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Burn your cash before it burns you

By February 26, 2013
burning-money

"Moneyless Man" Mark Boyle, living as he does in the UK, has an advantage over Yanks like me in that he can survive without an income but still enjoy free healthcare through the British National Health Service. Gotta love that socialism. Yet, Boyle still argues against hospital-based high-tech medicine and for localized healthcare based on herbs and natural remedies because the results will be healthier for both our bodies and our spirits. Wherever we live in the industrial world, we all … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: ,

Empathy: our strongest weapon against climate change?

By February 18, 2013
Outrospection video screen

Socrates said that the best way to live a good life is to know yourself. In the twentieth century, knowing yourself meant introspection, the practice of looking within popularized by Freudian psychoanalysis. But introspection can easily lead to navel gazing, self love and egoism. Such narcissism is unlikely to help deal with the big problems that threaten human society today, from climate change to global poverty to war in the Middle East. So perhaps what the world needs more than … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , , ,

Four things that were better in 1899

By January 23, 2013
Gibson print

It's no accident that the 1960 film adaptation of The Time Machine opens with host HG Wells welcoming four friends to a dinner party in London on January 5, 1900 to recount events that had occurred since he last met them, on New Year's Eve, 1899. What year could be more symbolic of the end of an era, for good or ill, than 1899? Since Americans worship at the altar of progress, we hardly need to be reminded that plenty of things in the 1890s were certainly much worse than they are … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Arts Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Will 2013 be the year globalization died?

By January 14, 2013
Insourcing American Jobs conference

In The Campaign, last year's hilarious, potty-mouthed political romp with Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, the Motch brothers (modeled of course on the Koch brothers) shovel piles of cash onto the campaign of Galifianakis's character Marty. Why? They want to build factories in his North Carolina congressional district, where they will employ Chinese workers at Chinese wages. They call it "insourcing." The term might sound silly, but in real life insourcing is no joke. For decades, … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Economy Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Letter from India: It takes a village

By December 13, 2012
Gurgaon office tower

If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India. - Max Mueller Returning to the world's second-biggest nation after seven years away, it's clear to me that the two distinctive features of modern India, overpopulation and globalization, are … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Transition Tagged With: , , , , ,

Ecology is turning me into a conservative

By December 12, 2012
Edmund Burke

“Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” advises Michael Pollan, author of foodie blockbuster The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Who knows what hidden dangers newfangled and untested foods like margarine, energy drinks or Tofurkey might pose to our health? Now, that’s conservative. And I don’t mean conservative like the GOP leadership in Congress or the Koch Brothers or people who don’t like gay marriage or abortion and blame the Bible for it. I mean … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Energy Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The real war on Christmas and why it matters

By December 6, 2012
Bill O'Reilly

Christmas season is making me tired. Every year, I get tired of hearing jaunty, NutriSweet-y jingles that sound like they're sung by Hello Kitty touted as "Chrismas Carols" and played earlier and earlier in the fall. "Here Comes Santa Claus" on November 11 — it's a revolting enough song if you have to hear it once. But do we really need to endure this particular brand of nausea for a full six or seven weeks? And I'm just as tired of hearing Fox News announcers sound more and more shrill … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Spirit Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Revenge of the amateur: the future of culture after peak oil

By December 3, 2012
La clemenza di Tito

Does anybody else under the age of sixty like opera besides me? I'm not talking about musicals like Cats or Starlight Express or even light opera or operetta like Die Fledermaus or The Merry Widow. I'm talking about hardcore, five hours long, it-ain't-over-till-the-fat-lady-sings grand opera. This weekend, at our art house movie theater in downtown Staunton, Virginia -- yes, our town of 24,000 souls is lucky enough to have a movie theater that shows foreign films and documentaries -- I … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Arts Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

If you’re not doing politics, you’re not doing enough. Review: Slow Democracy

By November 26, 2012
Fairfield City Council

"We live in an anti-political moment," wrote David Brooks last week in the New York Times, "when many people — young people especially — think politics is a low, nasty, corrupt and usually fruitless business. It’s much nobler to do community service or just avoid all that putrid noise." Brooks rightly suggests that seeing Steven Spielberg's new film Lincoln will show that politics, if done right, is more powerful than volunteerism, altering your personal lifestyle or any other strategy … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

With America distracted by oil bubble, peak oil patiently waits

By November 20, 2012
oil graphic

Mohandas Gandhi may or may not have said, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." But it's become a truism among activists that, after years of playing to an empty house, it's actually a sign of progress when the rotten tomatoes start to fly. For a long time, people in the peak oil community complained that both government and media didn't pay any attention to the issue of energy supply. Well, they can't complain about THAT anymore, with all the … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Energy Tagged With: , , , , , ,