And hear our most excellent home-grown, all-Vermont Funk band, Electric Sorcery !! Playing 2:00 PM at the historic Gathering Inn, Hancock, Vermont !

The doors of sound have been ripped off the hinges by Electric Sorcery who routinely electrify Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Towns are regularly woken out of their slumber by the by the wicked sound of this power trio.

Electric Sorcery takes psychedelic music firmly rooted in the 70s and adds their own special twist. Funky rhythms and psychedelic guitar riffs come together to create an intriguing sound that is sometimes very heavy.... This is a fun listen and anyone who gravitates towards the psychedelic sounds of the 70s needs to hear this… - SeaOfTranquility.org 

Meet & Eat    Greet & Drink

Saturday, September 25, from 2 – 4 PM  

1295 Route 100

Diagonally opposite the Hancock Hotel

Please bring your concerns, your hard questions, and your ideas.  The Independent vision for Vermont is all about you, your families and communities !

Doug, a longtime science teacher in Alaska, makes this observation:

If Vermont were to secede from the United States of Empire and become an independent nation-state, how could it possibly survive as a separate republic? How would it function? Are there any examples of smaller, sustainable nation-states which might serve as a role model for a state like Vermont, should it decide to leave the Union?

Gross National Happiness USA debuted at the beginning of this month with a conference in Burlington on Changing What We Measure from Wealth to Well-Being. I used audio from the conference, from interviews I conducted afterwards, and from Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke's May speech on the Economics of Happiness to put together a radio documentary called Pursuing Happiness in Hard Times.

In the documentary, my point of departure is that we're about to face the end of economic growth in industrial economies, as fossil fuels peak and decline. So, is there anything in the burgeoning field of happiness research that can give us hints on how to maintain well-being while the economy shrinks? I found some surprising answers. 

The half-hour radio show debuted yesterday on the Pacifica radio network, and you can download it here or at the web site for my weekly radio show Relocalizing Vermont on WGDR Plainfield. 

In mid-May, I attended two public meetings: Bernie Sanders called a
Town Meeting in Burlington to hear public concerns about federal
education policy and Department of Homeland Security/Customs &
Border Protection Agency held a meeting in Franklin on why the Army
Corps of Engineers needed to seize a farmer’s land.

Greetings from Channel 17/ Town Meeting TV:

Vermont - The State to Reinvent the United States was recorded on 2010-05-13.

*WATCH ON TV:* You can watch this program on Channel 17/ Town Meeting Television, on Comcast Cable and Burlington Telecom at the following times:

1 Thursday May 13, 5:25 PM
2 Friday May 14, 7:00 PM
3 Sunday May 16, 7:00 PM
4 Sunday May 23, 1:00 PM
5 Thursday May 27, 3:09 PM
6 Sunday May 30, 11:45 PM
7 Monday May 31, 4:45 AM
8 Monday May 31, 10:45 AM
9 Saturday June 5, 5:45 AM
10 Saturday June 5, 11:45 AM

Review of Michael C. Ruppert Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World (Chelsea Green, 2009, 238 pages, $15) and CoLLapse, Bluemark Films, a documentary directed by Chris Smith, featuring Michael Ruppert, a former LAPD narcotics detective and founder of www.fromthewilderness.com; 82 minutes. (Visit www.collapsemovie.com.)

It’s time to act with great intention. There’s work aplenty to do in this weary world and people engaged in that work. Find those people. - Tim Bennett: “What A Way To Go: Life At The End of Empire”