Voices and messages not heard in the evening news:
Can We Recover And Feed A Far-Flung Military Empire?
According to the New York Times, suicides in the US Army in January alone could total as many as 24. (In January ‘08, the number was five.) In all of 2008 at least 128 soldiers killed themselves, as the Times noted, the highest level in nearly three decades. Army officials attribute “the stress of long deployments to the increase.”

Mark Benjamin and Michael de Yoanna of Salon.com, in a major examination, report a wealth of evidence of military misdiagnosis, mistreatment, and…lack of desire to face the plague of suicides destroying lives, families, whole communities as it drains the economy of productive workers,
lifetimes health costs for impaired warriors, and psychological damage to their families, especially the children.

Political leaders struggle no less unimpressively to deal with with the larger problems of overextension, over-deployment, and resultant military stress. Their unanimous solution: expand the number of US forces to cut down individual deployments. But the obvious solution that would bring the military back to a state of health is roundly ignored: Downsize the American Mission. Bring the troops home.
–William Astore and Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

What We Can Learn from the 1990s Collapse of the Russian Economy
Dmitry Orlov, quoted below, was a first hand observer and has practical advice for our crisis.
“If you still have a job, or if you still have some savings, what do you do with all the money? The obvious answer is, build up inventory. The money will be worthless, but a box of bronze nails will still be a box of bronze nails. Buy and stockpile useful stuff, especially stuff that can be used to create various kinds of alternative systems for growing food, providing shelter, and providing transportation. If you don’t own a patch of dirt free and clear where you can stockpile stuff, then you can rent a storage container, pay it a few years forward, and just sit on it until reality kicks in again and there is something useful for you to do with it… What we can do is prepare ourselves, and each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences, and scaling down our needs.” Link to the full article below:
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html

Illicit & Legal Urban Chicken Movement Growing

The Worldwatch Institute reports that a growing number of US city-dwellers are raising their own chickens, often in defiance of local ordinances.

Citing unsanctioned henhouses in Denver, Boston, and other cities, Worldwatch’s Ben Block notes that an “underground ‘urban chicken’ movement has swept across the United States.”

In many cities, such as Ann Arbor, Mich., Ft. Collins, Colo., South Portland, Maine, and Madison, Wisc., owners of clandestine coops have successfully changed the laws to allow them to keep hens. (Roosters, whose crowing can disturb neighbors, are usually more restricted, and not needed for hens to lay unfertilized eggs.)

Many cities, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and Seattle never banned domesticated fowl and have served as incubators of sorts for the emerging movement, in which urban henkeepers post online tips on building coops, caring for the birds, and fending off predators. –report from The ChristianScienceMonitor
Also check our DC-Watch blog’s recent posts for numerous online urban chicken sources.