Everyone Hates the US Media: Nicholas Kristof in the NYT covers a pair of new reports that indicates that Americans of all political stripes deeply distrust the mainstream media. Maybe the time for reconsidering the job of the media has come. Mad Cow in the US: There is growing evidence that the US has covered up incidents of Mad Cow disease. Is anyone really surprised? US Income Disparity Balloons Again: Pay increases for US CEOs last year again reached double-digit levels, with salary increases compensating for the drop in stock options. meanwhile pay increases for the average US wage-earned declined in real terms last year. The differential between the income of the elite and the average worker is now the highest anywhere since such statistics were first collected. Meanwhile, nothing of significance happened up here in Canada. We might have another election soon as a result of continuing revelations about our small-potatoes government fraud, which will almost assuredly (a) produce another, even more splintered, minority government, and (b) embolden the separatists in Quebec to make a last gasp effort to win a separation referendum. And last but not least, a bunch of people have sent me links to James Kunstler’s essays. They’re very entertaining and well-written, but they add no new information and are sure to further polarize the US population. What is it going to take for us to get past insane partisan politics and start working together to find real and lasting solutions to the crises we’re ignoring and the crises we’re precipitating? UPDATE: Two erroneous links fixed. |
Navigation
Collapsniks
Albert Bates (US)
Andrew Nikiforuk (CA)
Brutus (US)
Carolyn Baker (US)*
Catherine Ingram (US)
Chris Hedges (US)
Dahr Jamail (US)
Dean Spillane-Walker (US)*
Derrick Jensen (US)
Dougald & Paul (IE/SE)*
Erik Michaels (US)
Gail Tverberg (US)
Guy McPherson (US)
Honest Sorcerer
Janaia & Robin (US)*
Jem Bendell (UK)
Mari Werner
Michael Dowd (US)*
Nate Hagens (US)
Paul Heft (US)*
Post Carbon Inst. (US)
Resilience (US)
Richard Heinberg (US)
Robert Jensen (US)
Roy Scranton (US)
Sam Mitchell (US)
Tim Morgan (UK)
Tim Watkins (UK)
Umair Haque (UK)
William Rees (CA)
XrayMike (AU)
Radical Non-Duality
Tony Parsons
Jim Newman
Tim Cliss
Andreas Müller
Kenneth Madden
Emerson Lim
Nancy Neithercut
Rosemarijn Roes
Frank McCaughey
Clare Cherikoff
Ere Parek, Izzy Cloke, Zabi AmaniEssential Reading
Archive by Category
My Bio, Contact Info, Signature Posts
About the Author (2023)
My Circles
E-mail me
--- My Best 200 Posts, 2003-22 by category, from newest to oldest ---
Collapse Watch:
Hope — On the Balance of Probabilities
The Caste War for the Dregs
Recuperation, Accommodation, Resilience
How Do We Teach the Critical Skills
Collapse Not Apocalypse
Effective Activism
'Making Sense of the World' Reading List
Notes From the Rising Dark
What is Exponential Decay
Collapse: Slowly Then Suddenly
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Making Sense of Who We Are
What Would Net-Zero Emissions Look Like?
Post Collapse with Michael Dowd (video)
Why Economic Collapse Will Precede Climate Collapse
Being Adaptable: A Reminder List
A Culture of Fear
What Will It Take?
A Future Without Us
Dean Walker Interview (video)
The Mushroom at the End of the World
What Would It Take To Live Sustainably?
The New Political Map (Poster)
Beyond Belief
Complexity and Collapse
Requiem for a Species
Civilization Disease
What a Desolated Earth Looks Like
If We Had a Better Story...
Giving Up on Environmentalism
The Hard Part is Finding People Who Care
Going Vegan
The Dark & Gathering Sameness of the World
The End of Philosophy
A Short History of Progress
The Boiling Frog
Our Culture / Ourselves:
A CoVid-19 Recap
What It Means to be Human
A Culture Built on Wrong Models
Understanding Conservatives
Our Unique Capacity for Hatred
Not Meant to Govern Each Other
The Humanist Trap
Credulous
Amazing What People Get Used To
My Reluctant Misanthropy
The Dawn of Everything
Species Shame
Why Misinformation Doesn't Work
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The Right to Die
CoVid-19: Go for Zero
Pollard's Laws
On Caste
The Process of Self-Organization
The Tragic Spread of Misinformation
A Better Way to Work
The Needs of the Moment
Ask Yourself This
What to Believe Now?
