User:Paxuscalta/Vanity

This is a more scandalous and complete entry on Paxus Calta than the official Wikipedia entry. It is also less objective and far less verifiable. Almost all shameless propaganda written by Calta himself. Originally, this was based on a banned wikipedia page, but it has grown a life of its own.

At Protest at Temelin Nuclear Power Plant, Czech Republic 1996.

Paxus Calta is a trouble maker thinly disguised as a radical. He self identifies as an anarchist and a funologist (a word he takes credit for coining). Calta also claims to be a memeticist, an organizer, a feminist, a political activist and blogs often and irregularly. Calta attained some prominence beginning in the 1980s as an anti-nuclear power campaigner in eastern Europe and the U.S. He is a member of Twin Oaks Community (and since March 2013 concurrently of Acorn Community) in central Virginia, in the southeast U.S., where he has lived for over a 18 years. He is also an active proponent of and propogandist for polyamory, the idea that consenting adults can honestly practice multiple simultaneous romantic relationships. In 2004, he wrote a chapter of the book The Impossible Will Take a Little While (compiled by Paul Rogat Loeb, in which he detailed a successful campaign to overthrow the Bulgarian government launched by an 18-year old [1]. Calta's philosophical belief include that progressive and radical groups are principally social groups rather than political groups and thus "to spark the revolution you need to build the better party".

Calta is active in contemporary movements against nuclear power, for intentional community living and memetic design. He continues to develop the quasi-science of funology and co-authored the personal growth system called co-empowerment. Between 1997 and 2009 Calta served on the Board of Directors of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS). For the last two years of this period he served as the board chair of NIRS. In 2007 he initiated a wiki-book project Contagious Tales and the Honest Seduction and Radical Romance workshop series. In late 2008, he started working with on the Third Generation Social Networking site Bio.cz In 2009, he helped start the failed Villages in the Sky project which is building tree houses and wind turbines at intentional communities, with the intention of spawning new communities. In 2011, he started promoting Transparency Groups designed to improve communication and foster community connections. He is a member of the board of directors of the Living Energy Farm, a dark green ecovillage. In 2011, selected entry's from Calta's blog were printed in the meta-blog StrangeTango.com. In 2012, Calta was arrested with 17 other as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement protests in the city of Charlottesville, VA occupation of Lee Park. [2] In 2013, Calta was the lead organizer for the Loud Love unconference, which used Open Space Technology to determine its content. This event was generally focused on building healthy romantic relationships and empowered consent culture.

Subsequent to this plan, in late 2013, he started working on the Point A project [3], an urban high achievers income sharing community [4] Calta has become actively involved in starting new income sharing communities in Vermont, Virginia, Colorado and California). While not a resident, Calta was actively involved in the creation of the Compersia income sharing community in Washington DC founded in 2015. In early 2016 Calta was expelled from Acorn Community where he had lived as a dual member for almost 3 years. Calta is also contributor to the Commune in a Box project which is in part an online wiki designed to help people start new communities, especially income sharing ones.

In 2017, Calta because an unofficial dual member with Cambia Community. Unofficial, because to date Twin Oaks (where he has lived for over 20 years) does not yet recognize his dual membership. Cambia is a small intentional community located just 2 miles from Twin Oaks. Cambia is committed to having the highest whimsy to member ratio of any income sharing community.

Biography

Calta studied engineering and economics at Cornell University, where he was elected to the Board of Trustees as a student representative and was selected as the "most Outstanding Senior" in 1979. After which he worked as a software designer, helping to found and ultimately selling two small software consulting firms. In 1982, he changed his name to Paxus Calta. In 1988, he hitchhiked on sailboats across the Pacific, settled briefly in Australia and then moved on to Hawaii where he worked for Makai Ocean Engineering. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Calta moved to the Netherlands and worked for The World Information Service on Energy (WISE) in Amsterdam. Calta has adventured extensively, having smuggled monks out of Tibet into Nepal, having protested a top Soviet tanks in Estonia immediately preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union, having hitchiked across the Pacific Ocean on sailboats [5].

Calta's employment career is eclectic. He guided submarines between the Hawaiian Islands laying test power cable power. He worked for Standard Oil of Ohio briefly on the North Slope of Alaska. He operated CAD/CAM software for a Dutch real estate firm. Calta worked under a "Secret" level security clearance for the Beltway Defense Contractor BDM as a management systems analyst.

