The Outer Banks

Hello ladies and gentlemen of the internet realm. I am sitting in The Coffee House on Roanoke Island in the Outer Banks. I can't wait to leave this coffee shop and explore. I do have to say this place has the best coffee of my whole trip. 16oz organic mexican brew is the way to go. Great internet connection too! The Coffee House on Roanoke Island gets 2 SBM thumbs up. I will be updating my findings in a few days when I leave the Cape Hatteras National Shore. Here is a picture from Nashville to help hold you over. Nothing special, but a decent landscape of the city.



I will leave you with a passage from Utopia or Oblivion by Buckminster Fuller 1969

"At the present moment in history, we find ourselves in a fundamentally different economic position. When, a decade ago, Eisenhower went to meet with Khrushchev in Geneva, both had been informed by their military and scientists regarding the magnitude of the destructive capability of the atomic bomb. And Eisenhower said, as he went to that conference, "There is no alternative to peace." I'm sure Khrushchev, with the same realization, must have felt the powerful responsibility of that moment. Both, being political realists and hard-fact men, knew that they would not be able to make any important peace agreements as conceived solely by themselves. Their proposals and agreements, if any, would have to be backed by their respective political parties, and their parties were always in mortal contest at home with their chief opposition parties which waited upon altruistic moves of the "ins" as opportunities to impeach them for treachery to their respective sovereign power's ideological premises. Any softheaded step on the part of the leader would throw the party out. While Eisenhower and Khrushchev couldn't yield an inch politically, ideologically, and militarily, both of them brought along their atomic scientists and allowed them to talk to each other in limited manner regarding any at all possible peaceful uses of the atom.
Only one decade ago, at the meeting in Geneva and its companion meeting of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, it came so clearly into scientific view that the leading world politicians could acknowledge it to be true that -as reported unequivocally by Gerard Piel, publisher of the Scientific American- for the first time in the history of man, it was in evidence that there could be enough of the fundamental metabolic and mechanical energy sustenance for everybody to survive at high standards of living - and furthermore, there could be enough of everything to take care of the increasing population while also always improving the comprehensive standards of living. Granted the proper integration of the world around potentials by political unblockings, there could be enough to provide for all men to enjoy all earth at a higher standard of living than all yesterday's kings, without self-interferences and with no one being advantages at the expense of another.
But clearly both political leaders and their respective states were frustrated by all the political checks and balances each side has set up to protect and advantage only their own and their allies' side in view of yesterday's dictum that there was only enough of what it takes to support one in a hundred. So, all the ages-long fears; all the bad habits; all the shortsighted expedients that have developed in custom and law frustrated whatever might be done to realize the new potential. But the fact to remember is that it was only one decade ago that man had this completely surprise news that Malthus was indeed wrong and there now could be enough to go around -handsomely."



Isn't that refreshing!
-Scott B. McKibben