation and deep work precisely because they were the beneficiaries of a social and economic system which offloaded their dirty work onto the less fortunate members of the British caste system.  This point is made abundantly clear by the description of the lives of coal miners in George Orwell's book The Road to Wigan Pier.  I am particularly struck by one of the Victorian sons of privilege whose life was mentioned in Pang's book: Sir John Lubbock.  It is amazing to me that Pang cites him as a beloved reformer who saw the benefit of rest for all of British society when one considers that his "Early Closing Bill" restricted the working hours of British youth under 18 to no more than 74 hours per week.  Consider that this still adds up to over ten hours a day, 7 days a week.  What a joke of a reform.

However, having made my objections, I still think that the central idea of Pang's book has a certain merit.  (I'd also like to mention that Pang seems to be trying to organize a movement for good in this country.)  In particular, I agree with the idea that there is a certain cluster of optimum life arrangements which must be sought by those who desire to do groundbreaking intellectual work.  And I'd like to suggest something which was not found in Rest: namely, the idea that America is suffering an innovation crisis (see this also) precisely because the overlords of modern American society have driven rest out of the lives of most workers by making those optimum arrangements for rest impossible.  I think that will have consequences rather soon.

Man, You Got To Figure It Out Yo'self

(Pardon the title.  I've been listening to some old Billy Joel lately...)

I have been following Cosmic Connies' blog Whirled Musings for a while, and I really appreciated her latest post.  The first part of that post deals with Ginni Thomas, the crazy-mixed-up wife of crazy-mixed-up U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence (Uncle Tom) Thomas.  It appears that she got involved in a cult during her young adulthood, then saw the light and got out of the cult.  After leaving the cult, she did some very good personal work which helped to build an exit path for others who had been sucked into cults.  But much later, she fell into the present day cult of white supremacy and the conspiracies that have been manufactured to express the existential fears of white supremacists whose supremacy is now fading away.

A few observations.  First, I think that the cults which hapless rubes fall into tend to reveal a lot about the motivations and values of those rubes.  I am thinking of those who fall into money cults, for instance.  That Ginni Thomas could fall into the cult of Trump and the associated cults such as QAnon does not speak well about her inner motives and values.  But let's consider the issue of cults from a larger perspective.  It seems to me (having myself fallen into a cult once and gotten out of it after many years) that people who fall into cults are looking for a certainty in life that simply cannot be guaranteed.  Therefore they look for gurus who will show them the minutest details of a supposed "One True Way" so that they can regiment every aspect of their lives to fit this supposed "Way" without having to do any thinking of their own.  Gurus tend to be people who lay out every detail of all the steps which the lives of their followers should take, including what to eat, what to wear, whom to marry, and where to work.  The guru's false promise is that if you follow all the steps which he (or sometimes she) lays out, you will never make any mistakes.  Cults provide both leaders and followers with an illusion of control.

But life can't be controlled the way the cults promise, simply because although we can know the past and experience the present, we cannot know much about the future except in its broadest brush strokes.  In many cases, all we can do for the near and intermediate future is estimate possibilities and probabilities.  There are general principles (especially moral principles) that we can and should apply in navigating those possibilities and probabilities.  And we can be confident that sooner or later, the moral principles will always work themselves out.  But we can't always know in advance the precise details by which this working out takes place.  People probably shouldn't expect a voice telling them to buy a certain lunch from a certain restaurant on a certain day.  You'll have to figure that out on your own.  

So in my own post-cult life, I have had three main priorities.  The first is to un-learn the malignant ways which I learned in while in the cult.  The second is to figure out for myself the general moral principles which I should follow.  Let me explain this one a bit.  I am a Bible-believing Christian and I intend to stay that way.  But I have had to realize that most of what I was taught by mainstream American evangelicalism is completely false.  (How could it be otherwise, when so many white evangelicals refuse to obey the Sermon On The Mount, when they are armed to the teeth, when they vote for slimy politicians like Trump?)  So I need to construct my own theology.  It is a work in progress.   The goals of that theology are that I myself may become a decent person, and that I may not get fooled again.  The third priority is to recover some of what was stolen from me.  To borrow a bit from Shawn Colvin,

I have lost too much sleep

and I'm gonna find it.

And as for the one in five Americans who still believe in QAnon or the Americans who still belong to the cult of Trump, I can only say that by their own evil they have made themselves the willing victims of "a politician who has fallen into populism and begun to make impossible promises...Naturally, his lies will come to light before long." (The Courage To Be Disliked, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga)  Some of the lies which have come to light have come from the anti-vaxxer and COVID denialist members of that group, many of whom are now pushing up daisies because they became victims of COVID.  Based on my reading of trends, I think that life is about to serve up a number of other painful contradictions of the things which these people believe.