Calta was invited by the Czech Deep Ecology organization, Hnuti DUHA, to run the international campaign against the Temelin nuclear power plant from Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1991, which remained his primary home base for most of the 1990s and where he became a prominent activist against nuclear power. In 1998, Calta and partner Hawina Valkenburg (Falcon) moved to Twin Oaks Community in the United States. Calta has a personal webpage and a blog

Political activism

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Calta was active in efforts to stop nuclear power plants from being built in Eastern Europe and the West coast of the U.S. More recently, he has campaigned against a planned new plant in Virginia, near Twin Oaks Community. For a time he was a public face of various anti-nuclear campaigns, and his personal website (which appears not to have been updated in several years) includes the text of a speech he gave against nuclear power after which he and then-IAEA director Hans Blix debated the appropriateness of protest as a political strategy. .

Calta was the Chair of the international campaign commemorating the Chernobyl 10th anniversary and co-managed the FAIRE project (Free & Applied Internships in Renewables and Efficiency) which trained east European activists in English language skills, campaigning and then placed them in western environmental groups as interns. The FAIRE project was funded by the Heinrich Boell Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green Party.

The Czech Deep Ecology organization Hnuti DUHA (which translates as "The Rainbow Movement") invited Calta to be the lead international anti-nuclear campaigner after he left WISE. While DUHA still exists, it is a less radical organization than during Calta's tenure.

Calta initiated the Clean Energy Brigade project in the Czech Republic in which local activists installed energy saving hardware in residential homes and public buildings at materials cost in exchange for documentation of reduced energy use. This program was expanded to 11 East European countries and is now called the Clean Energy Brigades. In aggregate, the efficiency upgrades from this project are abating literally thousands of tons of CO2 each year.

According to CoMedia [6], Calta was the Lead Nuclear Campaigner for the 56-country Friends of the Earth International network and is on the Board of Directors of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) in Washington, DC. In June 2007, Calta was elected Board president of NIRS. He is a strong proponent of energy efficiency and sits on the Green Hydrogen Coalition's Steering Committee with Jeremy Rifkin.

Calta was also the interim campaign manager for Brad Blanton's second run for congress in 2006. Blanton is running as an independent on a Radical Honesty platform. Calta developed the idea of "the wire" in which everything the candidate said would be recorded and put up on the internet, making the politician transparent and veritably honest. Blanton has agreed to operate under this condition.

In August of 2008, Calta was arrested with 6 others at the North Anna Nuclear Power Plants information center for trespass. Bail was set at $1,000 and he was sentenced to 15 days in jail, because of prior arrests and the contention that he was the "ring leader" of the action group. He is appealing the case. Associated Press did a slide presentation on the action.

In 2008, the Star Family plus several Satilittes (Angie, Corb, Caroline, Kassia) came to Amsterdam and other points in Europe. Calta moved into and did organizing work at Casa Robino around new forming the digital nomad movement. He also started working with EcoDefense in Kaliningrad Russia. And with Honza Beranek from Greenpeace International.

In 2014, Calta and three others were arrested on the UVa campus in Charlottesville, Virginia for trespassing at the fraternity accused of gang raping a student. This unplanned arrest action got a disproportionate amount of press coverage, including the NY Times, LA Times and Washington Post.

In 2014, Calta was founded the Point A project with others. This campaign is designed to start new income sharing communities in north eastern US cities including NYC, Wasington DC, Baltimore and Richmond VA. It has been successful both in converting collective houses into income sharing and starting new communes from scratch.

In 2018, Calta organized a team of activists/canvassers to converge on Tampa Florida to work on the state constitutional amendment which restored voting rights to felons. This initiative passed enabling 1.5 million Florida returning citizens to vote.

In 2020, Calta "disorganized" a team of out of state activists and street theater performers to converge on Maine in an effort to flip the US Senate to Democratic. This effort was called Flip 2020 project and worked the the Lisa Savage for Maine campaign. After Maine, a related team traveled to Georgia for the run off Senate election, where they were successful and save Democracy in the US, for now at least.

In 2021, Calta founded QRemedy an organization working to counter the worst effects of the daughter disinformation movements which have sprung or spread from QAnon. QRemedy is especially researching the development of new games in order to treat different populations impacted by the spreading wave of conspiracy theories.

Lifestyle activism

File:Paxpourscurd.jpg

Making tofu at Twin Oaks

Calta has also been a prominent activist in less clearly "political" causes, authoring a widely distributed and translated pamphlet about polyamory and writing and speaking on behalf of various environmental, anti-consumption, and other radical causes. He has also been a very active member of Twin Oaks Community since 1998, serving as the group's recruiting manager since 1999. Many members of Twin Oaks give his recruitment efforts a large amount of credit for helping to increase the group's population - especially its population of young and politically active people - following a population decline and period of low community membership. Calta has stated that he sees Twin Oaks as politically significant due to its ability to serve as a model of a society based on sharing, equality, and cooperation.

