250,000 needed for mud and straw revolution

the power of parallel cultural structures

Welcome all of you new subscribers to this bunch of freedom loving heretics and privateers! Here we place individual sovereignty at the forefront in the fight against the tyrannical, socialistic corporate technocracy that now rules the US.

Thanks for subscribing, sharing and liking!

(Wait a minute. Socialistic corporate technocracy? That’s what exits when banks too-big-to-fail get bailed out by taxpayers to the tune of trillions of dollars. When people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk usurp taxpayer subsidized research and become billionaires from it. When pharmaceutical companies get the US taxpayer to fund vaccine research, development, distribution and advertising, while pocketing all the profits. The catch-all term for these tactics is ‘subsidized business expense for private profit’… socialist corporate technocracy.)

You likely subscribed because on some level you’ve come to some of the same realizations the rest of us share - the corporate elite have spun themselves clothing through which all of us can now clearly see. And like the rest of us, you’re seeking answers.

And what do we find when we look through that nonexistent clothing? A technocratic agenda that seeks to control all aspects of our lives by usurping government, education, medicine, food, agriculture, transportation, housing, media along with the use of censorship and information control (via search engines) to steer the masses away from what they don’t want us to know and towards what they do want us to know.

Klaus Schwab and his delusional band of WEF minions like to pretend they own the playing field, the players, the referees and the scoreboard, but they don’t yet own you, the audience (although if you’ve been vaccinated, there are now some questions about that). Subscribing means you’re aware of all of this and that you’re watching their game very closely. I love and thank you for doing so.

Just to be clear, this heretic is not out to topple the technocracy. No, in the same way the Soviet Union collapsed, this technocracy will collapse under the burden of its own idiotic cumbersomeness.

Hopefully the previous 19 months worth of articles makes clear my commitment to the importance of being informed about what’s really happening. But increasingly, I see the need to bring awareness to something I’ve mentioned here a number of times over that period, what the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel called “parallel structures” or a “second culture” - alternative cultures that exist within tyrannical ones. During his life long work to free the Czech people from Soviet tyranny, Havel found that it was not only possible, but beneficial to set up truly free market, alternative cultural platforms within the context of the greater state controlled kabuki theater (covid theater today). We’re talking about alternative media, food, agriculture, housing, and medicine, all of which catered to the real needs of everyday people. Of course by then most people were fully aware that the official news agency, Pravda, was spewing out lies and half truths, that the state controlled food stores were unreliable, that state medical care was abysmal and that state housing was deplorable.

And it worked. Part of what brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia was the fact that so many people had abandoned the official state platforms in favor of the alternative ones that the state no longer held any sway. That’s the plan here.

Fast forward 50 years from Havels heyday and we realize how familiar that all sounds today. Fortunately, I’m not putting forth something here that’s not already being done. Substack, the platform on which you’re reading this, is a fine example of an alternative media outlet that functions within the confines of a highly controlled media universe where the ‘official narrative’ is de rigor. And media may very well be the most important place to begin. Without a place to go and learn about what’s really going on in the “official reality” of the Pravda’s of the world, one can be left wondering aimlessly in the wilderness.

Alternative media can also serve as a source for those who are seeking out all of the other parallel options. This is how I see my recent pivot with The Secular Heretic - as a source for critical parallel options pertaining to food, health, textiles and the topic of this piece, housing.

parallel structure #1 - how to take back our health

Three of the last four articles here covered important steps we can take to do that, steps that, as far as our health is concerned, involve beginning at the beginning… improving the soil in which we grow our food.

We’ll come back often to #1. But today I want to introduce a new topic, one I’ve been pondering for many years. And given the toxic nature of modern housing, #2 may also play a role in helping you with your health problems.

parallell structure #2 - free yourself from the chains of the conventional housing market

The following article was originally published in November of 2013. It has been updated for this publishing.

cob house built by two middle aged women

on natural building

Most people today - perhaps more so those of us who have been affected by it - mark the beginning of the decline of the U.S. to 9/11, and more so to the sub-prime mortgage crises of 2008. The result of that banking fiasco has been that, for many Americans, the great American dream of owning a home has been dashed.  I see this as a good thing.  Why?  Because many working Americans are participating in a housing Ponzi scheme that defines incongruity: needlessly going into debt to consume far more than their share of planetary resources to house themselves in buildings that most of the rest of the world’s population consider elaborate mansions. 

what?

