Are you ready for a new kind of politics beyond Left and Right?
After centuries of rule by kings, emperors, tyrants, mad men, fascists, communists, military dictatorships and mega-corporations, We the People of the world are now ready to take charge of our own destiny and start calling the shots from below.
Looks like the world has finally had enough of Israeli oppression of Palestinians. ENOUGH of its violations of International law, its settlement building, its asymmetrical violence. ENOUGH of the messianic brutality of its hard-right government led by the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Could this be the moment the Palestinians finally start winning their freedom fight? Spread this hopeful meme! — The Third Force
Hey Jammers,
Our latest Jam of the Week takes you on a mystical journey of the psyche with the latest mechanized summer firestarter Scorpion by 3teeth. World revolution begins in our beating hearts and before we strike a blow against the corporate war machine, we need to let go of our mental trappings and begin anew.
Lead singer Alex Mincolla writes, “The scorpion symbolizes the challenge to confront and integrate those parts of ourselves that we repress, ignore, or fear. It invites a descent into the depths of the personal and collective unconscious. Its venom is the entropic catalyst for the dissolution of old, rigid structures of the psyche, making room for rebirth. To acknowledge and embrace the scorpion is to accept the necessity of change.”
Corporations, these legal fictions we ourselves created two centuries ago, now rule over us. And we accept this as the normal state of affairs. We go to corporations on our knees. Please do the right thing we plead. Please don’t cut down any more forests. Please don’t pollute any more lakes and rivers (but please don’t move your factories and jobs offshore either). Please don’t use pornographic images to sell fashion to my kids. And please don’t addict them to your algorithms. We’ve spent so much time bowed down in deference we’ve forgotten how to stand up straight.
This July 4th, reclaim some of that great American revolutionary spirit by just spending the day with your family, reforging bonds with neighbors and friends, and proudly waving the corporate America flag however and wherever you can.
Scientists used to think there were only six human emotions — anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear and sadness. We now know there is a seventh: awe.
Awe is the feeling, registering more in our body than our mind, that we’re in the presence of something so vast and deep and powerful that it swamps our present understanding of the world. A skyful of stars in the middle of nowhere. A soaring piece of art. An act of wild kindness, fugitively glimpsed.
On an average day, a Palestinian who works in Jerusalem and resides in the West Bank must wake up at four in the morning in order to arrive at work by nine. The reason is not the distance between workplace and home. With the construction of the separation wall that began in 2002, and is still underway as of 2022, the Israeli state entered into a new stage of encroachment on Palestinian territory.
The Palestinian worker has to wait in line for hours at checkpoints staffed by soldiers who are incentivized to make the line move as slowly as possible. Most of these border-crossers have a long day ahead of them in various kinds of construction work. After crossing into Israel, they must spend hours every day passing through checkpoints to get to work, even though they often have only a few kilometres to travel.
How do you feel about being Canadian, British, Australian, Spanish, or American? Are you proud of your country? Do you like how the politics work, the decisions are made, the economy’s run, the problems and crises are handled?
These days, it’s wise to do a gut-check on all that. Including the way you were raised to think about what a working democracy looks like. You may be looking at the light of a dead star.
The notion that We the People are somehow in control just because we go to the polls every few years, or that the political parties we vote for represent us and turn our wishes into action, or that government bureaucracies are tuned in to our needs: If only these things were true. What we call democracy is really just kabuki theatre: politicians, lobbyists, corporations, think tanks and intellectual pundits thrashing around, jostling each other, triggering social-media storms, running op-eds in the New York Times and Washington Post and pontificating on CNN, MSNBC and Fox. The sad truth is, none of these so-called political, cultural or intellectual leaders have a clue about how to handle the big stuff — how to fix the climate crisis, avert the next financial meltdown, stop the next steal. —from the soon to be released Adbusters book - A Manifesto for World Revolution
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We've been here before
Years before Chamberlain caved in to the Nazis, we knew where Hitler was going, aware of what was at stake, felt what was coming, yet we kept putting up with his ever escalating swipes, indignities and arrogances. We just didn’t have the guts to take him on — until it was too late.
Now the very same thing is happening with Xi Jinping’s China. We’re appeasing him, tolerating his mounting pugnaciousness, compromising our values for economic favors — blindly following the same script that got us into World War II.