In 2013, Calta has became a member of Acorn Community, located 7 miles from Twin Oaks. He has worked on recruiting new members and on marketing and order fulfillment for Acorns organic and heritage seed business Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. He also is becoming active in the class action suit against Monsanto.

Calta managed the fundraising for the youth literacy program called the Reading Window School, based in Louisa VA and for Southern Exposure Seed Exchange's Heritage Harvest Festival a joint project to promote organic and heritage seed saving with the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants at Monticello.

In 1996, Calta was the Chair of the Chernobyl + 10 campaign, which included numerous political actions and a large conference in Kiev, Ukraine.

Between 1997 and 2010 Calta served on the board of directors of US based anti-nuclear group NIRS for the last three years as the president of the board.

In 1999, Calta co-founded the Emma Goldman Institute for Theoretical and Applied Funology, with Frodo Underhill (a real person who took on the characters name). Funology is a largely undocumented quasi-science which "studies fun, using somewhat repeatable experiments" such as parties and festivals.

In 2001, Calta co-designed with Joy Legendre, Hawina Falcon and Kate Adamson the Co-Empowerment system for personal growth and enabling political action. Co-Empowerment uses a collection of tools for helping people, especially activists, to move through their fears and other internal blocks to reach their "empowered selves". Calta and Legendre do workshops and occasional seminars using these tools.

In 2003, 2006 and 2007, Calta was a presenter at the Network For New Culture Summer Camp program. In 2003 and 2007, the co-empowerment tools were/will be introduced and in 2006 he and Tree Bressen presented the work of Joanna Macy on moving through despair to Empowerment.

Calta considers himself an anarchist and propagandist and is the principal organizer of the Fingerbook Propaganda Project, which besides producing and distributing the pamphlet on polyamory also creates and disseminates "Fingerbooks" (small handbooks) on Consensus, designing revolutions, and intentional communities. Calta taught a class on "How to Design a Revolution" at the Living Education Center for Arts and Ecology (LEC) in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In 2009, Calta and his lovers Feonix Fawkes and Angie Tupelo did workshops on Honest Seduction and launched a website on the topic.

In 2009, Calta initiated the failed attempt to organize the air festival called Villages in the Sky at East Wind Community This effort in it's early stages did complete a number of tree houses at Acorn Community in Virginia. It also brought a curious hoard of activists and artists to Burning Man in 2009, where they presented in the Alternative Energy Zone.

In 2010, Calta began work with multiple transparency groups and promoting this idea.

IN 2012, Calta started working on the Chubby Squirrels Project. This is the temporary name (thank goodness) for a new community based on best practices of existing communities. Specifically, borrowing the transparency tools work from Twin Oaks, the clearness and consensus processes from Acorn, dumpster assisted sustainability from The Keep in Washington Death City, off grid tech like Dancing Rabbit and a radical service mission like Possibility Alliance and Catholic Worker communities. While many people are interested in this, there are no principal organizers identified for this project yet.

In 2013, in conjunction with other organizers from Twin Oaks and Acorn Calta started work on the Loud Love Conference [7]

In 2014, working with other members from Acorn, Calta initiated the Point A project which is designed to catalyze new income sharing communities in the NYC proper and Washington DC proper regions (not the metro areas, but inside the city limits). [8].

In 2015, Calta was involved in starting new income sharing communities in Richmond Virginia, Portland, Oregon and Chester, Vermont.

In 2018, Calta was the principal "disorganizer" of the team of activists and organizers who went to Tampa Florida to run a canvass and GOTV effort for Amendment 4, restoring felon voting rights. This effort paid off and these rights were restored, only to be stripped by Gov Desantis, who basically did not want black people to be voting. [9]

In 2020, Calta was the principal organizers of another group of out-of-state activists (now called "The Flip Project" who went first to Maine, to work with independent candidate, Lisa Savage, who because of Rank Choice Voting in Maine was able to draw votes away from Republican Susan Collins, without interfering witht he chances of Democrat Sara Gidion to wrestle the seat from the most unpopular Senator in the country. Alas, the polls were wildly wrong and Collins won re-election, but Georgia and the US Seante were still in play. Most of the Flip team relocated to Atlanta where we ran mural competitions, canvassed door to door and promoted free rides to the polls - especially in regions which do not speak English as a first language.

Family

Calta, and Hawina, his partner of 28 years, and Sky Blue all are co-parents to Willow that Hawina gave birth to in 2002. He is the son of Earl R. Flansburgh, a successful Boston architect who died in 2009. He is the older brother of John Flansburgh, of rock band They Might Be Giants. Calta's mother, Louise Flansburgh, is the founder and president of Boston by Foot, which gives architectural walking tours of the city of Boston.