In 1992 a U.N. committee on sustainable housing determined that if we were to house everyone in the average U.S. house, three more planet earths would be required to supply all of the resources needed to do so.

In 1950 the average home size was 983 square feet. By the time of the sub prime mortgage crises in 2008, it was 2,300. Three things had occurred that allowed the average house size balloon out of control.

1. George W. Bush signed the American Dream Downpayment Act of 2003, which gave banks carte blanche to make home loans to stray dogs wondering in off the street.

2. Bankers took Bush's lead and made unscrupulous loans and then packaged them in even more unscrupulous cdo’s.

3. The Fed then, unconscionably, raised interest rates. Hence, the perfect economic storm was created. Clearly, Americans have been duped into living beyond this planets resource capacity as well as their personal financial capacity, all so a few elite puppeteers can further enrich themselves. 

earthen counter tops made with soil from on site - note gallon jar bins embedded in the wall

Since a group of natural builders from all around the world gathered at the Black Range Lodge in the little town of Kingston, New Mexico in 1994 for the very first Natural Building Colloquium, the local building movement - affectionately known to practitioners as ‘the natural building movement’ - has been promoting the use of locally available, native and recycled resources for home building.  These builders represented what has since become a burgeoning movement to build homes using adobe soil, straw bales, timber frame, cordwood, cob, bamboo and other locally appropriate, natural building systems. I held a workshop on bamboo construction at this and several other ensuing events. (Numerous colloquiums are now held around the world every year.)

I should clarify here that the natural building movement predates the currently popular tiny home movement by more than a decade. Tiny homes are typically built with highly manufactured materials that come from all over the world, whereas natural buildings optimize naturally occurring, minimally processed, local resources as much as possible.

Having had the good fortune to be involved in building homes that incorporate all of these systems, I’ve found cob construction, when used in concert with bamboo (known as quincha in South America, nara dake in Japan) to be more resource efficient and applicable to a great number of locations and owner/builders.

The environmental benefits, the performance benefits, the seismic resistance, the ease of construction and the ability to build a snug, debt-free home are what draw most people to cob construction. But what really sends me is knowing that the simple revolutionary act of building a small cob house is a gesture of defiance to the corrupt, conventional, US home building/banking system. 

Unbelievably, the shady mortgage practices that led to economic collapse in 2008 and begat the largest transfer of wealth from the lower and middle class to the wealthy elite [up to that time], are still being employed by financial institutions today.  I can think of no better way to thumb our collective noses at those banksters than to build a small cob house that requires none of their filthy lucre.  In fact, if enough people did this it would gain the attention of all the other delusional promoters of the corporate system; university architectural departments, wood products companies, developers, mega contractors and the most misguided of all, regulatory building departments (a whole ‘nuther topic).

I’m currently building a small cob house (my third) for a neighbor, a project that has me once again thinking about all of the positive attributes of cob construction.  The ability to utilize the soil from the site and mix it with regionally available straw to create seismically resistant, energy efficient cob walls, is just the beginning.  Cob’s malleability allows it to conform to a boundless variety of shapes and creative features. 

formerly the hemitage, now it’s where my solar freezers are located

greenbuilding con

Cob is efficient, both environmentally and economically. To drive this point home lets make a comparison, not to conventional housing - that would be too easy - but to what many today consider to be the cutting edge in house construction, greenbuilding. Not to be confused with natural builders, greenbuilders utilize highly manufactured, non-local resources developed by corporate stakeholders who, I have to say, often seem bent on seeking ways to retain market share. In other words, greenbuilding is code for greenwashed housing. Same energy/toxicity issues, different name. In the same way corporate big ag is taking over the organic farming movement, greenbuilding is the corporate solution to natural building alternatives. Don’t fall for it.