America is all dressed up with nowhere to go — exporting a virus of individuality more deadly than Covid to the rest of the world. All the revolutionaries are burned out — every moment of time monetized.
Meanwhile, in China, we watch the steady, methodical rise of a 21st century Hitler. World leaders flock to China just like they flocked to Germany 80 years ago.
Can we leap over both of them, and forge a third path through the perilous years ahead?
A young corporate go-getter in Shenzen, China, on the fast track in her design career, suddenly quit to become a pet groomer. She swapped her fancy wardrobe for a uniform, and took an eighty-percent pay cut. When she told her story to a couple of New York Times reporters recently, Loretta Liu could barely contain her delight.
“I was tired of living like that,” she said.
By like that, she meant squeezed by the deal of the capitalist ticket-to-ride: insane work hours, demanding bosses and stress levels that crushed her physical and mental health.
Is it possible — in a world crisscrossed with roads, railways, pipelines, and shipping routes — to carve out a little freedom from the free market? For an answer squarely in the affirmative, see autonomous zones: pockets of sovereignty where the people, asserting themselves, mount scale-model societies unloosed from the dual bonds of capitalist industry and the industrial state. Radical in spirit and prefigurative in principle, autonomous zones are sociopolitical laboratories in which the shape of a viable future may well be cast. At a time when prospects for that kind of a future appear dimmer every day, grasping the results of these experiments isn’t merely interesting, but imperative: if even one of them can withstand the rising heat, it just might prove our last best hope.
Take the zad. Crawling with biodiversity, it spans some 4,000 acres of woods, pasture, hedgerows, and wetlands — a regional mixture known as bocage — near the township of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, in the west of France. Alongside a handful of hold-out farmers, this expanse is home to dozens of squatters who dwell in handmade cabins, tend communal gardens, mill their own wheat, bake their own bread, brew beer, make cheese, tan hides, publish a paper, run a pirate radio station, keep a library — in brief, who make up a leaderless, self-sustaining cooperative.
I passed a guy the other day, maybe 16, 17 years old. And as he got a little ways down the street I heard him holler at the top of his lungs: “I hate my fucking life and everyone in it!” (I guess that included the defeated-looking woman I took to be his mom, who was walking 20 feet behind him.) I felt sorry for this kid, and I hope he gets help. But I also found myself giving him a little private salute. At least he’s facing it. Bellowing his sad truth to the heavens must have felt like a bit of liberation. Who hasn’t felt a hint of that existential frustration? Maybe you even feel it now. Like: Really? This is the life I have settled for? Starbucks, Safeway, smokeshop, home. Bang, bang, bang, marching to the drumbeat of capitalism.
—from the soon to be released Adbusters book - A Manifesto for World Revolution
Biking home from work the other day, I was in the pits of despair. This job, sometimes… I don’t know what it was, but being on social media all day, it weighs on you. There’s so much going on that we’re entirely powerless to change. So many forces bigger than us.
And no one is doing much of anything.
Protest marches are so boring. The same old signs, the same old chants, the same old people.
What happened to revolution?
We’re forgotten that protests are powerful. A medium to change the world. So why are all the placards we see right now so fucking dull?
On that day I biked into an Extinction Rebellion march. There was a throng of people dancing beneath a sign the size of some rooms, quivering in the breeze.
It read: ACTION IS THE ANTIDOTE TO DESPAIR
And in that second I thought “Fuck yeah! Of course it is!
That was an epiphany moment. A good protest sign has the power to change your mood from dreary to delighted. And it might just change the right person’s mind.
Keep Voting & see our cynicism about the future starkly exposed
Surprising results, aren't they? Our faith in our future seems to be at an all time low. After all, at least the cockroaches have a chance of surviving the looming environmental catastrophe. The time for dramatic change is upon us, before we're forced to hand off the reins to the insects.
Adbuster's crusade against Xi Jinping's Slave state
Step 2: A boycott of Walmart & Amazon
80% of the stuff sold in Walmart comes from China. Amazon isn't up front about their product sources but we know it's probably well over 63%.
Why are we supporting China like this?
Find other ways to shop — go local and support indie stores.
Let's work together and stop mindlessly supporting Xi Jinping.
Witness the power of a battlecry for the 21st century. These activists sing from their hearts and stand up in the face of ecological disaster, with sheer vitality and emotion, disrupting not only Shell’s annual meeting but the very medium of activism, bringing a new sense of solidarity and cultural power to the front lines.
