Read:

ZNet - Chomsky Conversations pt. 1

Alternate Scene from "The Dark Knight"

Michael Moore Letter Re: Bailout

Senate to Middle Class: Drop Dead

Friday, December 12th, 2008

Friends,

They could have given the loan on the condition that the automakers start building only cars and mass transit that reduce our dependency on oil.

They could have given the loan on the condition that the automakers build cars that reduce global warming.

They could have given the loan on the condition that the automakers withdraw their many lawsuits against state governments in their attempts to not comply with our environmental laws.

They could have given the loan on the condition that the management team which drove these once-great manufacturers into the ground resign and be replaced with a team who understands the transportation needs of the 21st century.

Yes, they could have given the loan for any of these reasons because, in the end, to lose our manufacturing infrastructure and throw 3 million people out of work would be a catastrophe.

But instead, the Senate said, we'll give you the loan only if the factory workers take a $20 an hour cut in wages, pension and health care. That's right. After giving BILLIONS to Wall Street hucksters and criminal investment bankers -- billions with no strings attached and, as we have since learned, no oversight whatsoever -- the Senate decided it is more important to break a union, more important to throw middle class wage earners into the ranks of the working poor than to prevent the total collapse of industrial America.

We have a little more than a month to go of this madness. As I sit here in Michigan today, tens of thousands of hard working, honest, decent Americans do not believe they can make it to January 20th. The malaise here is astounding. Why must they suffer because of the mistakes of every CEO from Roger Smith to Rick Wagoner? Make management and the boards of directors and the shareholders pay for this.

Of course that is heresy to the 31 Republicans who decided to blame the poor, miserable autoworkers for this mess. And our wonderful media complied with their spin on the morning news shows: "UAW Refuses to Give Concessions Killing Auto Bailout Bill." In fact the UAW has given concession after concession, reduced their benefits, agreed to get rid of the Jobs Bank and agreed to make it harder for their retirees to live from week to week. Yes! That's what we need to do! It's the Jobs Bank and the old people who have led the nation to economic ruin!

But even doing all that wasn't enough to satisfy the bastard Republicans. These Senate vampires wanted blood. Blue collar blood. You see, they weren't opposed to the bailout because they believed in the free market or capitalism. No, they were opposed to the bailout because they're opposed to workers making a decent wage. In their rage, they were driven to destroy the backbone of this country, not because the UAW hadn't given back enough, but because the UAW hadn't given up.

It appears that the sitting President has been looking for a way to end his reign by one magnanimous act, just like a warlord on his feast day. He will put his finger in the dyke, and the fragile mess of an auto industry will eke through the next few months.

That will give the Senate enough time to demand that the bankers and investment sharks who've already swiped nearly half of the $700 billion gift a chance to make the offer of cutting their pay.

Fat chance.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

Jihad and Petrodollars - BBC

Jihad and Petrodollars I

Jihad and Petrodollars II


Sure, the enforcement agencies are doing their job in tracking the flow of money and trying to arrest people involved in financing terrorism. Where is the effort to fix the root causes of terrorism.

Are they too deeply embedded in our economic, political and cultural systems, and ways of dealing with other nations? I don't know what the root causes are exactly, but it seems obvious that if a government can't help but create hatred towards itself and its citizens, the problem will never be eliminated. The title of Chomsky's book, Hegemony or Survival, comes to mind.

Malcolm Gladwell ESPN Interview

ESPN Interview with Malcolm Gladwell about his new book Outliers

Cancer cure?

i haven't read this yet but check it out

http://www.thenhf.com/articles/articles_792/articles_792.htm

Zeitgeist Addendum

Watch this. I promise you won't regret it even if you don't buy everything said.

Silver Lining to Economic Downturn

Article by Mike Nickerson, author of Life, Money, and Illusion: Living on Earth as if we want to stay

Here are some highlights from the article:
"Among the first things societies can do, as we acknowledge our maturity, is to shift investment into education and health care. Unlike cars and expanding highway networks, which are resource and waste intensive, education and health care (particularly care at the preventative level) consist almost entirely of knowledge and good will.

