Below are excerpts from six articles describing two upcoming national and international initiatives that could further undermine our already shaky ability to exercise informed self-governance. The first anti-democracy initiative is the apparent re…
For so many of us – perhaps most of us – a peculiar energy resides at the core of our being, an energy that does not accept the world we are given, that does not agree that what we see is all there is, that knows – as the World Social Forum procla…
According to articles in the links below (and elsewhere) Iceland crowdsourced its new constitution with mass participation and elected delegates to a Constituent Assembly made investors and bankers – not taxpayers – pay for the economic crash (it …
There’s a flash of hope here: A remarkable U.S. transpartisan group called Represent.Us is promoting a brilliantly designed Anti-Corruption Act. Check it out! The proposed law pulls together a number of anti-corruption and money-out-of-politics ap…
During the last 6-9 months most Occupy groups have been relatively invisible in the mass media. But just because something is invisible, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Think radiation… or back room deals… or the vast webs of fungi and ant civili…
Dear friends, In anticipation of challenges to my assertion that our political dichotomies – especially the liberal/conservative, blue-red divide – are illusions, I offer the following references: 1. The “Purple USA” map – http://en.wikipedia.org/…
President Obama said in his 2012 victory speech that “we are not as divided as our politics suggests”. He also argued that we are more united than our politics makes us think we are. Finally, he hinted that we are more diverse than our politics su…
It’s so tempting to say “Global warming caused superstorm Sandy.” And it is so easy to counter with “Storms like Sandy happen. You can’t say that global warming caused a particular storm!” Much human folly nowadays comes from believing that identi…
(NOTE: In this essay I intentionally subsume the thinking processes of official decision-makers into the thinking processes of the citizenry as a whole. I realize that official decision-makers can and do make decisions independently of the will of…
I like this article by Rebecca Solnit (who’s writing I’m coming to love more and more) not because it comes from “the left” but because it calls for sanity and decency. It acknowledges the overriding fact that our quasi-democratic system is itself…