Book tour coming up soon!

The paperback edition of 2020: Our Common Destiny & the Anti Communitarian Manifesto combined into one book, is finally finished! Mail orders ship out next week. If you pre-ordered this book sometime in the past two (?!?!?!) years and do not receive one within the next 2 weeks, please be sure to let us know. International orders should be received within 3 weeks.

Arrangements are underway for a book tour to the lower 48 beginning sometime in August. I'll bring a short powerpoint presentation that will also be streamed from some of the locations where I'm speaking. Before I leave we'll be having a local book signing party in Anchorage, Alaska at the Tap Root in Spenard (the old Whitekeys Fly By Night club!), probably on a Blues Monday. More details on that will be posted here soon, along with a list of the radio shows I'm doing now.

I've got a reader who owns the original spiral bound version down in Northwestern Montana who's generously offered to set up the venues for that part of the state. My tentative plan is to fly to Seattle and have a book party there and meet up with a lot of old friends and initital contacts from 1999. I have a friend in Tacoma who may be making the arrangements in King County. From the PNW I'll head east on I-90, swing down to Walla Walla and back up to Spokane, Boise, and then on to Montana and Wyoming. Depending on how it goes, I'll be adding new destinations to my journey, but I'm certain I'd like to make it all the way to NYC (with stops in WI, Ohio, Amherst, Long Island and Staten Island for sure!). Best case scenario, I'll ride the train down the coast to Florida (where I've never been) and across the south to California, after a long tour of Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Documentary footage of the journey is another part of the project. If you'd like to assist with this endeavor, meet up with us for a day, or join the party and travel with us for a while, please be sure to let me know. Looking forward to meeting as many of my readers as is possible, some of you I feel like I've "known" for years.

Our return to the "fray" is also bringing the haters and the critics out of the woodwork. I'm sure I may have to deal with them along the way too. Maybe I'll find time to stop in DC and poke my head in at Etzioni's office, just to say hello, and thanks for the memories!

So much has happened since we started studying the plan in 1999, and there are a LOT more Americans who know something about it now. I get emails all the time from regular people across the states who have just begun speaking out against it in their municipal councils and meetings. Two state legislatures passed Acts forbidding implementation of Agenda 21 and sustainable development, and while those two items are only the tip of the iceberg, it's a great start! ICLEI has also been outlawed in over a hundred towns! America had a slow start, but it looks like it has the potential to rise to a fast finish. In some places the local governments still DENY that their local plan has anything to do with Local Agenda 21, and the mainstream press is painting all opponents as right wing wackos and conspiracy theorists. These defamation of character pieces breezily ignore the Democrats Against UN Agenda 21, and so many others like us who do not fit their right v left dialectical con. It's "the healthy instincts of the plain man" that's their biggest threat right now.

The updates on the outcome of Rio+20 are claiming it was a big failure. Haven't found anything new on the proposed Rights of Mother Earth, but I did get quite a few hits from Brazil last week on the Pachamama article.

I'm going to sublet my gertees month-to-month while I'm gone, so if you've ever had the desire to live in a rustic but cute yurt setup in Alaska, here's your opportunity. The 3 gertees connected to each other ten miles north of Wasilla are perfect for a single or a couple, but the RV park is also kid friendly. Have to haul water and sewage, and it's wood heat. Has electric and a well, sewage drains, shower, laundrymat, and wireless on site. Space rent is $450. a month. There's close access to the Parks Hwy and local stores. My email is nikiraapana@gmail.com

SMART GROWTH CENTRALIZING WEALTH IN THE NEW EARTH AGE

10' Gertee Travelers ~ home ~ winter 2011

I submitted one of the new chapters in 2020/TACM to newswithviews. The book revisions are underway and it won't be much longer before everyone who pre ordered will have their copies. I know some people are very upset with us because of the long delays and I don't blame them one bit. It has been over a year since some people ordered theirs.

There are several reasons it's so overdue, all of them are of a personal nature and partly health related, so I am extremely grateful to the majority of our customers who have shown us such patience. I am humbled by the people who became so concerned that we were unable to fulfil our obligations that they wrote not to ask for a refund but to ask where to send donations and how else they can help us to finish it. Some people know (from following my blog) how little we have and how we live. There have always been people who respected the way we didn't try to make money off our research, they appreciated the fact that we had no advertisements and flashing banners saying "Buy now!" I always wanted to maintain that kind of presentation, in spite of the reality that sites without ads usually have funding coming from someplace else.

For years I avoided the whole marketing scene because I really believed that this was such essential information that it had to be free. I managed to survive on part time jobs for many years so that I could keep studying and writing continuously. And then my body just gave out after years of sporadic eating, the stress of the topic and constant studying in primitive conditions. I started this work when I was 43 and still felt young enough to go winter camping to research and write ACL articles in a tent. I'm 55 now, and sleeping in a tent on the ground in the rain about killed me this past summer. Anyone who's ever had pneumonia will understand why I almost wished I would die. But somehow a brush with death also brings on a new sense of purpose and determination. Now I feel inspired to put these books out for sale and put the free research back online in the new format. One last time I'll forget about eating and spend the winter writing in a wood heated unplumbed Gertee. But this has to be the last time I do this.

SMART GROWTH
CENTRALIZING WEALTH IN THE NEW EARTH AGE
http://www.newswithviews.com/Raapana/niki121.htm

What happened to the ACL website?

This has turned into such a busy year for us and, as some of you have noticed, I haven't had much time to blog lately. Hopefully that caused a few readers to browse my archives. :)

The revision of 2020 is hanging heavily over me like a huge cloud, I had no idea how difficult the rewrite would become. It's also a challenge to write (and think) in a 12 foot Gertee with another adult and two children. We're building new Gertees later this summer but for now we're doing "real" camping, and I'm feeling the pains associated with sleeping on the ground for 2 weeks.

I wrote Etzioni, in case him or his staff have been able to form a rational rebuttal to our thesis.

Dear Dr. Etzioni,

We are about to republish "What is the Hegelian dialectic?" & "The Historical Evolution of Communitarian Thinking," with "2020: Our Common Destiny" in one volume.

We sent our thesis to you and your network when they were originally published online in 2003. Ericn riska and others on your staff responded, but we've never receieved any kind of a legitimate rebuttal. More than 500,000 visitors have accessed our argument since then, and thousands of those visitors came from universities and government agencies around the world.

I don't know if you are aware that our work was introduced alongside your books in a Vassar College "Quality of Life Seminar" last spring. Maybe it has escaped your attention but the Anti Communitarian League has an entire section in the National Association of Scholars' Bibliography of the Communitarian Residence Life Movement.

As our work continues to gain favorable recognition in the international community, we would like to offer you and your staff one more opportunity to rebut our arguments against the validity of the Communitarian Network's Platform and mission. We will publish any response you have, regardless of its content.

Fire away!

Niki Raapana
co-founder, Anti Communitarian League

All the typos were in the original letter. I figured it didn't matter much since Etzioni's English is so bad other people have to write all his US books and articles for him. So far he hasn't responded. We're still soliciting rebuttals from any communitarian who wishes to prove our thesis and conclusion about communitarianism is unsound.

Here's where Nordica archived the old ACL website pages:
http://nord.twu.net/acl/research/

Here's a sample of the kinds of current things that we needed to add to 2020:

http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/time-ratify-law-sea