Another step will be to revive local, small-scale agriculture. Food produced in this way requires less fuel and other natural resources and has been shown to produce more food per acre, of a higher nutritional quality, than industrial scale farming."

"the world is awash in so much capital that, a continuous stream of speculative bubbles is necessary to give it places to invest."

"At present, if there is a natural disaster, toxic spill or a health epidemic, the costs of dealing with the problems are added to the GDP, giving the false impression that we are better off. While more money might be flowing, life is degraded by such things. If we were to measure social and environmental factors of well-being with the same authority and enthusiasm with which we measure GDP, much of the confusion would be avoided. A Genuine Progress Index (GPI) would provide a broader spectrum of information, enabling the costs and benefits of different activities to be assessed with greater accuracy."

"By identifying resource draw-down, pollution, and disruptions to communities, with a GPI, external factors would enter the picture. Presently externalized costs are not included in the price of goods. When such costs are added to production costs, those goods that are socially and environmentally friendly would be less expensive and those that cause problems would cost more. Both consumers and producers would then be inclined toward responsible products.

Taking the additional step of shifting the skill, ingenuity and persuasive effort that is presently applied toward engineering obsolescence, and, instead, using it to design durable, easily repaired goods, and to reclaim pride in objects that have long served us, could cut up to 50% off of our material and energy consumption and consequent impacts."

"We celebrate when our children grow. If an adult continues to grow like a child, however, it is cause for serious concern. Developing a healthy steady-state economy is no more frightening than the prospect of becoming adult is for a teenager"

He makes a lot of sense. We need to figure out now what things are preventing this kind of change from happening. Who is invested in the status quo, in the need for growth? The obvious answer seems to be - BANKERS. Who else is highly dependent on the use of debt?

Apparently in the U.S. the money supply is loaned to the federal government by the federal reserve, with interest. This trickles down, so the whole monetary/economic system is predicated on loaning money and credit. That’s why the media pushes the importance of unfreezing credit in the midst of the crisis. They aren't interested in the true causes of the economic crisis.

The people, the citizens, are tied up in the current system so they are mostly concerned about their investments and jobs. This lack of interest from the media (corporations selling audiences to other businesses) and citizens allows the true causes of the crisis and the underlying, fundamental flaws with our way of life to go largely undiscussed.


More from Mike Nickerson:
Sustainable living: Things You Can Do

Internet Censorship?

Lebanon's migrant workers

Recent news article about the treatment of migrant workers in Lebanon

Brzezinski on why he support(ed) Obama

The Men Behind Obama

Designing the future

Zeitgeist - The Movie

I can't find the frickin video anywhere. Anyway this is kinda funny
Who's More Grizzled script

Funny how some sports team's take the name of the thing they eradicated in that region....

Colorado Buffaloes,
Florida State Seminoles
Atlanta Braves
Toronto Maple Leafs

you piss in your pants, you only stay warm for so long...
-robert duvall's character in 'we own the night'

a good summation of the history of human existence since the full-scale adoption of agriculture as the one way to live.

give students a taste of freedom in the classroom, and maybe they will demand it when they leave

We are the biggest parasite in the history of existence. We are the mosquito that drinks itself to obesity before the human squeezes the skin and blows it up.

The human even tries to warn the mosquito. But it sees all the others biting the humans so it decides to continue. The human then says to it - I'M GOING TO KILL YOU RIGHT NOW - but it can't help itself. It knows there is some kind of danger but it can't fully bring it to focus. Its tiny brain can't fully process the message. All it can think about is blood...more blood...more blood...

SMACK.

News report - NJ Supreme Court ruling on factory farms

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2008/2008-07-31-093.asp

We are in the midst - maybe near the end - of a huge tech boom. Crazy amounts of new technologies, etc.

When we run out of non-renewable resources all of our new products are going to have to be made from recycled materials. Maybe before it gets to that point we can change our way of living by the choices we make, and maybe keep a little saved money (oil) in the account for emergencies...