Across from the activists, past the faceless security guards, sit stoic board members with empty expressions, endless apathy. For once they are silenced if even for a mere moment, and we fully understand the activists’ message, a message that every last one of us has secretly wished for during this constant and unyielding destruction of our planet. It’s time we sent these devils back to hell.
On the weather report, another record-breaking hurricane is chewing up the coast. You drive out through the suburbs and discover a shantytown, the kind you’ve always associated more with Somalia or Haiti than your own hometown. One more overtime shift at work, and your company health plan will automatically sign you up for Prozac. On TV, there’s another war.
Around and around and around. Even the most entrenched believers in the new global order have a mounting sense that some fundamental mindshift is needed. The contradictions of late-capitalist life put increasing pressure on our psyches to synthesize the data, yet insights come only in fits and starts. They appear like desert mirages, dazzling us with their promise and then dissolving into sand.
And suddenly we are all wondering: What would it be like to drink deeply? Can we in the First World have a revelation? Would we recognize one if we had it?
Israel surveils Palestinians more than china surveils the Uyghurs
Al Jazeera's incendiary new documentary unmasks the terrifying reality of Israeli surveillance.
Palestine is the testing ground for the worst abuses of privacy and freedom of movement that a surveillance state can muster.
The Israeli government doesn't want you to watch this. Share it with all your friends!
Adbusters 165 Hits Newsstands WOrldwide NOw!
Child Labor in America
Private equity titan Blackstone is using child labor in its meat packing plants. Let’s wipe this sicko corporation off the face of the earth! Blockade their offices; pie their executives; destroy their brand. Do whatever it takes!
The feminist philosopher Andrea Nye has suggested that Simone Weil’s emphasis on obligations rather than rights may offer a way out of the impasse over abortion in the US. Thousands of ordinary readers interested in mysticism or Catholicism have found her books illuminating. - Linda A. Bell
We can do better than asking women (and men) to choose between their children and themselves. - Karen Swallow Prior
We on the Left will keep thrashing around in the weeds until we find the courage to engage wholeheartedly with our opponents.
"To kill your own child is another dimension of evil."
"The perfect way to stop abortions is to stop having careless sex."
"Seeing an arm pulled through the vaginal canal was shocking."
The most vivid argument of the pro-choice side is the back-alley and other dangerous abortions that result when you make the procedure illegal and the women who die as a result.
The most vivid argument of the pro-life side is the sonogram, and the growing evidence that cognitive life begins sooner than we thought. These images are proof that what grows within a pregnant woman’s body is a human being, living and unfolding according to a timetable that has existed as long as we have. Obviously it would take a profound act of violence to remove him from his quiet world and destroy him.
There’s a reason this debate is so hard.
- Caitlin Flanagan, The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate
A lot of the progressive commentary, on the other hand, won’t recognize the fetus at all.
Over the last day or two I’ve seen progressives refer to abortion as just health care for women, or an entirely private decision about what a woman does with her body.
A lot of progressives talk about abortion as if it couldn’t possibly be a termination of a human life.
- David Brooks
Pregnancy begins with a small cluster of undifferentiated cells that are not, in fact, a child. The anti-choice movement calls it a child because it is essential to their argument. But calling it so does not make it so.
At term, that small cluster has definitely grown into an unborn child. Somewhere on the continuum of fetal development it is reasonable to say it has become a person. That moment of personhood is perhaps difficult to define, but Roe at least made the effort.
Given the enormous consequences to the mother, it is important that we give her the right to choose her own well-being for some period of time over that which is not yet an unborn child
- Deborh Taylor Santa Cruz, Calif.
What is forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term if not involuntary servitude?
- Carie N. Baker MS.magazine
An Obscure Cousin of Basketball Lets Men and Women Play as Equals
In the fringe sport of korfball, an offshoot of basketball, co-ed teams square off in what’s about as close to total gender-parity competition as it gets. All of basketball’s macho elements – like dunking and picks and greasy contact in the paint – have been stripped away, leaving only gender-neutral skills like court vision and hand-eye co-ordination. Pure teamwork wins. “Eight players, one heartbeat, ”as the world-champion Dutch team likes to say.
