Ladies of New York , you are free to walk bare-breasted through the city! New York City's 34,000 police officers have been instructed that, should they encounter a woman in public who is shirtless but obeying the law, they should not arrest her. This is a good step towards gender parity in public spaces. This decision means that breast exposure is not considered public lewdness...
A century ago, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie believed that Darwin’s theories justified an economy of vicious competition and inequality. They left us with an ideological legacy that says the corporate economy, in which wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, produces the best for humanity. This was always a distortion of Darwin’s ideas. His 1871 book The Descent of Man...
April is usually a cheerful month in New England, with the first signs of spring, and the harsh winter at last receding. Not this year. There are few in Boston who were not touched in some way by the marathon bombings on April 15 and the tense week that followed. Several friends of mine were at the finish line when the bombs went off. Others live close to where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the...
Your information diet is an ethical choice of yours, so when you’re on the Huffington Post looking at say the Kardashians and you click on the Kardashians, understand that you are not only reading that article, but you’re also voting for that article. You’re telling an editor to produce more content like that at the expense of the stuff that you didn’t click on...
As a perpetual emotion machine -- producing and guzzling its own political fuel -- the “war on terror” continues to normalize itself as a thoroughly American way of life and death. Ongoing warfare has become a matter of default routine, pushed along by mainline media and the leadership of both parties in Washington. Without a clear and effective upsurge of opposition from the...
The thriving metropolis of Boston was turned into a ghost town on Friday. Nearly a million Bostonians were asked to stay in their homes – and willingly complied. Schools were closed; business shuttered; trains, subways and roads were empty; usually busy streets eerily resembled a post-apocalyptic movie set; even baseball games and cultural events were cancelled – all in response...
Yesterday, the US House prepared for the debate on the privacy-invading "cybersecurity" bill called CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. The rules committee hearing was the last stop before the bill is voted on by the full House. In the hearing, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) was questioned about the core problems in the bill, like the broad immunity and new...
Americans will remember Monday, April 15, 2013 as a day in which unspeakable violence took the lives of three people and wounded at least 153 after bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon finish line. Thousands of miles away, Iraqis will remember this same Monday as a day in which violence claimed the lives of at least 31 people and over 200 injured after multiple car bombs detonated in...
Late last night I saw on Twitter news reports coming in about the twin bombings at the Boston Marathon. I saw the photographs of bloodied runners on the ground, read the stories about how people had their legs and ankles blown off. I heard that an 8 year old boy died from the bombs. I lived in Boston for six years and stood on the road outside Wellesley College to cheer on the marathon...
People are waking up. They're getting involved. They're saying, "Not another day! This is where I mark the line." Their desire to change the world is turning from simple wishful thinking on Monday mornings into tangible action. The thoughts they used to have only occasionally about their relationship to the rest of the world now occurs to them all the time. They're...
Part 1: The River of Vision “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.” So begins the novel Ishmael , published in 1992 by Daniel Quinn, now residing in Houston. Through the course of more than a dozen books and countless speeches and essays, Daniel Quinn has served as a strong and poetic guide for the human journey. Whether...
The Family: Friend or Foe? The family is one of the issues that divide liberals from conservatives. In general, conservatives tend to see private associations — the family, the church, the corporation — as bulwarks of freedom against the state. Few conservatives question the need for a powerful state apparatus, but they insist that it operate in the service of private...
The war on germs is just one expression of a medical system based on control. Control, in turn, arises from our sense of self, that we are separate beings in an alien and indifferent universe. Not being part of any purpose beyond ourselves, naturally we seek to maximize the security, comfort, pleasure, and other interests of those selves. Technology is one form that ambition takes. If...
Crossroads: Labor Pains of a New Worldview is an exciting and surprisingly uplifting new documentary about the role of ideology in finding solutions to the urgent global crises humankind faces in the 21 st century.
Is greed all that's wrong with capitalism? No. It is not enough to attack capitalists for being greedy, although this is a common tactic. I hope to explain why in this short essay. Consider a small business family who work longer hours than do their employees, who live frugally, keeping just enough of the income from the business to support their modest lifestyle, paying the rest out...
An increasing foundation of scientific research shows a significant linkage between personal well being and environmental knowledge, attitudes and behaviours . This is not coincidence; it is a profound truth of crucial importance in the quest to create sustainable societies. It proves beyond a doubt that sustainability has nothing to do with sacrifice and everything to do with creating a...
A 'cult,' according to Merriam-Webster, can be defined as "Great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work..(and)..a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion." Capitalism has been defined by adherents and detractors: Milton Friedman said, "The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the...
