“This is a valid news story. The casu­alty fig­ures for this mon­ster storm have been incred­i­bly low thus far. If there are more vic­tims than have been reported, the pub­lic has a right to know. I would fur­ther argue that the pub­lic has a right to see. It goes with­out say­ing that the pub­lic has a right to trans­parency in gov­ern­ment, even in, par­tic­u­larly in, a dis­as­ter situation.

Noth­ing good is going to come of this black­out. The tim­ing of it, six weeks prior to the fall elec­tion, is sus­pect, and it’s not tin­foil ter­ri­tory to sus­pect oppor­tunism on the part of author­i­ties at some or all lev­els, to take advan­tage of the badly-​​fucked up infra­struc­ture and still-​​scattered pop­u­lace and avoid the kind of graphic pho­tos of death and destruc­tion we’ve all still got in our heads from post-​​Katrina.”

“Hop­kins then lays out the twelve steps (not sequen­tial) nec­es­sary to cre­ate a tran­si­tion town:

1. Set up a steer­ing group with a tem­po­rary life
2. Raise aware­ness
3. Net­work with oth­ers in the com­mu­nity to lay foun­da­tions
4. Orga­nize the launch (‘unleash­ing’)
5. Self-​​organize work­ing groups
6. Use Open Space method­ol­ogy
7. Develop vis­i­ble prac­ti­cal man­i­fes­ta­tions of the project
8. Develop a reskilling project
9. Build a bridge to co-​​opt local gov­ern­ment
10. Hon­our the elders (and learn impor­tant local his­tory from them)
11. Let it evolve the way it wants to
12. Include an energy descent plan to be pre­pared for the End of Oil”

“OK, got it cracked. Don’t be a share­holder, or a pre­ferred share­holder, or even a cred­i­tor or a pol­i­cy­holder. Just be a coun­ter­party to a sleazy deriv­a­tives bucket shop — AIG Finan­cial Prod­ucts (AIG), to pick a name at ran­dom — and your chips, with applic­a­ble prof­its, will be returned no ques­tions asked. ”