Bishop Desmond Tutu, in a recent Guardian essay, asserted: “There are many ways that all of us can fight against climate change: by not wasting energy, for instance.” Bishop Tutu then went on to “recognize” that “these individual measures will not make a big enough difference in the available time.” The solution to the problem of “climate change,” Bishop Tutu, continued, is for people to
. . . the solution is not to toss youthful offenders into jail or prisons. We long ago recognized alcoholism to be a disease, and abandoned efforts to treat alcoholics simply by locking them up. – former Oregon Governor Tom McCall
One may without exaggeration now speak of technological compulsiveness: a condition under which society meekly submits to every new technological demand and utilizes without question every new product….
— Lewis Mumford (1970)
Peter Gelderloos is an anarchist and author from Virginia. His books include How Nonviolence Protects the State, Consensus, Anarchy Works, The Failure of Nonviolence, the travel narrative To Get to the Other Side, and the collection of short stories Sousa in the Echo Chamber. He currently lives in Barcelona, where he takes part in ongoing social struggles.
In one of a series of significant talks over the weekend by the world’s foremost Internet freedom activists, Julian Assange spoke on MSNBC about the central “battle” of the Information Age:
Jeff Drones for Dildos Bezos . . . The TakeOver . . . The End Times . . . Useless Collective Consumerism . . . The Empire is Daft and Dangerous!
Oh, hell, I’ve been challenged to write some positive stuff on the DV blog, like, what, five straight blogs in a row that are all hopeful, positive, about the real heroes and heroines and hard-working people who never get their day in the limelight, day in court, or 15 petrabytes of fame.
Alexander Hoffmann is a physicist-turned-financier, a refugee from the particle accelerator complex in CERN who now runs a $10-billion algorithmic hedge fund from nearby Geneva. The fund is managed by VIXAL, Hoffmann’s machine learning algorithm, and is incredibly successful. The company’s statistics boast a consistently huge Alfa – a measure indicating by how much the fund beats the average and exceeds the normal rate of return – and the world’s biggest oligarchs and financial institutions are salivating at the mere thought of being allowed to invest in it.
Mt. Gox, the oldest Bitcoin exchange recently shut down, leaving customers high and dry. This Tokyo based company that once dominated the crypto-currency trading scene is reported to be filing for bankruptcy protection.
When one considers the complexity of climate modelling, the surprise, to me, is that “97% of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities”; IPCC defines ‘very likely’ as 95% certainty.
University of California scientist Tyrone Hayes discovered a widely used herbicide may have harmful effects on the endocrine system. But when he tried to publish the results, the chemical’s manufacturer launched a campaign to discredit his work. Hayes was first hired in 1997 by a company, which later became agribusiness giant Syngenta, to study their product, Atrazine, a pesticide that is applied to more than half the corn crops in the United States, and widely used on golf courses and Christmas tree farms.
