Consumer Advocacy

It’s one thing to read about the United States in the news every day, or hear about the growing sociopolitical insanity from friends via the Internet. It is another thing altogether to come back to the land of one’s birth and citizenship for a few weeks, and to observe it all directly. That comfortable feeling of safe distance that some of us who live in calmer countries (calmer on the surface, at least) cherish and hold dear is, after only eight or nine hours in an airplane, gone.

A civilization where women and children are sexually commoditized is one in terminal decline. The next enduring superpower will be one that had successfully shielded its women and children from the ongoing epidemic of mass-mediated sexualisation. Any futurist worth his salt will vouch for this axiom, as well as note the inverse correlation between the enfeeblement of the current superpower and the procession of phallic chevrons that accompany its military compulsions abroad.

Irrespective of nationality, religion, race, or gender; whether stinking rich, desperately poor, or somewhere in between, happiness is the one thing everyone is seeking – consciously or not.
The architects of the socio-economic system in which we live have devised a system that promises to satisfy this yearning. But instead of building a society at ease with itself, full of peaceful, happy people, collective discontent is fed, resulting in a range of mental health issues, and in some cases, suicide.

Yogyakarta and Karang Klethak Village — Djokopekik (who uses only one name, as is common in Java) could easily be described as the greatest living Indonesian painter. He is something of an anomaly in his country, where vulgar pop art, pop music and almost absolute submission to Western pro-market dogmas, religious rituals, and feudal family structures, are confining this vast archipelago into a tight straight jacket.

You Consume Fear: Then You are What you Eat!
Endless ignorance, presaged by fear, hate, suspicion, paranoia, misanthropy, and then all galvanized to the constructions of neutering culture of consumerism.

These are some of the news headlines that appeared when searching for “charter schools” in GoogleNews in June 2017:

The essential kernel of Karl Marx’s labor theory of value is the fact that “labor power is measured by the clock”1, namely, how many hours of labor an individual worker is required to work for capital in order to replenish the labor power he or she expends working for this very same capital.

It’s time for us as a people to come together, to form an understanding about our natural environment, and our connection to it. If we are to survive long into this century and beyond, our society will have to learn to re-indigenize itself. This will be a painful process for those dependent on creature comforts, on the electrical grid’s continuous power supply, on the streams of TV, Netflix, even the internet itself, on factory-made pharmaceuticals, etc.

The Lawless-loving corporatists have worked overtime to besmirch the word “regulation” (or law and order for corporations) and edify the word “deregulation,” to help bring about their dream state of  dismantled or weakened regulation.

It was the school holidays and there were lots of teenagers in my local park. I sometimes spot them meandering home, but I rarely see them en masse as it were. Blind to the bluebells, peacocks and glories of nature all around us, they were glued to their palm-sized screens. What were they so engrossed in – some kind of game or trivial video, a map of the park perhaps, unnecessary given the proliferation of signs? Are they texting, e-mailing, or trawling through the Internet, or all of the above?