Looking around your classes, you realize that it's all on us. We have to step up and take responsibility for our actions. Obviously this applies to life in general, and it might be the most important lesson anyone can ever learn.

Who Killed The Electric Car? - movie trailer

The foundations of any society:

education
health care
legal system

And these mostly suck right now. They need to be changed. The best one right I guess is health care. Education is so much more important though because it is the formative years of every single human being. I have no idea what it will look like but I am imagining a world where the other two cease to exist in their current forms. Imagine if you could walk or take the bus to the clinic like you go to the convenience store. Everything needs to be decentralized. The concentration of power and thinking and money is the worst fucking thing in the world. It's killing us.

Education has to give people a chance to learn. Teach people how to learn, and then fucking let them do it! You don't even need to teach people how to learn. They know how to learn, and they are only going to really learn about the shit that they are interested in. We are destroying spirit the way we do things - at best we are stifling it's potential, but no - people are sick (why do we differentiate between physical and mental illness?), they steal from each other, they kill each other, they fucking hate each other for reasons that are so superficial it's insane. It is absolutely insane. There has to be some metaphor for this....

We are obsessed with compartmentalizing everything. We have chopped the world up into pieces - yours, mine, whatever. It's not ours! It's not fucking ours. What we need is freedom. You can't even kill yourself. Now that is beyond belief - you don't have a choice about being born but you can't kill yourself. Not that I think people should kill themselves, I don't. But that's just one example of our society making legislation to try and control. We need to give up trying to control each other to the fullest extent possible.

Current controls that need to go:

• Prescriptive education - telling people what they need to know. Give them skills then set them free
  
• Criminal penalties for using drugs - why don't we fine people for crimes? Make some money instead of spending it all on keeping them in jails. Of course you want to lock up the dangerous people or send them to Siberia to work or something, but the people who don't cause any harm? It's a total waste.
• feel free to add to the list

I guess the environment has to be added to the list of pillars of a society. It seems a bit redundant but maybe not, because everything is the environment. So to re-state that, the natural environment should be a top priority.

Think about it in terms of time-value. Compare the environment's value to that of a human life. A human life lasts for approximately 75 years. The environment is responsible for the whole population on the earth's existence. We can't live on a planet that doesn't have trees, clean water, clean air, grass, animals.... the advent of big, urban cities where people are removed from nature, has caused people to think that we don't need it! The stuff is removed from another part of the world, processed - causing pollution and destroying some other place, and then shipped into the city. So the city people don't care about the environment because they are insulated from it. I suppose the cities on the gulf coast hit by the hurricane might disagree...

Exxon

Exxon's latest quarterly profits

continued...

So it's the government's role that is primarily to blame. If factory farms had to pay all the costs of doing business that way and their prices were reflected in the market, they would get priced out.

But thanks to lobbying and maybe the illusion that they are doing everyone a favour by keeping meat cheap, bigger problems are being created.

Just another place that the government has no business in. I was reading on Wikipedia how the environment is being trashed mostly because the courts won't allow it to be protected. Their decisions usually favour industries, I don't know enough about it though.

So instead of creating and enforcing environmental regulations, the government gives everyone a free pass.

I know people don't look too far into the future when it comes to the impact of their actions. But we can't have a government that does the same thing. Everything we do has to be geared to the long-term, or life just becomes a casino. Sure you can think you are lucky for a while playing roulette, but eventually you will lose everything.

This is the difference and value of the tribal ways of thinking and living.

This is disturbing.... watch it anyway.

Read after viewing:

Either this type of food production has gone too far, or we are OK with our food being produced this way.

Look, I love burgers, steak, chicken wings, turkey, ham sandwiches, all of it. Does meat have to be produced this way? For it to be cheap and available to the majority of the population, apparently the answer is yes. Well, since when is meat eating a right? Shouldn't the market dictate the price of goods? I just read that governments subsidize meat and dairy heavily (16oz of beef should be $30 approx. - don't quote me on that), to keep them cheap enough for everyone to consume. Is that true? Government intervention seems to distort the market and create negative externalities...

