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2013-05-19 14:06:20 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 10 +1s)

“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.” - Rollo May

2013-05-17 01:12:08 (1 comments, 4 reshares, 15 +1s)

#philosoraptor  

2013-05-11 02:09:54 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Four days until the election.

I will either have time to participate or I will have a new job. :-)

2013-05-01 12:59:01 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

The new Mother Pelican is out.

2013-04-19 16:10:24 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Hello fellow Greens,

I live in a jurisdiction that allows unlimited political contributions from anywhere in the world. I am here to ask you for your help in changing that. Part of our policy platform here in British Columbia is to restrict political donations to citizens only and only citizens who actually live in the province.

As with Green politicians everywhere, I am long on passion and short on funds. Even $5 or $10 dollars via the Paypal link below could make a material difference in this election. My opponents have deep pockets but are fresh out of ideas. I know that I can beat them on the issues, I can beat them at the doorstep but I cannot match their resources.

And we really need to beat them.

If you live in British Columbia I can even send you a tax receipt for donations over $20.

Thank-you.

2013-04-19 04:06:39 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Nothing elaborate, look to my profile page if you need convincing.

I am trying to effect positive change within the existing political system. 

Some say I am a dreamer. But I need to start somewhere.

If every single person in my circles sends me $5 via the Paypal donation page below I will have what I need to defeat the money in my riding. I turn to you, Google+, and the people who have chosen to add me to their circles, for your support.

If you live in British Columbia I can even send you a tax receipt for donations over $20.

Thank-you.

2013-04-05 03:33:29 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 0 +1s)

The new Mother Pelican is out.

2013-03-19 23:19:25 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 11 +1s)

"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." - Kenneth Boulding 

2013-03-17 14:29:39 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

"Those who are unaware they are walking in darkness, will never seek the light."--Bruce Lee

2013-03-14 11:32:48 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 6 +1s)

“Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.” - Albert Einstein

2013-03-12 01:15:53 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

When you consider the serious health effects of stress, this is such a simple solution.

“People who reported higher levels of mindfulness described better control over their emotions and behaviors during the day. In addition, higher mindfulness was associated with lower activation at bedtime, which could have benefits for sleep quality and future ability to manage stress.”

2013-03-11 04:32:48 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

“In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be, by remaining what we are.” - Max DePree

2013-03-10 05:37:01 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

I tremble for my species when I reflect that God is just. - Thomas Jefferson

2013-03-06 01:52:35 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

The looting phase is finished.

Next up, full blown economic and social collapse.

2013-03-01 04:40:01 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

It’s no wonder we don’t defend the land where we live. We don’t live there. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances. - Derrick Jensen

2013-02-28 23:27:50 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

The new Mother Pelican is out.

2013-02-26 14:08:28 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 3 +1s)

Dear fellow humans being,

I am running for office in the province where I live for the Green Party of British Columbia. I am here to ask you for what all aspiring politicians want from you. Your support.

Why does that matter to you, someone who probably does not live where I do? We all share a common atmosphere and we all share a common future.

I am here to ask you to help me buy some time. Time for us to implement the solutions, time for us to come up with more new ideas to try to soften the blow of what lies in our future. The thick purple line on the map below is the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline which if built would carry bitumen across the Rocky Mountains, across thousands of streams in a pristine wilderness with little or no environmental oversight on construction. The thick blue line is the Kinder Morgan pipeline that is currently in the permitting phase... more »

2013-02-26 05:32:59 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Dear fellow humans being,

I am running for office in the province where I live for the Green Party of British Columbia. I am here to ask you for what all aspiring politicians want from you. Your support.

Why does that matter to you, someone who probably does not live where I do? We all share a common atmosphere and we all share a common future.

I am here to ask you to help me buy some time. Time for us to implement the solutions, time for us to come up with more new ideas to try to soften the blow of what lies in our future. The thick purple line on the map below is the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline which if built would carry bitumen across the Rocky Mountains, across thousands of streams in a pristine wilderness with little or no environmental oversight on construction. The thick blue line is the Kinder Morgan pipeline that is currently in the permitting phase... more »

2013-02-26 05:32:36 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Dear fellow humans being,

I am running for office in the province where I live for the Green Party of British Columbia. I am here to ask you for what all aspiring politicians want from you. Your support.

Why does that matter to you, someone who probably does not live where I do? We all share a common atmosphere and we all share a common future.