Furthermore, greenbuilders only consider the performance of a house once completed, not the energy that goes into building the house. Builders using cob and other natural building processes not only consider the performance of a house once completed, they also delve into what we call ‘embodied energy’, or the energy that goes into the resources used to build a house. In the case of a greenbuilding, the logging, mining, processing and manufacturing of resources that go into what are often very high tech materials, can be extensive. Then there is the embodied energy of transporting those resources from around the world to the building site. Under this light, green buildings begin to look more gray than green.

From an economic perspective, the purchase of highly manufactured resources from distant corporations means the money used to do so is leaving the local economy to further enrich a distant corporate fat cat, never to be seen in the local economy again. The cob builder who uses local soil excavated from the building site, mixed with local straw to build walls and local timber to build a roof, is likely to have some of that locally spent money come back into his pocket at some point in the future.

earthen floors made from clay on site, sealed with linseed oil

A good example of the negative forces at work in green or any other modern building process can be seen in the rafters of almost any new home.  Many rafters today are pre-manufactured to specs, delivered to the site ‘on time’, and installed on top of the walls.  Many of these rafters are built by giant wood products corporations that rape forests for the lumber and truck the logs to energy intensive mills that are often powered by dirty energy sources.  The rafters are then slapped together and transported across the country to the new house.  Energy intensive, well traveled building materials like this makes concerns about how far our food travels seem trivial.  Unlike the well traveled food in our evening meals, most modern houses have highly manufactured components coming from the four corners of the world.  All in all it makes for a very energy intensive, resource consuming, soulless way to house people. 

ticky tacky little boxes

University architectural departments often receive funding from the corporate building industries to buy influence for their systems and products - like rafters, for instance.  Developers and large contractors also like this arrangement because they can get better prices when scaling up. What the buyer gets is a version of Melvina Reynolds ticky-tacky, “Little Boxes”, cookie-cutter houses that look the same as all the other houses across the US.  This is the antithesis of historic “vernacular architecture” that has occurred across much of Europe, Asia, the Middle East and other culturally intact places where housing in each region reflects the locally available resources of that region.

I once picked up a hitchhiker who was an architectural student from the UK. He’d been hitching across the US for 3 months. We got to talking about this, and he bemoaned the sameness of US housing across the land. He went on to tell me he could be blindfolded and taken to any traditional village in the UK, remove the blindfold and he could tell you where he was just by identifying the local vernacular architecture.

Compare the wood products industry rafter format to the roof on the cob home I’m currently building.  I recently grabbed a few hand saws and went out a few miles from the project to cut some large branches off of a few Alligator Junipers.  These vigas (a southwestern term for logs used in this manner) were then brought to the site where the bark was peeled off by hand with a draw knife.  The vigas were then “set” on top of the cob walls and overlain with latillas (the smaller branches cut from the larger vigas).  The latillas were covered with recycled burlap coffee bags from our local roaster.  The burlap bags were then covered with 10” of “light clay straw” made with local clayish soil and straw from a nearby farm. This was then covered with a regionally made roofing product derived from natural rubber. 

See what I mean about embodied energy, or lack thereof in this case?  And every aspect of this home has a similar locally derived, hand crafted resource that, in concert, create a regionally distinct, vernacular style of architecture. But the best part is, the final product is a home that is so affordable, no loan is needed.  Additionally, keeping cob homes under 1,000 sq. ft goes a long way towards keeping them affordable, so the emphasis can be on quality not quantity. With an abundance of innate character, beauty and soul, it becomes apparent why cob construction is so beloved.

all the building resources in this photo were derived locally - note the urbanite foundation and steps, bamboo latillas, posts and beams from the nearby forest

Want to help thwart banksters from ever stealing lower and middle class homes again?  Better yet, want to change the world? As Americans, we have the power to do just that. Just say no to the banksters and their modern “housing” system by building a small cob home. By the time 250,000 of you do so, I guarantee the positive results of this peaceful revolution will reverberate around the world.

And parallel structures will rule.