If the government did not subsidize meat and dairy or whatever, and the market dictated the price, what would happen? The price would go up and less people would be able to afford it. Good! Then the demand would go down, supply would go down, and there are other sources of nutrition. Maybe obesity would go down too and diabetes! Who knows.... any ideas?

Krishnamurti

There is so much good shit by this guy but here's a sample:

Then there is the question of dying, which we have carefully put far away from us, as something that is going to happen in the future- the future may be fifty years off or tomorrow. We are afraid of coming to an end, coming physically to an end and being separated from the things we have possessed, worked for, experienced - wife, husband, the furniture, the little garden, the books and the poems we have written or hoped to write. And we are afraid to let all that go because we are the furniture, we are the picture that we possess; when we have the capacity to play the violin, we are that violin. Because we have identified ourselves with those things - we are all that and nothing else. Have you every looked at it that way? You are the house - with the shutters, the bedroom, the furniture which you have very carefully polished for years, which you own - that is what you are. If you remove all that you are nothing.

And that is what you are afraid of - of being nothing. Isn't it very strange how you spend forty years going to the office and when you stop doing these things you have heart trouble and die?

Krishnamurti founded schools in England, India, and the U.S. The Oak Grove School in California looks like a pretty good school but is obviously prohibitively expensive. How to provide an education like that for all?

The Krishnamurti Foundation of America website.

Check out the Arrowsmith website. The school corrects many learning disorders. For $4,000 a teacher can be trained to administer the program, but of course the school board has to see value in it to pay you, and the way things look I don't think LD kids are a top priority. To attend the Arrowsmith school in Peterborough for 1 year costs $17,000+, yet the materials of the program are easily replicated and distributed.

in light of the financial crisis and the U.S. government's response to it, the role of federal government must be called into question. Personally, i'd like to see education and health care moved to the local/regional level, leaving regulation (enforcement of rules on important industries like financial markets and large industries) and the military to the feds... Ideally federal government will eventually cease to exist.

I was listening to Robert Kennedy Jr. on his radio show, Ring of Fire, on Air America on Saturdays, which you can also podcast from iTunes. On October 11 he was talking to Naomi Klein and they were saying how the bailout is another example of the Bush administration giving a handout to corporations.

The point that sticks in your head is when they say the economic system is crony capitalism - profits are privatized, and losses are socialized. Wow. What a world we live in. I mean, you get the sense that you are up against some powerful interests, but that just lays it down for you. The government lets the companies keep the profits, and the taxpayers pay for the losses.

Where is true capitalism when you need it.

(in the voice of Harry Caray): Hey! What about this?!

Get rid of the centralized government (for most things). It is fat, bloated, and so inefficient that it's leading the charge to our graves. Distribute power so that communities/regions/cities are the masters of their own domain.

Let local governments tax their own people, and have that tax money go right back into the community. The way the world is connected now, it is so easy to move people, share information, and trade goods and services. We don't need a big bureaucracy making decisions, and there are so many benefits to having local government make the decisions. First of all, transparency - you can actually see the lifestyle of your local leaders, have a say in their decisions, and see the effects of decisions. Second, if people know that the money they give the government is the same money that is going back into the community, they will have goodwill towards the government. They will pay taxes (maybe even on under the table transactions) because they know that it's paying for their hospital bills, kid's education, roads being paved and plowed, etc. Third, culture - people get to live the way they want to. Sure, there would be a minimum standard of laws for everyone that protects property and against crime, but other than the important laws, people could determine how they want to live.

This country's infrastructure has been built, and now the centralized government is unnecessary because it is just ripping us off while living the high life and skim the fat for their corporate "real" constituents.

I guess a centralized government is necessary for regulatory bodies - stock market, media, etc. But then again, these bodies aren't doing jack shit. Centralized ownership of the media gives us the same news wherever you go, dissenting points of view are hard to find in the mainstream.

So let's move to what all the right-wing pinheads say they want - a free market (unless they REALLY screw up, then please bail us out). But instead of bailing people out when they make mistakes, let the market dictate where money flow. All the government should be doing is creating the playing field - make the rules and enforce them, but stay out of the game.