I am here to ask you to help me buy some time. Time for us to implement the solutions, time for us to come up with more new ideas to try to soften the blow of what lies in our future. The thick purple line on the map below is the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline which if built would carry bitumen across the Rocky Mountains, across thousands of streams in a pristine wilderness with little or no environmental oversight on construction. The thick blue line is the Kinder Morgan pipeline that is currently in the permitting phase... more »

2013-02-26 05:26:01 (2 comments, 5 reshares, 5 +1s)

Dear fellow humans being,

I am running for office in the province where I live for the Green Party of British Columbia. I am here to ask you for what all aspiring politicians want from you. Your support.

Why does that matter to you, someone who probably does not live where I do? We all share a common atmosphere and we all share a common future.

I am here to ask you to help me buy some time. Time for us to implement the solutions, time for us to come up with more new ideas to try to soften the blow of what lies in our future. The thick purple line on the map below is the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline which if built would carry bitumen across the Rocky Mountains, across thousands of streams in a pristine wilderness with little or no environmental oversight on construction. The thick blue line is the Kinder Morgan pipeline that is currently in the permitting phase... more »

2013-02-22 06:12:56 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

"The future belongs to those who can give the next generation reasons to hope." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

2013-02-20 17:54:54 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

The right to speak out is also the duty to speak out.
- Vladimir Pozner

2013-02-13 20:06:59 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 9 +1s)

2013-02-12 17:47:20 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 10 +1s)

“You think the end justifies the means, however vile. I tell you: the end is the means by which you achieve it. Today's step is tomorrow's life. Great ends cannot be attained by base means. You've proved that in all your social upheavals. The meanness and inhumanity of the means make you mean and inhuman and make the end unattainable.” - Wilhelm Reich

2013-02-10 17:24:04 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 14 +1s)

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." -Frederick Douglass

2013-02-10 01:03:45 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 12 +1s)

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.” - Seneca

2013-02-03 04:07:42 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Hopelessly naive?

2013-02-02 16:04:45 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books. - Manly P. Hall

2013-02-01 14:40:47 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

The new Mother Pelican is out.

2013-01-30 22:10:47 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

"What's extraordinary about these findings is that it provides some of the first evidence that early American hunter-gatherers were not as simplistic as we've tended to imagine," says study co-author T.R. Kidder, PhD, professor and chair of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

2013-01-28 04:19:44 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Interesting read.

Can you see the sasquatch?

So what happens when we classify in the absence of theory? We aren’t yet inductively constructing theory, and we aren’t able to deduce from theory (since there isn’t any yet) the classes of objects in the domain we are investigating. We argue that what is happening here is pattern recognition (Bishop 1995).

2013-01-25 20:11:43 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

They were all bullshit jobs in the first place.

Thinking that we could be prosperous selling plastic gewgaws to each other (that were actually made elsewhere), servicing peoples needs for food and entertainment and participating in the irrelevance of finance, insurance, real estate and retail was ridiculous. Productivity means producing something. None of this activity produced anything. It consumed and destroyed. That it is now over should not be a great surprise to anyone.

"The jobs that are going away aren't coming back," says Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of "Race Against the Machine." ''I have never seen a period where computers demonstrated as many skills and abilities as they have over the past seven years."

2013-01-25 18:11:40 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Someone over on FB commented that they thought that when robots take over jobs like this that the taxes the people being replaced would have paid on their income should still have to be remitted by the company.

I would go further and say that the majority of what those people were making should go into the kitty for redistribution. It is either that or the "surplus" people will soon find themselves facing liquidation. Sort of how people treat livestock in a down market or when the price of grains and hay rises too high to make a profit.

We're doing it to ourselves with our insistence that the primary value in our culture has to be economics.

2013-01-23 17:08:35 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

We keep nibbling around the edges.

Eventually we must realize that there simply is nothing like oil.

Though it takes significant energy and resources to produce the super-small silicon balls, the particles could help power portable devices in situations where water is available and portability is more important than low cost.

2013-01-23 00:50:23 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Are we really that afraid?

"A 5-year-old girl was suspended from school earlier this week after she made what the school called a "terrorist threat."

2013-01-21 21:32:48 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Interesting.

Who knew?

2013-01-21 21:14:26 (4 comments, 3 reshares, 4 +1s)

So much for that.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

2013-01-21 14:17:35 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

"The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable receiving." - Albert Einstein

2013-01-20 17:13:29 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

A very brave perspective on being in the world.

2013-01-20 15:11:12 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

I talk to people about the issues facing our society all of the time.

Always their rationalizations start out with "They". They will do this or they will do that. What "They" have been doing for my entire lifetime is whatever it is that is in their own best interest. And this time their own best interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of the majority of people who live here.