Rogue Primate
Conversation & Silence
The Language of Our Eyes
True Story
May I Ask a Question?
Cultural Acedia: When We Can No Longer Care
Useless Advice
Several Short Sentences About Learning
Why I Don't Want to Hear Your Story
A Harvest of Myths
The Qualities of a Great Story
The Trouble With Stories
A Model of Identity & Community
Not Ready to Do What's Needed
A Culture of Dependence
So What's Next
Ten Things to Do When You're Feeling Hopeless
No Use to the World Broken
Living in Another World
Does Language Restrict What We Can Think?
The Value of Conversation Manifesto Nobody Knows Anything
If I Only Had 37 Days
The Only Life We Know
A Long Way Down
No Noble Savages
Figments of Reality
Too Far Ahead
Learning From Nature
The Rogue Animal
How the World Really Works:
Making Sense of Scents
An Age of Wonder
The Truth About Ukraine
Navigating Complexity
The Supply Chain Problem
The Promise of Dialogue
Too Dumb to Take Care of Ourselves
Extinction Capitalism
Homeless
Republicans Slide Into Fascism
All the Things I Was Wrong About
Several Short Sentences About Sharks
How Change Happens
What's the Best Possible Outcome?
The Perpetual Growth Machine
We Make Zero
How Long We've Been Around (graphic)
If You Wanted to Sabotage the Elections
Collective Intelligence & Complexity
Ten Things I Wish I'd Learned Earlier
The Problem With Systems
Against Hope (Video)
The Admission of Necessary Ignorance
Several Short Sentences About Jellyfish
Loren Eiseley, in Verse
A Synopsis of 'Finding the Sweet Spot'
Learning from Indigenous Cultures
The Gift Economy
The Job of the Media
The Wal-Mart Dilemma
The Illusion of the Separate Self, and Free Will:
No Free Will, No Freedom
The Other Side of 'No Me'
This Body Takes Me For a Walk
The Only One Who Really Knew Me
No Free Will — Fightin' Words
The Paradox of the Self
A Radical Non-Duality FAQ
What We Think We Know
Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark
Healing From Ourselves
The Entanglement Hypothesis
Nothing Needs to Happen
Nothing to Say About This
What I Wanted to Believe
A Continuous Reassemblage of Meaning
No Choice But to Misbehave
What's Apparently Happening
A Different Kind of Animal
Happy Now?
This Creature
Did Early Humans Have Selves?
Nothing On Offer Here
Even Simpler and More Hopeless Than That
Glimpses
How Our Bodies Sense the World
Fragments
What Happens in Vagus
We Have No Choice
Never Comfortable in the Skin of Self
Letting Go of the Story of Me
All There Is, Is This
A Theory of No Mind
Creative Works:
Mindful Wanderings (Reflections) (Archive)
A Prayer to No One
Frogs' Hollow (Short Story)
We Do What We Do (Poem)
Negative Assertions (Poem)
Reminder (Short Story)
A Canadian Sorry (Satire)
Under No Illusions (Short Story)
The Ever-Stranger (Poem)
The Fortune Teller (Short Story)
Non-Duality Dude (Play)
Your Self: An Owner's Manual (Satire)
All the Things I Thought I Knew (Short Story)
On the Shoulders of Giants (Short Story)
Improv (Poem)
Calling the Cage Freedom (Short Story)
Rune (Poem)
Only This (Poem)
The Other Extinction (Short Story)
Invisible (Poem)
Disruption (Short Story)
A Thought-Less Experiment (Poem)
Speaking Grosbeak (Short Story)
The Only Way There (Short Story)
The Wild Man (Short Story)
Flywheel (Short Story)
The Opposite of Presence (Satire)
How to Make Love Last (Poem)
The Horses' Bodies (Poem)
Enough (Lament)
Distracted (Short Story)
Worse, Still (Poem)
Conjurer (Satire)
A Conversation (Short Story)
Farewell to Albion (Poem)
My Other Sites
The ‘growing evidence’ link is either broken or misleading…
http://www.promedmail.org
Sometimes I wonder if on a purely “how to save the world” level (lets forget about other factors for no) an independnet Quebec wouldn’t be a good thing. We’re more progressive than the rest of Canada, more in favour of Kyoto and strict environmental laws (we’re actually going to include a right to a clean environment into our human right charter, and our environmental ministry is now the ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, which, when a new bill comes to law, would have power over other ministries to impose sustainable development norms), we have more ties with Europe, are more anti-war, more in favour of a social-democracy measures, etc… Yet a lot of these traits are prevented from having their full impact since on the federal level they get somewhat evened out because Quebec is only 1 of 10, and on the provincial level they are sometimes hard to realized because the money is in Ottawa (huge surpluses, mostly because of all the cuts they made in education and healthcare in the 90s – cuts which have to be absorbed by the provinces) and is a very powerful force for centralization in the country. But we’ll see what will happen.