In Agatha Christie's novels, terms like "Oriental", "Gypsy" and "native" have been taken out, and revised versions of Ian Fleming's "James Bond" books will be scrubbed of racist and sexist phrases.
Classics by Roald Dahl have been stripped of adjectives like "fat" and "ugly" along with references to characters' gender and skin color.
You must revise your terminology to be more inclusive ... you must say:
not ‘Latino’ but ‘Latinx’ not 'homeless' but ‘houseless’ not ‘women’ but ‘people with uteruses’ not 'pregnant women' but 'birthing people' not ‘breastfeeding’ but ‘çhestfeeding’ not ‘abortion’ but ‘reproductive services’ not ‘pro-choice’ but ‘pro-decision’ not ‘L.G.B.T.’ but ‘LGBTQIA2S+'
We live in a time when the people who are in charge are scared of the people who aren’t. Professors report being terrified of their students. Publishing executives fear the wrath of junior employees. C.E.O.s worry about staff revolts. Museum curators watch what they say lest it lead to professional annihilation. Politicians in senior positions are nervous about their newbies — on their own side. — Excerpted from Bret Stephens, New York Times
Stanford is one of the greatest universities on earth. It also apparently used to be more fun. There was an anarchist house, a lake where students hosted bonfires and lascivious costume parties.In “Stanford’s War on Social Life,” in Palladium magazine, Ginevra Davis argues that an army of administrators has systematically shut that down.
She writes: “Since 2013, Stanford’s administration has executed a top-to-bottom destruction of student social life. Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus, a growing administrative bureaucracy has destroyed almost all of Stanford’s distinctive student culture.”
Theme houses and fraternities have been shutdown, weird rituals banned. Outdoor house, for students who enjoy hiking and the like, was removed from campus, though it was given permission to reopen this year after shifting its mission to “racial and environmental justice in the outdoors.”
The old culture gave students agency to be creative and have fun. But, Davis observes, “In less than a decade, Stanford’s administration eviscerated100 years of undergraduate culture and social groups. They ended decades-old traditions. They drove student groups out of their houses. They scraped names off buildings. They went after long-established hubs of student life, like fraternities and cultural theme houses. In place of it all,Stanford erected a homogeneous housing system that sorts new students into perfectly equitable groups named with letters and numbers. All social distinction is gone.”
— Excerpted from David Brooks, New York Times
The only thing we can imagine is catastrophe
There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist – most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet, and the current form of capitalism doesn’t seem to be capable of generating the kind of vast technological breakthroughs and mobilizations that would be required for us to start finding and colonizing any other planets. Yet ...
Edit this how you want and send to Honest Reporting Here
jacki@honestreporting.com
Dear Jacki,
Please answer the following inquiries:
Did your CEO spend 15 years at AIPAC? Are you working for the Israeli Government? Where does your money come from? Thank you,
[Your Name Here]
Decorate an ATM
ATMs are constant reminders that capital is the dominant religion of our time. They are modern shrines. So let’s treat them that way. Let’s drape ATMs with garlands, decorate them with flowers, crucifixes, votive candles, incense burners, little statues of the Virgin of Guadaloupe. Let’s surround them with mementos and splash them with paint. Let's make them an art project.
Hey Artists and Designers, Do we still have it? Can we invent new aesthetics, design sustainable products and rid our cities of waste . . . cultivate new sensibilities for our post-materialist age? There are hints of this new aesthetic in Kenya Hara's Designing Design when he talks about "a future without artifice," "whispered value systems" and creating "vehicles of thought and feeling." He says products are supposed to inspire "acceptance" not "appetite" . . . that the appropriate response to a product is "This will do," not "This is what I want." And there are clues to it in Jean-Marie Massaud's mission to create "a new art de vivre," and examples of it in Banksy's (and other street artists') heady mix of politics, design and the intimacies of everyday life.
Our century will be a time of monumental ideological clashes, paradigm shifts and metamemetic insurgencies on multiple fronts. We artists and designers must be the advance guards — positioning ourselves at the forefront of every struggle and debate. Just as farmers are the keepers of the land, we are the keepers of mindscape. We must nurture it and care for it and make sure there will always be wilderness, diversity and freedom there.
No screen time before age two, period. Reduce your own screen use in family spaces. De-screen common living areas and normalize analog pastimes and traditions; music, fine arts, reading, out loud story time, board and card games, help in the kitchen with cooking, candlelight hang-outs. Eat meals together as much as possible, with no screens permitted; respect the culture of the table.