Calta lives at Twin Oaks community in a Polyamorous family. Two Dad's, Calta and Sky Blue, organize with Hawina Falcon who is Willow Star Falcon's mom. Willow has slayed Magic Gods. [10]

Quotes

"Your passport to complaining is your willingness to do something about it" From the Ecotopia Principles

"Dream out loud with me"

"Modesty is dangerous: If we believe we are here to do something, if in fact we have the daunting task of turning around a system which appears destined not only to degrade, demoralize and dehumanize us, but to destroy the ecosystem in the process - we don't have time for outdated social customs. You need to tell me what you can do, what you are good at, how you can contribute to helping to make these changes. And i in turn need to tell you the same. Anything less endangers us. Anything less leaves one of us wondering why the other is not being clear, 'Are you unaware of your gifts? Are you unsure of them ? Am i wrong in estimating your ability?'" From personal webpage [11]

"Everyone but the devil means well."

"I'm convinced community is the answer, I'm just not sure what the question is." From Washington Post article on Twin Oaks [12]

"First Rule of Romance: Being in love with someone is insufficient condition to be in a romantic relationship with them."

"Twin Oaks is not utopia. But on a good day, we can see it from here."

"Patience is the easiest of all virtues, all you have to do is wait."

In response to the question 'When can we get together?' "There are two times in my life, now or not happening, you should choose"

"If you want to save a mad world, hire a mad person"

"Being in love with someone is insufficent reason to be in a romanctic relationship with them"

"Patience is the easiest virtue, all you have to do is wait."

"Besides hard work, all you need to stop a reactor is to be brilliant and to be lucky."

"People interchange envy and jealousy. Envy is when someone else has something you want also. Jealousy is when you don't want someone else to have something you think you have."

"Excuses are like cotton candy. They take up a lot of space, are sickeningly sweet and there is not much there."

"live your life like you are trying to keep the reader of your autobiography engaged"

"All honest mistakes are forgivable"

"We are in the manifest business."

"It is not necessary to overthrow a government to have a revolution. Revolutions are dramatic changes in the power relationship between institutions and individuals. So the Sexual Revolution qualifies, the power of the state and especially the church being significantly reduced basically thru a mass civil disobedience. No leaders ousted, no shots fired, but a full on revolution none-the-less." From the "Designing Revolution" Fingerbook for LEC.

"Fear no intimacy. Love full force"

"The antidote to globalization is replacing the materialist mindset with one which encourages sharing."

"It is not important to get your name in the history books, what is important is to make sure the pages get written right"

"If we fail in all else, if we succeed in sparking grand romance, we become great people."

"The difference between an organizer and a leader is that there is no job too low for an organizer."

"It is in the hands of the good liberals that the world will burn."

"If you don't have any enemies, you are not doing anything important."

"Good organizers are interrupt driven, good lovers are focused and attentive – rich lives are about choosing when for each."

"Being rich is not about having money, it is about having lots of good options."

"i am an optimist – if the anarchist principle is that “you can do what ever you want, but you must take responsibility for it," and you believe the new age principle of “we create our own reality,” then we have an obligation to be optimistic – or else we are creating the wrong reality. For seven years i lived in eastern europe working with small anti-nuclear groups against the most powerful corporations and the state. i was constantly reminding them that it was groups exactly like theirs which had stopped reactors around the world. it is as papa Chomsky so well put it:

"If you assume there is no hope you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance that you may contribute to making a better world. that is your choice."

"i am in the hope business. and that is why i am an anarchist." From the last section from the "Why i am an anarchist" [[13]] essay.

"There are lots of different ways that you can approach the problem of climate change. What the direct action movement believes is that the market-based solutions that have been used in the past are inappropriate. If we let corporations and governments do what they have always done, and the world is going to die,"

From AP story on South East Climate Convergence arrest actions printed in Nov 2008.

Full Name

Calta's full name is currently:

Paxus Adrian Zakarya Tupelo Adelová Calta Star

Where Tupelo is his long time Twin Oaks residence.

Adela Kubickova is his first wife and Adelová is the scrambling of Czech married name culture.

Star is his poly family name taken in 2002. This family name was temporarily in disuse after the departure of original co-parent Anissa Ljanta, a New Zealand social change activist and radical.

Writings can be found under both Adelová-Calta and Calta-Star

External links

• New name story
• Sailboat story
• Hnuti DUHA Czech environmental group
• Debate with Hans Blix
• Chernobyl 10th anniversary campaign website
• Reading Window School
• Heritage Harvest Festival in 2007 at Monticello's Tufton Farms
• Thomas Jefferson's Center for Historic Plants at Monticello
• Green Hydrogen Coalition
• Brad Blantons 2nd run for congress
• Boston by Foot
• NY Times Letter to the Editor on Ukrainian nukes.