There are obviously questions with this, economically is it feasible for example. Well shit, look at the waste. We pay 18 billion for the war in Afghanistan, for what? So we can stop the Taliban? Bullshit. Sure, there is progress, but it's not lasting. Stop the Taliban by cutting off their money - I just heard we need the opium produced there for morphine in our hospitals, so why don't we just pay the farmers directly? But that's getting beside the point.

The point is, we are wasting so much money that we are powerless to stop the flow of, other than in freaking elections to elect leaders who probably aren't going to make enough change. Not only that, but a big chunk of the population is uneducated and gets their political views from 30 second sound bites and marketing style commercials. Either that or they base who they want to lead the country, on what their local leader will do for them. So we end up with impotent minority governments and waste another 1-4 years of country's life. We need to break this system apart.

Chomsky

Good interview with Chomsky about the current state of affairs (neoliberal globalization, the current financial crisis, Latin America, etc.

Link to Chomsky's Z Space page. Articles, interviews, audio, video, blog posts.

Grade 2 Science

What the grade 2s learned today: The water on earth has always been here. The dinosaurs drank it, and all future generations of humans will drink the same water.

This reminds me how human actions run counter to knowledge. I know that if I pollute the water it is harder for the earth to clean it and that I eventually I will have less water to drink and over time this may put the future of mankind in jeopardy. But...... I can't see any instant effects of my actions, so what the heck.

What we are seeing is knowledge superseded by short term gain. Sure, the knowledge is not conscious -I'm not thinking about the fact that polluted water means it becomes more scarce and is not an easily replenished resource- but even if I was thinking about that, I wouldn't care. I wouldn't care because my actions don't matter. It's the classic water and wine story. The problem is, this trait in humans is killing us.

If everyone realized that their actions were everything (which they are, since you can't have a sum without the parts) things could be very different. I've written before about the power of one person changing their choices, but it's worth repeating.

If you can change yourself, you create a standard against which others are forced to compare themselves. Without an example of a better way, it is easy to rest in complacency.

Human actions running counter to knowledge can be found in many areas of life. Health and nutrition; the environment; the kid who knows he'll get in trouble but does it anyway; the educated smoker; the list goes on...

What this amounts to is this: Longevity is not top priority.People say they are afraid of dying, but apparently only of a quick or accidental death. They do not always act in their long-term, overall health's best interests.

Hmmmmm..... what the?

Graham this is who you are fighting re: Palin

Dick Morris on Fox News

Also, a must read review of Newt Ginrich's book.... this guy talks about how Norway runs its country, sounds like there is some good stuff there.

Al Gore on Climate Change (TED talk)

The point he makes about the cap and trade system is excellent, where if the whole world was united in this effort to minimize pollution, corporations would have a legal obligation to maximize profit by decreasing pollution. Thus, the market would be the force of change - seemingly the only way to get bipartisan support for an idea in the U.S.

1. How to Fix the U.S. Economy... Letter from Michael Moore to American citizens

2. (Apparently) Good Documentaries

Canadian Debate

October 2, 2008 - Canadian debate

U.S. Election clips....

John McCain
Sarah Palin, McCain, Iran, nukes

The evolution of the awakening of consciousness floats in a cloud of vanity.
We are all soaked in vanity – it permeates our lives.

People talk about God above. There is no "above" in absolute terms. Are there absolute terms?

If you want to refer to existence as God, fine, it doesn’t matter. But don’t talk about it like there is some void within existence, separating us and God. The fabric of life is ONE fabric. There is the appearance of here and there, but really there is only here.

We think we are everything. We are not. We have evolved enough to become aware of ourselves and our surroundings, but in doing so we have lost the path we came on. We are now destroying our home and ourselves.

Think about the universe, and its size. The universe is infinite, the earth is finite. By definition of these terms, the earth barely exists on a universal scale.

Now look around outer space, where else can such an abundance of life be found? Life is incredible. In an infinite space of gas and dust, this is what is growing, and we don’t have a fucking clue how rare and beautiful it is? Look at the joy of relationships, the diversity of living creatures and plants, the sensory offerings, the ability to learn about and do things you love to do.