Mikhail makes some good points … and to extrapolate a bit .. each region of Canada, if not each province, is demonstrating interesting ways of grappling with the rapidly-approaching *future* … unfortunately, a systemic societal approach is less evident, although the fact that our country continues to value some collectivist notions and at least continues to seek dialogue on important core values – issues of the common good – other than money, religion and power, offers some small degree of hope. But Canada is still just a small prop in the background on the world stage.
Stephen: Fixed, thanks.Lugon: Wow, great link. I wonder if we in the West would handle a disease outbreak that horrifically and quickly killed 93% of its infected, and required complete quarantine of the affected areas, as calmly and stoically as the Angolans. I also note that neither Canada nor the US has contributed any funds to the soaring cost of managing this outbreak.Mikhail/Jon: I think it’s inevitable, but my concern is that it will accelerate the balkanization of Canada, by allowing the Harper-Mulroney pro-Bush pro-States’ Rights faction to win power long enough to reintroduce Charlottown Accord and effectively end Canadian federalism forever, which would make continental ‘merger’ (to use a euphemism for the political takeover of Canada by the US) inevitable. I’m a great believer in decentralization, but devolving power from one huge central insensitive government to ten huge central insensitive governments is a step backwards. You don’t get from nation-based to community-based politics & economy top down, it has to be bottom uo.
Dave, good point. Personally I see no problem with Anglo-Canada being a strong country, it’s just that Quebec’s cultural differences will always make it the odd one out, always trying to go in a slightly different direction, and always causing conflicts. These problems can’t be eternal, they keep things from happening and everybody loses. Just imagine if France and England, or Germany and Italy, were parts of the same country. There would always be problems, and not just political problems, but cultural ones, and that would be quite unproductive; it’s not bad faith, it’s just two cultures, with different ways of thinking and of seeing life, with different societal goals and traditions (f.ex. Right now people in Quebec are pissed off because the Charest government wants to lower taxes – where else would you see that?). I have studied law in Ottawa, and have utmost respect for anglo-canadians; having received a license in both legal systems (Civil Law for Quebec and Common Law for the rest of Canada), it’s OBVIOUS that both nations think radically differently. In their purest forms, both legal systems are almost mirror images of each other (but right now the Common Law is using many things from Civil Law). Nobody can expect that a political solution will banish these kind of differences.
One more thing, Dave. As for the Harper conservative government, I don’t believe that it’s what people really want (esp. not in Quebec where they wouldn’t get even one seat); if he gets in, it will be as a minority government. I doubt that he’d be able to do too much damage, and if he tries, people will get so scared that the polls will show it, we’ll go to elections and people will re-elect liberals at the next election (hoping that they have cleaned up their act). The only reason why the conservatives have a chance of winning right now is because the liberals have been there for a zillion years and the scandals. Not because people really like Harper (except in the west).