Always, at every turn, reinforce the message that the real world is more interesting than the screen world. Point out every flying or perching bird, every darting squirrel, every crawling caterpillar, every passing cloud, every interesting shadow, every tree waving its branches in the wind. Make a religion out of doing this. Let your kids touch dirt, skin their knees, hide in bushes, climb boulders and trees. Nature, wherever you can find it, is the “app,” the “platform,” the “interface,” the “engagement” kids crave and need.
Rather than teach your kids what a smartphone can do, teach them that they don’t need one. Put fishing rods, ski poles and buck knives (almost anything, really) into their hands. Get them hiking and paddling before swiping and scrolling. Get them building lean-tos and forts before building Minecraft cities. Get them looking at plants, animal tracks and rocks before looking at "nature apps." Give them paper maps and compasses before you give them Google Maps. If you don’t mold your kids’ values early on, the tech moguls will. — Paul Keeling
“I always argued that the First Intifada was an artistic action,” said Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani, almost immediately upon meeting me on the patio of his Ramallah apartment. We spoke at the end of September, when the temperature was still high; you could feel the summer breeze in the air and hear the drums of the Third Intifada, played by youth born in refugee camps. As international organizations like to put it, “security conditions were deteriorating” all around us thanks to decades of Israeli dispossession, violence, and occupation.
I’ve never quite understood finance. It’s a nut I just can’t crack. I don’t get why the stock market goes up when there’s bad news.
Or why at a time of climate crisis the Dow Jones is breaking all records. I don’t know why 30 percent of new wealth is speculative — no physical objects bought or sold. Or exactly what work the three trillion dollars sloshing around the global economy every day is actually doing. Nobody has ever been able to explain this to me in a way that makes sense.
And how come tax havens still exist? And why did no one on Wall Street go to jail after the meltdown of 2008?
It’s all a mystery to me.
But I think maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong place. Read more...
Send this to the minister responsible for Canada's over-censoring intelligence agency:
Marco.Mendicino@parl.gc.ca
Marco Mendicino,
Why is CSIS keeping vital information from the Canadian people?
If Canadian elections are being tampered with by foreign governments, the people have the right to know. Secrecy is a rot that has eroded the people's confidence in this government's fitness to power. A free democracy cannot exist if our intelligence agency won't let us know when it's at risk.
There is nothing so precious that we the people can't know it.
[Your Name Here]
After a pregnancy, even one that doesn’t reach full term, the fetal cells go on floating in the mother’s uterus. They continue to be part of her body for up to forty years. I read this just a few days before my mother’s womb is removed.
Indeed, researchers have found that long after the end of a pregnancy (including one that ends in a miscarriage or abortion), fetal cells can be detected throughout a woman’s body—in her brain, blood, bones, liver. They are pluripotent, i.e., they can grow new, differentiated cells, and they are hypothesized to be catalysts for wound healing, autoimmune disease, and cancer. “We are made of others,” Barrera marvels. “This is a microchimeric book.” Hers is a vision of art as feminine, never truly original or new, but a cycle: art as birth and death; bodies decomposing the dirt, the roots; “the tree of our flesh.”
- Christine Henneberg reviewing Jazmina Barrera's An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes, in The New York Reviews of Books.
The feminist philosopher Andrea Nye has suggested that Simone Weil’s emphasis on obligations rather than rights may offer a way out of the impasse over abortion in the US. Thousands of ordinary readers interested in mysticism or Catholicism have found her books illuminating.
- Linda A. Bell
We can do better than asking women (and men) to choose between their children and themselves.
- Karen Swallow Prior
America's Secret Sauce
When I first hit San Francisco back in the ’60s, America was in the throes of an almighty cultural explosion. Everything in the air all at once. Poetry and music and fashion trying to explain it as it was happening, but it couldn’t keep up. You needed LSD / psilocybin / marijuana to modulate the tempo. And the new vibe – which absolutely steamrolled the tired old tummy-rub culture of Gunsmoke / Bonanza / I Love Lucy — shot throughout the world so quickly you couldn’t help but wonder: Could this youth rebellion be the beginning of a global revolution?
