Category Archives: How the World Really Works

No Choice But To Resist

Image of Ken Ward in 2016 Valve-Turners action, from the film The Reluctant Radical.  Aurélien’s latest article is about moving past despair and hope and doing what needs to be done to actually make a positive difference, no matter how small or … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Links of the Month: February 2024

no cats were harmed in the making of this Midjourney AI image; not my prompt I think I have run out of outrage. I’m becoming immune to it, rather than inured. The outrage serves no purpose. I try to understand … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 12 Comments

A Cornered Beast

Left:Blinken/Biden peace protesters; video from CBC; Right: Tucker Carlson, screen cap from Putin interview; Blinken and Carlson both frequently wear the same cornered ‘mask’ face, as do Biden and Trump and many other politicos and public figures Watching the interview … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | 23 Comments

What Third Culture Kids Might Teach Us About Coping With Collapse

my own diagram of what Jim Kunstler calls “The Long Emergency” — a gradual multi-stage collapse over an extended period My new adopted community of Coquitlam is an exceptionally ethnically and culturally diverse one. It also has a much larger … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

War, Peace, and Human Nature

Cartoon from Tom Gauld, seen on the memebrary. Thousands of books have been written about why we go to war. I’ve been trying to explore whether my evolving understanding of basic human nature offers any insights on this subject, particularly … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Time For a Jubilee

The late David Graeber, in his book Debt, traced the history of indebtedness back to the days when money was first invented. Every dollar of money represents a dollar of debt, and finance is all about measuring who owes how much … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | 1 Comment

How De-Dollarization is Likely to Play Out

Much has been written in recent years about “De-dollarization” — the shift from the use of the US dollar as the “international reserve currency” in favour of more diverse bi-lateral and multi-lateral currency agreements and transactions. The current system has … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | 2 Comments

Work That Doesn’t Work, and Work That Does

cartoon by the late New Yorker cartoonist Robert Weber, one of the few cartoonists who worked mostly with charcoal Every year we hear about workplace surveys that say that most employees are “satisfied” with their jobs, which would, I think, suggest more … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves, Working Smarter | 5 Comments

Coping With Trauma

… in which Dave reveals some unhappy and mostly politically unacceptable truths about our having no free will, and about aspects of Christian moralistic evangelism that permeate our western ways of thinking about ‘good and evil’, ‘healing’, and trauma. In … Continue reading

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

On the Dangers of Labels

image by Midjourney AI; my own prompt Fascist. Terrorist. Racist. Any other —ist. Addict. TERF. Anti-Semite. These are labels — nouns — we apply to others, that essentially equate their (often merely alleged or assumed) beliefs, situations, and behaviours with … Continue reading

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 10 Comments