Surveillance program that gathered Americans’ phone data was illegal, court finds

Surveillance program that gathered Americans’ phone data was illegal, court finds was an article headline in the Washington Post of two days ago. This is wonderful news. Governments should have nothing to hide. That is, of course, if they’re not run by kleptomaniacs and sociopaths and that, my dear, is a whole other problem…

Crisis Gardening: Fresh Food Fast

Food security should be job number one for everyone right about now. As our food supply is under increasing threat, taking matters into your own hands (by working with the soil and nature’s forces) can provide both food and sanity. You’d be amazed how much food you can grow in a small amount of space and how good you’ll feel working with living things. What are you waiting for?

System Error

Infinite economic growth flies in the face of real limits that exist in the Earth’s biosphere. Excessive loading of carbon into the atmosphere has disrupted the earth’s natural carbon cycle and has changed our weather patterns that were stable before the industrial revolution. Our monoculture and corresponding destruction of diversity has led to a global pandemic that is threatening to bring down civilization as we know it. These phenomena are integrally linked to humanity’s obsession with growth. Time for de-growth!

Pathogens and the Loss of the Buffering Effect

If you view the manner in which humans have inhabited the Earth, you can see it as a monoculture. This, as is discussed in the video, is the problem where the absence of organisms diversity leads to conditions where pandemics can occur wiping out entire populations of the impacted species. Is the answer setting aside vast areas of the Earth to be wild, free from human habitat? Is that any sort of guarantee that humans will remain pandemic free? The separation can never be complete. Why do we deny the fact that we are nature and meant to live embedded amongst a diversity of species? Maybe our designed habitat needs to change. Let us consider an end to anthropocentrism and a shift to ecocentrism or biocentrism or biosynergism. Something like that. [Note: new study shows wild habitat loss increases transmission of zoonotic diseases to humans.]

Calexit

I have long been an advocate for California’s secession from the union. Recently some pro-secession folks hired a mariachi band to play in front of an ICE director’s McMansion.