 |
Newest Blog Entries:
Lakota Vow: ‘Dead or in Prison Before We Allow the XL Pipeline’
Posted by Michael Butler, Tuesday, March 18, 2014Can Marijuana Improve Your Emotional State? | Politics News | Rolling Stone
There is no question about this fact.Posted by Michael Butler, Sunday, August 25, 2013
America: Home of the Brave, Land of the… Jailed? | Global Research
Posted by Michael Butler, Sunday, August 25, 2013Human Cells React Differently Between Our Well-Being From a Noble Purpose or Self-Gratification
Have we not always wondered why politician's all age faster than they are supposed to! Working nobly for the good of all concerned, is shown to be a way to obtain and maintain enhanced health. Perhaps our current leaders would perform differently if this were know to them. b.a.Posted by Michael Butler, Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Seeds of Destruction: The Diabolical World of Genetic Manipulation | Global Research
Posted by Michael Butler, Monday, July 22, 2013Were Paleolithic Cave Painters High on Psychedelic Drugs? Scientists Propose Ingenious Theory for Why They Might Have Been
Posted by Michael Butler, Sunday, July 14, 2013Biophotons: The Human Body Emits, Communicates with, and is Made from Light
Fun for the religious/scientist/philosopher, as to the potentials this presents. Science has shown we communicate with, emit, and are formed from light! b.a.Posted by Michael Butler, Friday, June 28, 2013
1863 Indian Massacre Site Uncovered in California – Now, the Paiutes and DWP are fighting to leave the area untouched | Newser Mobile
from Steve ZuckermanPosted by Michael Butler, Sunday, June 9, 2013
The Global Indigenous Uprising Offers a Path That Won’t Destroy Life on Earth
Posted by Michael Butler, Saturday, June 1, 2013Robert Redford on America: ‘Certain Things Have Got Lost’
Posted by Michael Butler, Friday, May 24, 2013China destroys the ancient Buddhist symbol of Lhasa City in Tibet – CNN iReport
Posted by Harry Sifton, Sunday, May 12, 2013John Zerzan: We Heard Screaming
Zerzan via Anonymous twitter feed ..1966 was a banner year for murder sprees, a break-out year ahead of its time. Although Charles Starkweather killed eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958, it was ’66 that introduced things to come. In that year Richard Speck stabbed eight student nurses to death in their Chicago apartment; and Charles Whitman left a suicide note, climbed a tower at the University of Texas, and shot fourteen people to death. After a few years’ relative lull, in 1983 multiple shootings by post office workers engendered the term “going postal.” Since that year there have been 35 homicides in eleven incidents involving postal employees. A slowly rising number of workplace killings included, for example, an Atlanta office shooting in 1999: thirteen dead. It was in the late 1990s that the term “school shootings” entered common usage. In Springfield, Oregon in 1998, Kip Kinkel gunned down his parents, then shot 24 fellow Thurston High School students, two of them fatally. More famously, in 1999 two boys at Columbine High near Denver achieved a death toll of fifteen. Several more school rampages followed, along with shootings at shopping malls, such as the nine fatalities at an Omaha mall in 2007. There were 33 killed at Virginia Tech in 2007, and twelve dead at the Fort Hood army base in Texas in 2009, on and on, including the "Batman movie" horror at a Denver suburb this summer and now the CT elementary school body count.. read more
[snip]
U.S. data, by the way, is increasingly duplicated in other developed and developing countries. Evidently, the more technological the society, the more likely carnage will occur. And this cuts across cultural differences by and large, underlining the importance of the technological factor. Technology can’t be said to be the only factor, but it is very much related to what I think is the bottom-line reality behind these near-daily rampages: the disappearance of community––face-to-face community.