How much richer could we possibly be? Imagine a richer planet.

Sadly, our consciousness cannot hold the vastness of the universe but for fleeting moments. How our self-perception would change if we could sustain this awareness, I don't know.

Why are we here? There is no adequate answer to this question other than ‘why not’. This leaves us in the middle… eternally. We exist as measurable entities between big infinity (looking at space) and small infinity (looking into space). The universe is infinite, I guess. If you put on your jet pack and shot into space in a straight line from earth, and never ran out of fuel, you would never stop!? If you created a microscope that could magnify anything without limit (human cells, for example), you would never stop seeing what it's made of.

This is one example of balance, a fundamental principle of existence.

Yet none of this matters, except in one area: appreciation. We are blind with vanity. We are so wrapped up in our own worlds, we can’t see the world. And I’m not blaming anyone. This is the natural course. Go through the bad, experience the shit, to discover the good.


Wage war. Do as the U.S. says, not as it does. Let the companies in or we'll cut off the aid, we'll make your people starve. They'll starve anyway, you say? Oh well.

Tax the poor. Privatize social security. Privatize the water, and the air. Privatize my thoughts - make me pay to think.

Once everyone owns everything, everything will be fine. Too bad this planet is not ours, we don't really own anything. But we play the game, and we take it very seriously.

Big Bang Machine?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7627631.stm

It's just human nature to take shit too far. These people are so obsessed with finding an explanation for existence, and they never will. What kind of scientific explanation could possibly prove adequate? Stop wasting money on this stuff.

TED talk: Clay Shirky on Institutions vs. Collaboration

Very interesting talk about the changing ways information is shared, and how institutions must change or die.

Spirit

Goldsmith talks about spirit as the underlying, fundamental realm of existence. The 'material' world as we know it sits upon the spiritual world. We are spirit, but we think we are material. We think we (are) matter.

Adyashanti talks about how we identify so strongly with our material manifestations - body, mind, thoughts, emotions. But if you search for an 'I' that these are all attached to, you can't find it. This is because our essential being is simply consciousness or awareness. Awareness is the underlying spirit, and this is the fundamental nature of everything that exists.

Unfortunately, most people measure their lives according to the manifestations. They identify themselves as those things. I think about it like this. There is a truck with a trailer attached to it. Wherever the truck goes, the trailer goes with it. Many people get dragged through life - often feeling dragged - because they are whipped around by their attachment to a self that does not exist.

When you stop this identifying with everything you thought you were, you can appreciate that everything is the same. Everything is awareness. What could this mean to how we live our lives?

So much hatred, violence, and suffering is caused by the divisions we draw between ourselves. Conservatives and Liberals. Democrats and Republicans. Blue and Red.states. Believers and Atheists. Muslim and Christian. India and Pakistan. The US vs. the world. Beautiful and Ugly. The list could go on forever...

And although these differences seem to exist on the surface, I think they lose their power when you realize there is something more fundamental that ties us all together. Awareness never changes. It's manifestations constantly change, but it never does. And the beauty of it is that you can sit in that awareness, you can be there all the time if you want. And this is such a peaceful, yet active and vital state of being, that it would turn the world on it's head.

Link to Graham's blog

http://gonzobockblog.blogspot.com

Gbock's blog

TED talk: Our Genes Are Not Our Fate

Thoughts

We think we are entitled to as much of anything as we want. In the animal kingdom this type of behavior is counter-balanced. We are too powerful for our own good, so our only option (until it’s too late) – if we want to avoid major suffering and devastation – is to be our own counter-weight. Nature is fighting back right now, and the next few decades are critical.

Standard of living – it would help things if we could make luxury unnecessary: if people feel good about themselves they don’t need possessions to feel good, and naturally a sustainable standard of living is achieved.

Viewing people outside their country as humans too wouldn’t hurt either.

On that note, aren’t people like Sarah Palin hypocritical? They supposedly believe in the sacred value of human life, forcing raped women who get pregnant to have a child because the zygote or whatever it’s called is life….yet have no problem with their American army killing innocent civilians.