"They" are not going to lift a finger to do anything to mitigate the destruction of the planetary ecosystem. "They" are going to continue to milk this system of exploitation for as long as they can right up until they can't any do it any longer. It is up to us to recognize this fact and to start doing what we can to make a difference for our kids.


To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power... more »

2013-01-20 15:10:23 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

"Favourable regulatory terms" means a government who is willing to use violence to stop opposition and a government that is willing to continue providing them with rock bottom royalty rates.

They need to be disabused of that notion and we are the only ones able to do it. We still have the limited democratic powers that our system grants us. We need to use them for the benefit of all of us.

Focusing on shale oil and other hard-to-reach fuels and citing "favourable regulatory terms" in North American countries (namely the US and Canada) for current profit growth, BP plans says that it now hopes less developed countries "will succeed" in paving a path for more unconventional fuel extraction in the coming years. BP's plan says that its global oil extraction could increase over the next two decades.

2013-01-20 15:08:43 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

A potent message for all of us.

Stop being lazy, get off the couch and educate yourselves.

2013-01-20 15:07:56 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

I keep coming back to Buckminster Fuller's idea on how to handle industrial pollution.

Demand zero emissions from industry. Government would compensate them for the costs associated with developing and implementing the technologies required to achieve this goal, leaving these industries in as good a competitive position as before the new regulations. The catch? Government would become entitled to all of the basic elements that the technology would sequester. Government would then come and pick up said materials, warehouse them and when industry is in need of more basic materials they would come to government to purchase the materials. This would compensate taxpayers for their initial investment in transitioning and close the materials loop, eliminating the need for rapacious extraction and exploitation of mineral resources.

This approach makes far too much sense for us to ever... more »

2013-01-20 15:04:38 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

A great example of this focused way of looking at the world is cancer.

We treat cancer in isolation. We have spent billions looking for a cure, millions fighting against the most egregious causes like smoking and we also spend ridiculous amounts of cognitive effort in denying the systemic causes that science has shown us. For example? Diesel exhaust is a known carcinogen. Benzene is a known carcinogen. Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen. If we spent half the time and money countering the "enterprise" that brings these carcinogens into our human environment as we do searching for a "cure", cancer would not be the scourge it is in our society today. Our passion for new cars, mobile phones, marble counter-tops, luxurious carpets; this is what is killing us, but because of ever narrowing laser focus on the symptoms of our disease, we miss the bigger picture and with it, the... more »

2013-01-20 15:03:40 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

West Virgina. The Aral Sea. The Gulf of Mexico. Fukushima. Chernobyl. The Niger Delta.

Stop me if you've heard this one before because I got a million of 'em.

I guess my question really boils down to this: When will it be enough? Before or after we reach the critical tipping point where loss of biodiversity guarantees the impoverishment of your children? Their children? What is an acceptable level of devastation? What is the acceptable tradeoff? $1 billion in GDP per extinct species? $500 million? Ten bucks?

Or is it all good as long as it is NIMBY? The problem with that approach is that it only works for a short time until they're done with somewhere else and they come looking for your community. By then it is far too late as there won't be anyone left to stand with you.

Attawapiskat and Fort Chipewyan are what Chris Hedges would describe as... more »

2013-01-20 15:01:44 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

An excellent resource for anyone still thinking that there is a debate to be had about AGW, affectionately known as global heating.

There is no debate. There is the massive and growing body of climate science. There is the massive and growing consensus among climate scientists. And then there is denial, in its many and varied forms, from paid shilling for the oil and gas sector, to the run of the mill "this is too complex and I love my Hummer" ideological positioning of our major political parties and a shrinking number of people in the general population.

I caution you: Don't "believe" in global heating. Get informed. Blind belief in the pronouncements of economists and capitalists got us into this pickle. Only by evaluating the evidence before you with a critical eye will enable you to fully participate in life in this young century. Turn off the TV for a... more »

2013-01-17 19:16:31 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 5 +1s)

http://www.commonsensehome.com/for-beginners/

2013-01-17 18:23:38 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Watch the trailers, support the documentary.

A couple of dollars from half of you who see this will make all of the difference in getting this documentary done.

Thanks.

Chris George

2013-01-16 17:29:21 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Coming soon to an urban area near you.

2013-01-15 17:35:28 (9 comments, 1 reshares, 10 +1s)

"People only accept change when they are faced with necessity, and only recognize necessity when a crisis is upon them." – Jean Monnet