The Exports of Grandma's House

In a previous blog post I mentioned my discovery of Chinese science fiction and how it has become a manifestation of a new cultural soft power.  As part of that discovery, I stumbled a few months ago on a delightful short story titled, "Summer at Grandma's House" (" 祖母家的夏天"), written by Hao Jingfang (郝景芳).  (See this also to get a fuller picture of Ms. Hao.)  The story is ostensibly about the process by which a young college student's struggle to identify his future direction in life is resolved during the student's summer stay with his grandmother.  The grandmother is not the central figure in the story.  However, she does play a major role, and thus we get a rather full glimpse of what sort of person she is and what she does with her life.  It is that glimpse which attracted my attention to the point that the young man's story became almost secondary to me.  For it is the picture of Grandma that illustrates some of the themes which my blog has addressed over the last four or five years, and especially during the last two years.  So let's go to Grandma's house together, shall we?

First, although it's only incidental to the story, let's take a look at the house itself.  The story describes the house as a "little two-story bungalow...at the foot of the mountain, its red roof hidden in the dense treetops."  As I tried to visualize the scene, the word "bungalow" caught my attention, as this was a word which I had heard in conversation from time to time over the years, yet whose definition had never been explained to me.  (To add a bit of confusion, it appears from Google's translation algorithm that the original Chinese phrase could also be translated "villa."  But in my mind, that translation ruins the picture somewhat.  What do computers know anyway?)  So I looked up "bungalow"... and discovered that the word has more than one definition.  The definition I liked best (which also matches the description of the house in the story) is "a small house or cottage that is either single-storey or has a second storey built into a sloping roof (usually with dormer windows), and may be surrounded by wide verandas." - Wikipedia.  Think of something like this, except that the roof color is wrong:

A rather ordinary house, no?  But let's consider the things Grandma did in that house.  For Grandma was a biologist/biochemist who had been a college professor before her retirement and who now had a lab on the second floor of her house.  In other words, although the house looked quite ordinary, there were extraordinary things going on inside it.  The manifestation of hidden extraordinariness extended even to the furnishings of the house, whose front door opened by pushing on the side closest to the hinges and farthest from the doorknob, where the oven looked like a refrigerator, where what looked like a table lamp was actually a mousetrap, ...

The extraordinariness of Grandma is seen most strongly in her lab and the experiments she does with things such as transposons and photosynthesizing bacteria.  Her research has implications and consequences which I won't get into now, in order not to ruin the story for anyone who wants to read it.  But there are high-level conclusions which we can take from Grandma's work.  Here is a woman who has devoted herself to learning to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, as Titus 3:14 says.  Moreover, the work she does requires the possession of rare and valuable skills.  As Cal Newport has pointed out in his books So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work, it is the possession of rare and valuable skills that meet genuine needs that gives the possessor a certain social, cultural, and economic power.  (Disclaimer: although I have enjoyed Cal Newport's early work and writings, I think he has begun to go off the rails a bit during the last few years.  Being friends with people like Joe Rogan is morally sketchy in my opinion, to say the least.)

Therefore we see that the cultivation of rare and valuable skills in the pursuit of beautifully good work is the means by which people build their own internal power, and it is the means by which communities and peoples - especially those peoples who have been historically oppressed - build their own collective power.  And this power can be built in small spaces and ordinary settings like the second floor of an elder woman's small bungalow.  In fact, it can be built in spaces even tinier and more prosaic than this.  (Want examples?  See this and this.  That second link is from a Filipina accountant and describes her home business space.)

The cultivation of this kind of power is a big step toward individual and collective self-sufficiency.  But when we think of self-sufficiency, we must shed a bit of cultural baggage that has been introduced into the societies of the developed world over the last decade or so.  I no longer believe that self-sufficiency is achievable by going entirely off-grid, due to the fact that we must all live in societies whose members must each pay some of the collective cost of maintaining those societies.  Thus, I am not really impressed by the late Jules Dervaes and his family, nor am I impressed with their "Path to Freedom" house and the rather extravagant claims they have made about their lifestyle - a lifestyle which they attempted to support by trademarking the English phrase "urban homestead" in order to force people to pay royalties to them.  Moreover, I have never really believed in the claims of people like Tim Ferriss who boast of being able to achieve retirement before 40 by building passive income streams.  The promise of "passive income" seems immoral to me, as does the type of character who chases after such a promise.  Such characters frequently get taken to the cleaners during their quest.  (See this for a humorous take on the subject.  And don't quit your day job!)  Sooner or later, both people and societies come to realize that those who have actual power are the people who produce valuable things that people actually need.  This, for instance, is why nations dominated by "service economies" are potentially weaker than nations that are dominated by manufacturing economies, unless the services offered support the production of beautifully good and necessary work.

Therefore, those of us who want the power we need to live unmolested in a hostile world must give ourselves to learning, and to self-education when other avenues of education are denied us.  As the Good Book says, "And let our people also learn to engage in beautifully good work..."  We may have to give up a number of evenings and weekends in our pursuit.  And we must learn to protect the fruits of our labors in order to make sure that those fruits are not stolen from us.  For we live in an age of dishonesty.  Therefore we must learn to be strategic.