Well, no. The door closed almost as quickly as it had opened. The commercial vibe reasserted itself, and marked the start of an ugly half-century slide into decadent overconsumption, toxic arrogance and the suffocation of any creative impulse that won’t turn a quick buck. No surprise we’ve landed up where we have: divided and stuck and scared shitless about what comes next. As we enter the Year of the Rabbit, it feels like America is having a mental breakdown — literally falling apart at the seams.
Humanity has always pulled out a win in the fourth quarter. The Big Chill 150,000 years ago nearly knocked us out before we'd really gotten started. The Toba volcano almost finished us 70,000 years ago, but we persisted. We dodged nuclear apocalypse by a hair's-breadth during the Cuban missile crisis. We've been knocked back decades by plagues and pandemics a few times, but we always come back swinging.
It's in our nature to adapt and overcome right?
Human progress will continue into the far future! The GDP will keep rising! We'll figure out climate change by sheer force of our technological optimism . . .
A Manifesto for World Revolution — the dream, the book, the mind bomb — will drop this spring.
We don’t yet have the language to describe the new wave of activism that’s going to sweep the planet as the endgame intensifies. But it’s not people marching through the streets, shouting the same old slogans, waving the same old signs… no! It’s going to be people breaking out of their funks, their depressions and anxieties, their cowardly wokeness — rejuvenating their revolutionary spirit — millions of us in cities everywhere, venturing out alone and in small wolf packs on #FuckItAll Fridays, pulling off myriad acts of civil disobedience, demanding world leaders listen to us, and threatening to bring their doomsday machine to a screeching halt if they don’t.
We catalyze a sudden, unexpected moment of truth, a stunning reversal of perspective - a global mind shift - from which the corpo-consumerist forces never fully recover
Adbusters is looking for people to fight the good fight. If you are:
Magazine/Web Designer Web Editor Web Developer Creative Writer/Director
The planetary endgame is approaching. But we're just getting started. Got the political savvy and the activist chutzpah to mobilize thousands and engage with millions? If you live around Vancouver send your resume and cover letter to Read more...
My teenage daughter’s social life is a whirl of competing invitations: You wanna go thrifting, or to the movies? Or maybe we grab some food while we prep for the Model UN trip and solve the world’s problems before sunrise?
All her friends are female or female identified. They are flowering, flourishing, gunning for a future full of power and promise. No boys cloud this picture. These girls have no more use for boys than ducks have for socks.
However her romantic proclivities ripen, it seems least an even bet that my daughter ends up with a female life partner, almost by default. The boys her age are in MIA. They are at home, bestriding their online private kingdoms: Crossfire, Grand Theft Auto, Orcs Must Die! 3. Their reflexes are extremely good.
thank you hedi slimane
In some ways they are following the path of the hikikomori, Japan’s lost generation of young men who started opting out more deliberately at least a decade ago. Cultural and family pressures have boxed the min. It’s a game they can’t win, so they have decided not to play. With a fuck that wave of the hand, the hikikomori confine themselves to their bedrooms for months or even years. They are conscientious objectors, secure in their caves, hermits without the asceticism. Reliable estimates put their number at half a million. Here in the West, some of the lost boys do venture out. Only to get promptly, cruelly... read more
A MESSAGE TO THE PEOPLE OF PALESTINE
Fight, fight, fight for your freedom! Stand up to the occupiers. Do what the Algerian freedom fighters did to France, what the South African freedom fighters did to apartheid and what the Ukrainian freedom fighters are doing right now to Putin.
And gain strength from knowing the bulk of the people of the world are behind you. Billions of us will fight alongside you with boycotts, donations, cash transfers and everything else we got.
You can help the people of Palestine win their freedom fight: Take this BDS Tarot card and make it go viral.
Dear Mr. Vladimir Putin,
You are a bad man. You have broken the people’s First Commandment - invaded a neighboring country and caused havoc in the world.
And for this Dear Vladimir, we will punish you.
We will stop buying your vodka, boycott everything you make . . . stop buying your oil and gas . . . and we’ll treat you with utter contempt on the world stage.
Bit by bit, we will sap your power and pop your mystique, until your people wake up and plop you into the dustbin of history.
From now on, this is what happens to world leaders who break the people’s First Commandment.
Your ass is too tight. Your surveillance too Orwellian. Your censorship too monolithic. Your China too much like a slave state.