Idle No More is an indigenous peoples movement born in Canada. Their mission is described as follows: Idle No More calls on all people to join in a revolution which honors and fulfills Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water. Colonization continues through attacks to Indigenous rights and damage to the land and water. We must repair these violations, live the spirit...
This might seem a stretch but when John Muir said everything in the universe is connected to everything else he was serious. He was speaking of the ecology of natural systems in the broadest sense – and human ecologies too, no doubt. Ecology in both senses has to do with systems with complex chains of causes and effects and networks of cross influence, the patterns through time of which...
When it comes to competition, we Americans typically recognize only two legitimate positions: enthusiastic support and qualified support. The first view holds that the more we immerse our children (and ourselves) in rivalry, the better. Competition builds character and produces excellence. The second stance admits that our society has gotten carried away with the need to be Number One, that...
Many of you have visited the Films For Action website and asked us why we have not posted any Alex Jones documentaries or included Infowars, Prision Planet, Natural News or other like-minded sites on our list of recommended independent media. Unfortunately, we feel it would be irresponsible to promote Alex Jones, his websites, or any of his films. His films were always overly sensational...
In many spiritual circles, it is popular to talk about gratitude. Gratitude encompasses much more than a quickie “thank you.” It implies a much deeper state of mind, one that practitioners realize will position you to receive even greater abundance. Gratitude – together with all the volumes that have been written about it – is very much an ingredient of the gift...
Daniel Quinn is the author of many works including The Story of B , My Ishmael , and Beyond Civilization . His first book, Ishmael , was published in 1992. Since its release as the winner of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, it has gone on to great success, and been read by millions. It has inspired new ideas in a diverse spectrum of people ranging from doctors and lawyers to musicians a
If we all treat one another with the best principles of human relationships, it is analogous to complying with Nature's biophysical principles by taking responsibility for our own behavior. In other words, if I want to become acquainted with you, it is incumbent on me to determine how I must treat you in order to allow, even encourage, you to reciprocate in kind. Thus, for me to receive the...
The universe ultimately runs on an energy economy, not a market economy as the dominant economic ideology claims. Ecological damage is tied to energy use of any kind in our peculiar type of economy where the operating rules of the system require maximization of profits at any cost. Unrestrained profit maximization in turn impels the conversion of energy and raw materials into garbage as fast...
Meet Gina Rinehart . Born Georgina Hope Hancock, Rinehart is heir to her father’s fortune built at Hancock Prospecting in Australia, where Rinehart remains as executive chair. Hancock Prospecting holds the rights to the world’s largest iron ore deposit and has made Rinehart the richest woman in the world, sitting on a fortune of almost $30 billion USD. Yesterday, Rinehart...
Yesterday was August 28th 2012. Remember that date. It marks the day when the world went raving mad. Three things of note happened. The first is that a record Arctic ice melt had just been announced by the scientists studying the region. The 2012 figure has not only beaten the previous record, established in 2007. It has beaten it three weeks before the sea ice is likely to reach its...
An irony of modern life is that, in spite of spectacular increases in material abundance and centuries of technological progress, hunter-gatherers, people who have lived with almost no material possessions, have enjoyed lives in many ways as satisfying and rewarding as lives led in the industrial North. Many hunter-gatherer societies have been affluent in the sense of having everything they...
Editor's Note: Limited Wants, Unlimited Means is a collection of essays that challenges much of our culture's invisible assumptions about tribal societies, which also allows us to see the assumptions we have about our own culture in a new light. This book was an inspiration to the Films For Action project, and it comes highly recommended as a source of inspiration for ideas and perspectives...
'White supremacists are all too frequently declared to be psychotic loners, where others are seen as part of organised ideological networks'. Photo: Heiko Junge/AP An independent inquiry has established that Anders Behring Breivik, the clean-cut white supremacist who methodically murdered 77 people in Norway, moved around unchallenged for three hours after detonating a car bomb, despite...
The crime on Sunday that left a community devastated and a nation wondering how such evil still happens today Terror and tragedy struck a Milwaukee suburb on Sunday as a white supremacist opened fired in a Sikh temple, killing six and critically injuring three. Worshippers reportedly hid inside closets while the killer walked through the temple, firing coldly and repeatedly. After...
Update 8/6, a clarification. The below article's quotes were taken a bit out of context: http://www.rt.com/news/bolivia-coca-cola-ban-770/ In a symbolic rejection of US capitalism, Bolivia announced it [hopes to] expel the Coca-Cola Company from the country at the end of the Mayan calendar. This will mark the end of capitalism and usher in a new era of equality, the Bolivian govt says...