American life is sacred, all others are secondary.

We are each responsible for our own impact on the planet. As populations grow finite resources get consumed and become scarce. If consumption is not controlled, the planet begins to die and then we do.

We have institutions that govern our society that tell us we don’t have to be responsible – courts of law, schools(?), even governments that allow private interests to go too far (prime housing debacle). Only when the shit hits the fan do we realize that our actions and choices actually matter.

Vision for future: people living sustainably, doing what they can to alleviate their burden on the earth. Ties in to what Obama was saying at Harvard about active citizenship, where citizens live and work not only for themselves but each other.

We need government to create a fair playing field for markets. Legislation that allows anyone and everyone a chance, not giving special considerations to those already with power and money. Like Robert Kennedy Jr. says, if the true costs of products were borne out in the market, we would be well on our way to lightening our footprints on earth. Animals tread lightly on this planet. Humans do not. We are only beginning to realize this and that it has really serious repercussions. We call human life the most valuable of blessings, yet we cannot see that we are indirectly killing ourselves. They don’t have a loud enough voice, those who talk about the future of the planet. Maybe once nature has had its say we will start to listen to ourselves (if we are still around).

The main obstacle is likely people bent on maintaining or raising their profits, no matter the cost to their countrymen/women, families, children, or the planet. By naming them we evoke emotion but the truth is that every stakeholder is the same.

Saving the planet = ourselves = our future generations, and this is true no matter the order you put the stakeholders in.

So what will it take? It’s going to take real education. People must learn about the real impact of their actions.

They must think about the future in terms of how their actions will affect future generations. But they must also think about their actions now, because the present time is where real change occurs.

Drop the mentality that it takes time to effect change. It does on a broad scale, but only because it takes people time to accept that it doesn’t take time! A paradox?

Regardless, individual change simply takes willingness and observation of self. If a person has a goal in mind and is working towards it, and wants to know how they are doing, all they need to do is observe. Observe themselves and their interactions with the people and things surrounding them.

Feeling like a part of a collective effort is satisfying for most humans. It gives their lives meaning and motivates them to act according to their own beliefs.

Right now, this is having an undesirable effect. People are not believing in the power of choice, and because no one does, everyone feels ok about it. The problem is that today, people do not think there is an alternative to feeling helpless.

Humans cannot think very far outside their own world for very long, but that is ok. They don’t need to, all they have to do is make choices according to their own beliefs and values, and know that it matters. The water and wine story applies here.

To do this, people must be educated about how the commercial options available to them today – products, services – are made and delivered to them. Make the "abstract" real. In other words, teach them how their day to day lives, the everyday choices, affect the world on a broad scale. Ultimately, what effect that is having on the planet or their fellow humans. The survival of the species is what is at stake when we are talking about the planet health.

The questions the people on earth should ask themselves when making any choice: am I doing harm, am I causing damage by making this choice? Do I have to make this choice? If the answer is yes and no respectively, don’t do it. The hard part is teaching people that yes is the answer to the first question, when asked about many products and services available in today’s markets.

A type of journalism could be to travel the world, telling the stories of the people who work at Coke factories, etc. It might make the consumers who need those ‘slave labourers’ think twice about buying. It’s too bad that many are addicted to many products, an attachment that will be hard to break. It starts when you are a child, and we all know habits are hard to break. This is why early education and proper conditioning is necessary. There's also addiction as a symptom of mental illness, caused -partially, let's say- by improper nutrition.

Now that's fucked up. We start eating crappy foods because it's cheap and tasty, which makes us mentally ill because our bodies aren't supposed to be fed so much sugar and synthetic shit etc., and that mental illness that the food caused, takes us right back to the very same food.

People must not grow up into money earning and spending adults who think that where they choose to spend their money does not matter. When you look at money, where it goes is one of the only things that matter because it is has the power to create or ease suffering.

Video

http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/video/videopage?categoryId=null&brand=null&videoId=3553404&n8pe6c=2

Video of Obama interview/playing 1 on 1 with Stuart Scott