Loosen up President Xi, or your brittle system will suddenly crack.
Remember when Extinction Rebellion burst onto the scene in 2018? They hit like a tornado. They were fired up and angry ...
After years of tepid work from groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club slowly filled the well, XR came along and said, "Here's a bucket. Start drawing water.”
Fast forward to 2023. XR UK is getting out of the rebellion game. No more blocked roads, no more smashed windows, no more arrests.But we're not done rebelling. With XR out of the fight, we need a new strategy going forward. So let's get to it.
Noticed a patch of grass shooting up next to the garage . . . my first instinct was to cut it down . . .whack it off with the weed-eater like I always do. . .But for some reason this time I couldn’t do it. This little tuft was trying so hard to thrust its way out of the stoney earth . . . a wild spirit wanting to have its moment in the sun . . . I saw bugs and beetles running around in there too . . . a tiny eco-system. Gives me a good vibe every time I walk by.
Damn those blackberry brambles! . . . they’re multiplying like crazy . . . climbing over the garage . . . now creeping right onto the porch.
I’m losing my thirty year battle with this wild weed . . . can’t hack it down and keep it at bay like I used to. Every year I fade away a bit, while it grows stronger.
I’ve always known it was a losing battle . . . that in the end, the blackberries were destined to win. But in the meantime, I sure relish that fierce taste when I pop one in my mouth.
Quiet evening . . . preparing Masako’s dinner. And there’s this pesky fly buzzing around. It keeps landing on the counter. I shoo it away but it always comes back, like it has every right to be here in my kitchen. Eventually I grab the swatter. But then it lands on a sheet of Saran Wrap and stands resolutely right in front of my eyes . . . stunningly luminescent blue-green wings. . . quivering antennae . . . legs rubbing each other. I can tell it’s a bit slow and wonky from the autumn chill. I think it’s hungry too.
And now I have a new thought: Why not just let this fly be. Leave it alone. Let it hang around for another day or two, rounding out its natural life on its own terms.
This slowly unfolding drama reminded me of a Mr. Magoo cartoon clip from my childhood. That half-blind old trickster striding jauntily down a garden path, chattering to himself. He glimpses a line of ants marching towards him . . . with great pomp he steps aside and gives them the right of way.
. . . a whole flock of hummingbirds are ducking and diving around my bean patch. My god how fierce they get. Don’t know if it’s males chasing females or the other way around, but they go at each other with a vengeance that we humans no longer knowhow to muster. Is this is the root of our malaise? Why Hollywood movies are boring . . . TV is boring . . . the art scene is boring?
Why nothing lights us up anymore. Why no tiny miracles lift our spirits. Is it because we’ve cancelled all the mavericks, crazies and outliers? Because we no longer abide savage spontaneity?Because the wild has been beaten out of us? And could this be why we’re losing the planetary endgame. Why bureaucrats are calling all the climate shots? And algorithms are winning all the elections? And social progress has ground to a halt?
To make it through this century we’ll have to pull off a jump cut . . . be like those birds, juking and feinting and mixing it up, with fuck-it-all fierceness.
we'll shake our heads and wonder why our lives are so full of cookies and influencers and data-capture and linkbait and bots. We'll wonder why we allowed surveillance capitalism to become the norm, and whether the damage to our political, cultural, and emotional lives can ever be undone.
Mental Liberation is about gaining agency from the neck up... learning to nip anxieties in the bud, modulating mood swings, shifting vibes, ambiences, tones funks... seeing dark clouds on the horizon and taking action before they engulf us... and being fearless at just the right moment.
WE TOPPLE THE MIND LORDS
For the Wild, The Third Force
Erasing Time
On an average day, a Palestinian who works in Jerusalem and resides in the West Bank must wake up at four in the morning in order to arrive at work by nine. The reason is not the distance between workplace and home. With the construction of the separation wall that began in 2002, and is still underway as of 2022, the Israeli state entered into a new stage of encroachment on Palestinian territory. The Palestinian worker has to wait in line for hours at checkpoints staffed by soldiers who are incentivized to make the line move as slowly as possible. Most of these bor-der-crossers have a long day ahead of them in various kinds of construction work. After crossing into Israel, they must spend hours every day passing through checkpoints to get to work, even though they often have only a few kilometres to travel.
