Recently, with the WEF spending the last few years acknowledging global income inequality is a problem, I’ve declared a kind of victory for the Occupy Movement: getting the lexicon on the 1% and inequality on the tongues of the sly gazillionaires who rule the world, and into mass consumption. Now
Continue readingTag: Voluntary Simplicity
Politics, Re-Spun: The 1% Has More Solidarity Than We Do
In Davos, the 1% rule the world. Literally. They also have the guns. The 1% are claiming we have it out for them; that if we don’t tone down the rhetoric and stop calling them names like “the contemptuous rich,” we might end up starting a class war. But they
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Occupy Vancouver Reboots Tonight!
Occupy Vancouver reboots tonight to join the worldwide #WaveOfAction that began on April 4 and runs [at least] to July 4, 2014. We will meet in Grandview Park on Commercial Drive in East Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish territories. 615pm is the start time, though honestly, I’ll be there a bit
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: When Blog Comment Spam Goes Bad
You know you want it! Someone really crossed the line from whoops, to nuclear codes. One of the15,000 weekly blog spam comments that never make it to the human eyes stage on this website, accidentally made it through. Sadly, it is a compendium of all the kinds of faux-sincere blog
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: What Occupy Vancouver Could Look Like
May Day, on May 1st: do you think we could get Occupy Vancouver up by then? I know how we can get this to work. I really do. And I’m not talking about tents or physical 24 hour occupations, in particular, right now. I am however talking about 2 things:
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Honing In On Friday’s #WaveOfAction
We need to think about two things for this Friday’s Occupy Movement reboot in the Worldwide #WaveOfAction: When thinking about pursuing social, political and economic equality, what is the list of things we need to change, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally? Who do we need to build coalitions with to
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Yes, Your Parents’ Standard of Living Was Better
Ugh. We’re so much poorer than our parents! Yes, your parents’ standard of living was better, so what are you going to do about it? When I was growing up in the 1970s, most [maybe 80%?] of my friends had a mom who stayed home and didn’t work. Over the
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: If the 1% Has Russell Brand Killed…
If the 1% has Russell Brand killed, we will see it in the corporate media as a drug OD relapse, or a freak accident. Why? He is dangerous because he fearlessly tells the truth and challenges pretence. Let’s examine this in some detail here [with video]: His brain works twice
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Because You’re Not As Dumb As They Think You Are!
Today is Friday. Let’s make it “think for ourselves Friday.” It’ll work: the government/corporations/1% won’t see it coming! Twitter / occupythemob: http://t.co/doHx1xWO4l. December 17, 2013 Fried Squirrels (0) December 20, 2013 Enbridge: What Now? We Escalate Our Fight (4) January 7, 2012 Day Two of Tragedy of the Market: From
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: More Clever Climate Change Awareness Actions!
…Burning oil caused the melting in the first place… A week ago [was it that long?] two climate change activists pulled a Yes Men on our greatest employee, Mr. Stephen Harper. But last summer, you may not have seen an equally clever, but more hi-tech, stunt by Greenpeace’s Save the
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: How the Occupy Movement is Enriching People’s Lives
Imagine an eco-community of micro-homes designed as a first step out of homelessness. Housing, easy to get into, if people care. Occupy Madison in Wisconsin has come up with an innovative first step of a solution [see below]. These 96 square foot homes are no long term solution, at all.
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: The Ultimate New Year’s Resolution
It’s mostly us. Many of us have heard of the idea of planning policy to consider effects seven generations downline. We’re pretty smart. It shouldn’t be that hard. But we have many incentives to think short term. Sometimes so short that we are ignorantly and apathetically victimizing our descendants. But
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Enbridge: What Now? We Escalate Our Fight
Some breaking news occurred yesterday, the Joint Review Panel of the National Energy Board approved the Enbridge pipeline, but with 209 conditions. To quote a teenager from 1994: “Big whoop.” Also, big whoop goes out to the awesome pictures of soon to be decimated pristine wilderness on the report cover.
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Fixing Cyncial Corporate Media
How to inoculate yourself against cynical corporate media. Corporate news media is not on our side. It is on the side of stoking fear, cynically eroding possibilities of a better, more robust democracy, and scaring us into obedience to corporations and government through sensational stories that undermine our happiness. But
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Fried Squirrels
It’s a crisp, foggy November Saturday morning in the south side of the city. Seventeen people sit in the large open area at the back end of an organic fair trade coffee shop run by a workers’ co-op inspired by the Mondragon movement in Spain. Meet-ups like this are quite
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Practice CrimeStop: You Are the New Terrorist
Balloons are a threat to civil order. The police must protect themselves from you with riot gear. You are a bad person. You. You enemy of the state. You radical environmentalist. Or worker rights advocate. Or whatever cause you are promoting. You. You are a threat to order. When you
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Are You Just Too Tired? We’ve Known Why for Decades
You actually do deserve a break today. What ails us? A large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Ice Crisis at the Poles: Ice, Ice, Baby
What continent is this, anyway? And why does it matter? The arctic ice cap will be fully melting in the next few summers, likely. There is a lake on top of the ice at the North Pole. Santa is getting worried. “On August 26, 2012, the Arctic sea ice extent
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Is It Really That Hard to Imagine Cities Without Cars?
A blissful infographic of imaginative paradigm mechanics! Probably. That’s why really creative paradigm mechanics are thinking outside the box-y sedans to figure out how we could reorient cities and movement in cities with a changed premise: no cars. Imagine how much parking space we’d free up for human pursuits? Imagine
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Climate Change Denial Affirmations
The sky is not falling. It’s just the end of this ice age. Extreme weather events are not related to each other. The climate is not a global system of feedback loops. Ecology is spin from tree-hugging, granola-eating hippies. Ice melts. The global insurance industry is only talking about climate
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