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…
Today’s article by Rebecca Solnit about Occupy Wall Street is fabulous, but she erred on an important fact. She ascribes the following quote abut the state of mind of anti-nuclear activists in the 1978 Clamshell Alliance to journalist Bill Moyers:…
Below is an interesting piece about the Obama campaign by a fellow named Larry Greene. Alhough I’m not endorsing Obama, this message is written in the spirit of the Co-Intelligence Institute’s “Politician’s Pledge” and it reflects my own sense of …