the nonsense of infinite growth just distracts from the fact that we will all wither and die
Activism
Act against the exploitation of the system
I admit it: I’m a fan of Yanis Varoufakis
movement for democracy in Europe and I hope he will be successful. Why do I rally - or fall - for the man? It might be his appearance and reputation as a motorcycling superhero coming to our rescue. Is it because he is a delightfully extravagant figure in the corridors of power that we tend to cynically dismiss? Is ...
Virtual capitalism
Margrit Kennedy, who died two years ago today, was one of the greatest advocates of an interest and inflation free money system. She was among the first to predict that we "cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet". Of course this is true. Logically, there are two ways out. We can try to stop ...
Lifestyle Changes
Most activists are frustrated when their opponent in a debate reduces citizen influence to consumer choices. They can't stand people who still live in their liberal fairy tale world where the consumer votes with her wallet and from the sum total of consumers, in good Rousseauian fashion, emerges the volonté generale and determines the destiny ...
Short Climate Temper
During a ride share with sacred. We are talking about a crime against humanity. The destruction of the rain forest and the rendering extinct of species are irreversible, as is the unleashing of permafrost methane, the demise of the coral reefs, the bees, and the birds. So how does it sound if we hold on ...
The Cat Who Killed Curiosity
Imagine the following scenario. A person who has noticed that the president's hair has turned grey posts on social media that she suggests he should dye it. Having grown up in a very poor neighbourhood she had not been able to finish school, so she confused orthographical acuity with onomatopoeic precision and spelled it thus: ...
TTIP means throwing democracy overboard for the financial security of the wealthy elite
Bullshit Job Rap
We perform empty tasks to protect the status quo of the one percent Hell-bent on endless wealth multiplication and profit enlargement The fruit of our labor is trickling bottom-up on the escarpment We're the indentured workers who slave for money just to pay our rent "It's the economy, stupid" preaches Donald Trump who knows how ...
Class Society
Bring it on, I hear myself thinking. Our economic reality is called class society. The wealthy one percent accumulates more and this seems to be a law of capitalism itself - we all know how the story goes. Given my pet dogma that makes saving our planet for future generations an absolute priority, I ask ...
Will Work For The Commons
for like minded people around the world who find themselves in a similar predicament We are educated people in our thirties, some of us have families. We feel the responsibility to comply with the system for the safety of our loved ones. Every day, we reluctantly choose to work for companies that don't (and can't) ...
Revolutionary
... is not that working over the Internet allows us to survive without becoming captives of the infinite growth System. Revolutionary is that we can earn well enough online to extract resources from that System and use them to build a sustainable, resilient, steady-state economy -
We are special!
Ours is the first species that is thrashing the planet so that a few rich individuals can survive in bunkers they build from the profits of that very destruction.
The rich.
The rich and their armies.
The relevant question becomes: What is the mutiny threshold?
Monetizing Facebook the Civilized Way
It took me a few weeks after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the public outcry for theoretical "freedom of speech", but today I arrived at a fresh idea. It pertains to this world's largest virtual territory, with more than a billion inhabitants - Facebook. Today, Facebook is a multi-billion dollar marketing machine. The money ...
Collaborative Anti-Consumerism
The word "consumerism" seems to imply that the act of consuming is the essence of our being, something more profound than what existentialism or Freudianism were hinting at. I understand that pushing a shopping cart and loading it with things that we decide all by ourselves to pick from the shelves can occasionally give us ...
Let’s call it a day
Suppose a respected scientific magazine would have written in October 1962 during the Cuba missile crisis, that a blow-up was inevitable, or even that the rockets were already in the air. Would the public just shrug it off and go about their business? But this is not the 1960s. In our "information" age, the intensity ...
The Enemy we Need?
Starring: Corporations (or rather any constellation that has so much capital at its disposal as to develop the emergent quality of being able to ignore the disastrous "externalities" they cause - of not giving a shit about reality) We are entering a new phase of schizophrenia. In today's globalized world the military powers might still ...
Countdown from Peak Child
I watched an entertaining and instructive talk by Swedish professor Hans Rosling the other day, because YouTube recommended this video. Mr. Rosling introduced himself as a dry statistics professor but did everything humanly possible to maximize the probability of laughter he induced among his mixed audience. Watch the first few minutes of his presentation and ...
The Aura of Money
A little anecdote that showed me recently what is wrong with our money: We were eating out in an Indian restaurant, where they serve excellent vegetarian dishes, fresh naan-bread and aromatic rice. The portions were quite large, and we were enjoying the many flavours, while feeding some of the salat cucumbers to our one-year old. ...
To respect us, is to respect this land
So today I can't write a hymn that flows well, but I want one for all the good people trying to live a life of respect for Mother Earth. Would you help me make the lyrics below sound better, express better what we aim for? Don't worry about hurting the "author's" feelings because there should ...
“But you need money”
Money. I've always had enough of it because of my natural thriftiness. So I can't really speak for those who have experienced real poverty (the UN's $1.25 a day kind of poverty), and for whom an empty wallet means an empty stomach. I know the predicament of all too many people: They simply need money ...
The Average Family
Kansas, 2050. - The shit has hit the fan, years ago. The Surveillance State has diabolical proportions and every citizen gives voice to dissent, shows abnormal behavior or otherwise deviates from the average, is arrested. Family Grey has always lived comfortably, and during the first months after the crises (a term that was used mostly ...
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation introduces vaccine against Affluenza
SEATTLE, Washington - Following recent outrage over a
Think like a network [draft]
It is nice to focus on our own social group. The search for more community spirit seems to be a common denominator of many people who have fallen, for various reasons, out of love with the individual consumerist worldview and its promise of satisfaction through material saturation. So we head for the exit, we dream ...
The Aura of Stuff
In sweatshops in Bangladesh, and shipped by a fossil-fuel hungry transport network, before being advertised by sexist media and sold to people who neither can afford nor really need it. And now this t-shirt is speaking. "I cannot wash away the sins committed in my name", it says (if it's a Catholic t-shirt), "but I ...