No More Pretending

Posted on December 17, 2009 by Jay Greathouse

Delusional hope produces nothing of value. Throughout my life I have sought to see things as they are. The past few months have provided me the opportunity to ponder current events against the tapestry of history.
“We have destroyed the Holocene biosphere, and it can never be rebuilt. We have inadvertently terraformed Earth into a different planet. This act cannot be undone; it is thermodynamically irreversible.” Desdemona
I leave it to climate change deniers to explain the recent wholesale collapse of fisheries with the increase in both reef and oceanic dead zones, the desertification of the world’s most productive land and the rapid transition from forest to desert by mega-fires.

The once frozen “methane bomb” has already gone off. The Arctic permafrost is already melting.

Large areas of Earth are becoming uninhabitable to mammals and their food plants. Most charismatic megafauna, such as elephants, rhinos and whales, will become extinct in a few decades. It is entirely likely that humans will follow them into oblivion.

For sure, this will [...] Continue Reading…

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HR 2749 Punishes Small Family Farms

Posted on July 3, 2009 by Jay Greathouse

Without Theory No Revolution

Glenn Maresca felt compelled to speak up and I am honored to make his views publicly available. He has a song that relates to this, The Quiet Revolution.

Glenn Maresca writes:

Here we have yet another phony food safety bill, which does NOTHING but grant the FDA massive new police powers without actual policy oversight. And it would do NOTHING to solve the actual problem, the stinking cesspools which call themselves “modern” factory farms, the SOLE source of whatever filth there is in our food supply. We don’t need burdensome new tracing regimes to drive small farmers out of business, we already know exactly where the problem is.

H.R. 2749 would give some FDA administrator (read self-serving corporate lobbyist) the power to dictate what farming practices must and must not be used nationwide (read enforced GMOs, growth hormones, and weird chemicals in our food). How can Congress make sane policy without identifying the specific problem and its source before empowering [...] Continue Reading…

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CwF plus RtB equals Serious Money

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Jay Greathouse

CwF + RtB = $$$$
This video spells out the somewhat cryptic title as meaning Connect with Fans and give them a Reason to Buy to Make Serious Money through an explanation with examples by Mike Masnick. A suitable subtitle might be The Essence Of Marketing Reduced To A Simple Formula.

It really doesn’t get any more straightforward than this. While the formula tells you what to do, it does not tell you how to do it.

The examples Mike Masnick gives here, and in an earlier video where he used Trevor Reznik of Nine Inch Nails fame as an example, indicates that giving away valuable free stuff is one way how to do it. This is the same advice widely offered for Internet marketing in general.

NARM (the National Association of Recording Merchandisers) 2009 Keynote Interview presents Eliot Van Buskirk (WIRED) interviewing Ian Rogers (Topspin Media). A long time innovator in the online media scene, he feels that real progress is most likely on the creative [...] Continue Reading…

Posted in Economics, Entrepreneur | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Timing The Collapse

Posted on June 15, 2009 by Jay Greathouse

FNORD

For anyone without income, a home or even hope, the collapse has already happened. The number of those people on the ropes certainly seems to be increasing daily.

On the other hand, in this personal sense, you may not experience collapse during your lifetime. Of course that is not what the doom and gloomers say.

I used to be a doom and gloomer, an authentic doomsday freak pointing out the failures of our system and its imminent collapse. I’ve learned to temper my fears simply by living long enough.

However, in a larger more empirical sense, we may ask what exactly constitutes a societal collapse. Here we are asking about the nature of the collapse of the Euro-American Empire indicated by the ongoing disintegration of its global hegemony.
If you are someone who does not want to read social criticism, stop now.
If you are worried about you head exploding when you are presented with new information, stop now.
OK, now that I know you [...] Continue Reading…

Posted in Climate, Economics, Localization, Ponerology, Post-Carbon | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Jury Nullification Constitutional Right

Posted on June 6, 2009 by Jay Greathouse
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Jury nullification is an effective way of countering prosecutorial abuse and limiting the power and intrusiveness of the legislature. The historical records indicate jury nullification played a major role in abolishing slavery, winning women’s suffrage, and the Repeal of Alcohol Prohibition.

Perhaps jury nullification will become the way the war on marijuana ends as happened in the Loren Swift case.

Juries are our last line of defense against the inappropriate use of power by the government.

Sam Smith wrote in What lawyers & judges won’t tell you about juries that according to the Yale Law Journal in 1964, during the first third of the 19th century judges did inform juries of the right, forcing lawyers to argue “the law — its interpretation and validity — to the jury.”

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi noted that “jury nullification is a constitutional right that every individual person who is called for jury duty possesses, and unless we appreciate that right, we will lose it because the courts will take [...] Continue Reading…

Posted in Localization, Marijuana, Ponerology | Tagged , , | 1 Comment