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, April 20, 2013
Adbusters: 1% Art
Andrea Fraser at AdB ..recent economic research has established a direct connection between skyrocketing art prices and income inequality, showing that “a one percentage point increase in the share of total income earned by the top 0.1% triggers an increase in art prices of about 14 percent.” It is now painfully obvious that what has been extraordinarily good for the art world over the past decades has been disastrous for the rest of the world. In the United States it is difficult to imagine any arts organization or practice that can escape the economic structures and policies that have produced this inequality. The private nonprofit model–which almost all US museums as well as alternative art organizations exist within–is dependent on wealthy donors and has its origins in the same ideology that led to the current global economic crisis .. Progressive artists, critics and curators face an existential crisis: how can we continue to justify our involvement in this art economy? At minimum, if our only choice is to participate or to abandon the art field entirely, we can stop rationalizing that participation in the name of critical or political art practices or–adding insult to injury–social justice. Any claim that we represent a progressive social force while our activities are directly subsidized by, and benefit from, the engines of inequality can only contribute to the justification of that inequality.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, April 14, 2013
Gay marriage: And now on to polygamy | The Economist
Posted by Michael Butler, Wednesday, April 10, 2013Adbusters: Mein Campus
AdB ..A cultural shift is happening on university campuses across North America. Students are lining up for mental health services faster than they can be treated. This shift is defining a generation and marks a profound change in the mental environment on campuses today. There was a time not so long ago when students used to reach out for help with a particular life crisis: a broken relationship, the death of a loved one, difficulty with a major decision. Today, however, students are complaining that their life is the crisis, an all-pervasive sense of bleakness about themselves and their future that didn’t exist a generation ago .. More than two-thirds of student health centers say they don’t have enough resources and counselors to deal with the growing numbers of clients. Thirty-four percent of centers have ongoing waitlists.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, March 30, 2013
The Iraq War and Moral Injury
Posted by Michael Butler, Friday, March 22, 2013“Rhoda” gives lessons in life — and death – Salon.com
A wonderful interview from an incredible lady. mbPosted by Michael Butler, Friday, March 15, 2013
Adbusters: The anti-preneur manifesto
This is Danielle Leduc ..I don’t want to be a designer, a marketer, an illustrator, a brander, a social media consultant, a multi-platform guru, an interface wizard, [] a brand, a representative, an ambassador, a bestseller or a chart-topper. I don’t want to be a human resource or part of your human capital ... I want to be a lover, a teacher, a wanderer, an assembler of words, a sculptor of immaterial, a maker of instruments, a Socratic philosopher, [] an erratic muse, [] a disrupter, a creator, an apocalyptic visionary, a master of reconfiguration.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Arundhati Roy: Decolonize the consumerist wasteland – Re-imagining a world beyond capitalism and communism
Roy in Adbusters ..If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them. The first step toward re-imagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination – an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the waters in the rivers, the trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? If they say they cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Labor of Love, The enforced happiness of Pret A Manger
Tim Noah at the New Republic ..Pret workers[] are required to master what the company calls the "Pret Behaviours," which in addition to the usual requirements—courtesy, efficiency, etc.—include "has presence," "creates a sense of fun," and "is happy to be themself" [sic] .. Pret doesn't merely want its employees to lend their minds and bodies; it wants their souls, too .. Noting that one Pret worker in London got fired soon after he tried to start a union .. Pret keeps its sales clerks in a state of enforced rapture through policies vaguely reminiscent of the old East German Stasi. A "mystery shopper" visits every Pret outlet once a week. If the employee who rings up the sale is appropriately ebullient, then everyone in the shop gets a bonusits getting harder and harder to buy something these days w/out guilt .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, February 2, 2013
Glenn Greenwald: MLK’s Vehement Condemnations of US Militarism are More Relevant Than Ever
Glenzilla ..Obama's policies are a manifestation of exactly the militaristic mindset which King so eloquently denounced. Obama has always been fond of invoking King's phrase "fierce urgency of now", yet ironically, that is lifted from this anti-war speech, one that stands as a stinging repudiation of the continuous killing and violence Obama has spent the last four years unleashing on many countries around the world (Max Blumenthal suggested that Obama's second inaugural speech be entitled "I have a drone")Happy BDay MLK! .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, January 21, 2013
Jared Diamond: Do Hunter-Gatherer Societies Raise Their Children Better Than Americans Do?
Posted by Michael Butler, Saturday, January 19, 2013Adbusters: The Great Mystery
Tim Flannery @ Adbusters ..Foremost among the great mysteries is whether or not there are other Gaias out there .. [But] If we really are the first intelligent super organism, then perhaps we are destined to populate all of existence .. If we ever achieve that, then Gaia will have reached puberty, for she will have then become reproductive, nurturing the spark of life on one dead sphere after another. From our present vantage point we cannot know such things. But I am certain of one thing: if we do not strive to love one another, and to love our planet as much as we love ourselves, then no further human progress is possible here on Earth.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Wednesday, January 2, 2013
What Will Be Different After 12/21/12
from Raya KingPosted by Michael Butler, Monday, December 31, 2012