Excerpt from the book, “The Story of B” Systems thinkers have given us a useful metaphor for a certain kind of human behavior in the phenomenon of the boiled frog. The phenomenon is this. If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber Out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float...
Address given at EnvironDesign 3, Baltimore, MD, April 30, 1999. Editor's note: Even though this essay is over 10 years old, it's as relevant today as ever, especially considering the mass shootings that became a tragic outlet for wounded human beings has only increased as the years go on. We need to start solving for causes rather than effects if we ever want to see this end. - Ed...
The Mayas has more than one Calendar. They have the calendar of the big circles, which cover over 5000 years, and many more different smaller calendars/ circles, which covers different time periods.(some of them 22 days, some of them 520 years, and so on..) One of these big circle is getting to the end at the end of 2012. Some people believe it’s already happened in 2011 , some people...
If you're not the type to keep up with ugly, soul-killing political controversies, let me catch you up: A while back, hugely popular political commentator Rush Limbaugh lost a bunch of advertisers because he publicly called a college girl a slut and a prostitute after she suggested that health insurance plans should cover birth control. But he's paid to say outrageous things. If you really...
The leaked Heartland Institute documents proved what most people know to be true anyway – that mainstream climate deniers are secretly funded by industry and will stoop to any level to fight science with spin – even brainwashing children through the k-12 curriculum. As one of the world’s leading climate denial thinktanks, the expose is a serious blow to the objective...
Why do we stick up for a system or institution we live in -- a government, company, or marriage -- even when anyone else can see it is failing miserably? Why do we resist change even when the system is corrupt or unjust? A new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science , a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, illuminates the conditions under which we're...
REMIX : To combine or edit existing materials to produce something new. If you’ve seen it, you’ll probably have guessed that here at The Crisis of Civilization we love Remix films – and we want you to have a go too. We would like to invite you to create your own Crisis of Civilization -style sequences, using unused interview audio of Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed with images...
One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority. While all cultures are different, in many non-modernized societies children enjoy wide latitude to learn by free...
The following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It is Russell Means's most famous speech. A member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, he was perhaps the most outsized personality in the American Indian Movement...
A radical situation is a collective awakening. . . . In such situations people become much more open to new perspectives, readier to question previous assumptions, quicker to see through the usual cons. . . . People learn more about society in a week than in years of academic “social studies” or leftist “consciousness raising.” . . . Everything seems possible &mdash...
In the US on September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of 9/11, politicians and their presstitute media presented Americans with "A Day of Remembrance," a propaganda exercise that hardened the 9/11 lies into dogma. Meanwhile, in Toronto, Canada, at Ryerson University the four-day International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001, came to a close at 5pm. During the four days of...
“You say laughter and I say larfter,” sang Louis Armstrong. The difference is subtle. Across the world, however, from the Amazon to the Arctic, tribal peoples say it in 4,000 entirely different ways. Sadly, no one now says “laughter” in Eyak, a language from the Gulf of Alaska, whose last fluent speaker died in 2008, or in the Bo language from the Andaman Islands, for...
Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination. Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that...
“This odd little woman is attempting to give a moral sanction to greed and self interest,” Gore Vidal said of Ayn Rand, writing for Esquire in July 1961, “and to pull it off she must at times indulge in purest Orwellian newspeak of the ‘freedom is slavery’ sort.” The mindset of Rand’s followers has not changed over the decades. “She has a...
For many years now, I have fed my family food from the dumpster. It’s not because I can’t afford to shop at grocery stores like other, normal folks. It’s because supermarkets across the nation toss perfectly good meats, cheeses, eggs, and produce into the trash every single day. So I dumpster dive, which is exactly like it sounds: I jump into dumpsters, pull out...
The moral philosopher Cornel West , if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the first scene of the play would dangle power, privilege, fame and money before Obama. West would warn Obama that the quality of a life is defined by its moral...
When NYU art professor David Darts shows people his lunchbox, "a smile just starts creeping up on their face." Painted black with a white skull-and-crossbones, the metal box doesn't hold a pastrami on rye; instead, it's stuffed with networking equipment and batteries, and it hosts a Debian Linux install running a barebones Python-powered Web server. The goal of this "PirateBox": to create...
I n the last few years, a growing number of economists have been discovering happiness. It's not that they are spending more time admiring flowers, helping old folks cross the road, dancing on the street or baking pies for neighbors. In fact, these happiness economists are working long hours in soul-numbing ways, torturing data with their latest econometric techniques to force deeply buried...