The question’s as blunt as the times are dire. Are we winning or losing the planetary endgame? In our year-end issue we argue both sides, with our most optimistic, bright-eyed inclinations colliding in...
In high school the cool kids smoked. So I started smoking too. And I continued to smoke in university. I just changed brands. Gaulois were too pretentious; I went for British brands like Peter Stuyvesant, with its pure white pack.Then I started to hear murmurings: cigarettes cause lung cancer.It was still just a rumor — at least that’s how the industry spun it. “The link hasn’t been proven,” said Philip Morris. PM had marshaled a team of corporate lawyers and PR flacks — not to mention publicly skeptical doctors on their payroll. The evidence just isn’t there, they said. The average smoker’s chances of getting lung cancer from cigarettes is roughly the chance of being struck by lightning.So I kept puffing.But I tried to quit, again and again. Problem was, I couldn’t edit a film without smoking. You can imagine it: you’re immersed in the flow, the rational part of your brain is in park, the wild reactive part firing on instinct, and your hand instinctively reaches for a dart. For me back then smoking was woven into the ritual of doing creative work on a deadline.The magic of tobacco is that it’s both a stimulant and a relaxant. The smoke cloud itself is hypnotic.One morning, after a lot of boozing and chain-smoking through many nights of editing, I woke up feeling like shit. And I stopped smoking. Again.But this time I stayed clean. One, two, three days. On day four I woke up feeling . . . amazing. Clear skies.Not long after, I ran into one of my mother’s neighbors. He looked awful. I learned he was dying of lung cancer. He had only a few months to live. I looked in his eyes and saw that he had given up. I’d gotten lucky; many hadn’t.It dawned on me that Philip Morris did this. They knew they were killing people and they covered it up. They built their empire on a business plan to sell toxic addictive products to people who didn’t know any better. They were literally getting away with murder and had been for decades.That’s the moment I started to hate corporations.
“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” #FuckItAllFridays is a weekly global ritual. Every Friday we revolt. This Friday, and next Friday, and the Friday after that too.
Existence is a free gift from the sun. - Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
Herman Daly, a towering figure who was shamefully suppressed by generations of mainstream economists, passed away on October 28, 2022.
Rest in Peace
Come the moment, come the man
Is the world finally ready to listen to Herman Daly, father of ecological economics?
The first mind Herman Daly changed was his own. When he started studying economics in the 1950s at Rice University, in his hometown of Houston, he was a“growther” — just like pretty much every other economist. The rules were simple: You keep producing more things for people to use, and the market system fairly distributes these things; wealth trickles down and everyone’s life gradually gets better. Read more...
Three blind mice
This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics went to three economists who certainly made an impact, just not in the way we might hope. Each of them played a huge part in perpetrating multiple financial meltdowns, crippling the world’s economy and pushing humanity to the brink of collapse. They and their neoclassical colleagues are the architects and cheerleaders of our failing world system, and I’d be happy if angry Econ101 students who know full well they have no future started disrupting classes, throwing pies and nailing manifestos to their professors’ doors. Read more...
To live without dead time means to embody a great refusal, to find pleasure in struggle, to transform every moment of existence into a repudiation of the consumerist nightmare and an affirmation of revolutionary possibility. A semester, a year, a decade without Big Macs, Frappucinos and Facebook but overflowing with midnight adventures of blackspotted billboards, guerrilla gardening and spectacular synchronized global memewar actions. Imagine if a huge number of us start living in this way, turning daily life itself into a form of resistance that re-enchants the city and reawakens the promise of a people’s insurrection. The way forward is through this kind of radical play.
Kensho Moment, a Quantum Transformation
“This is what capitalism does best, right?” she told the journalist Ezra Klein on his podcast not long ago. “It first creates this enormous appetite for things, and then it tells us that whatever we have is not enough. I mean, I think that is a form of madness. It seems to me there’s no question about that.”
We the People must find our voice. Rather than being asked to vote once every four years (and that’s only if we’re lucky), we organize our own global voting system, where we can vote in the millions, in the billions, on issues that we really care about. This is how we find out what We the People actually want from our political leaders, rather than letting them decide the agenda. No more arbitrary polling data, or media hype.
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We’re caught in an existential crisis with no obvious way out. It’s time to question the hidden coordinates of our reality and launch a new operating system for Planet Earth. We're about to give you the codes . . . Are you ready?
