http://www.alternet.org/economy/155456/capitalism_has_failed:_5_bold_ways_to_build_a_new_world/?page=entire

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: The old economic model has utterly failed us. It has destroyed our communities, our democracy, our economic security, and the planet we live on. The old industrial-age systems -- state communism, fascism, free-market capitalism -- have all let us down hard, and growing numbers of us understand that going back there isn't an option.

http://www.zillow.com/visuals/negative-equity/

map of the places where people owe more on their homes than the homes are worth. scary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Kuiper

these days i dream of posthuman dramas...genetically altered pirates and cyborg assassins among the icy isolated worlds at the edge of the System.

Kuiper, the son of a tailor in the village of Tuitjenhorn in North Holland, had an early interest in astronomy. He had extraordinarily sharp eyesight, allowing him to see magnitude 7.5 stars with the naked eye, about four times fainter than visible to normal eyes.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1837285/hippie-capitalism-how-richmond-calif-is-building-an-economy-on-co-ops

“The whole worker-owned co-op thing, it’s most beneficial for the people directly in the co-op, but there’s a trickle-out effect, and we want to talk to people about that,” says Lexi Hudson, a co-op specialist with the California Center for Cooperative Development who has been working with the café. “When one person in the community feels empowered to own their own business and make their own decisions, they’re absolutely going to be affecting everybody else in the community.”

All the cool kids are dumping their Facebooks and taking back LJ now.

http://gbooza.com/group/americas/forum/topics/mexico-marijuana-growers-learn

If drug gangs in Mexico are successful enhancing the quality of their product, they can sell the improved marijuana for up to five times the normal price. The going rate for top quality U.S. pot is around $2,500 per pound, while Mexican types sell for under $500, U.S. law enforcement officials say.

New cultivation tactics may be a sign Mexico is being forced to compete with growers north of the border, especially in California where business is booming, spurred on in part by marijuana for medical use, now legal in 15 states and the District of Colombia.

"I've been in drug law enforcement since 1970 and I never in my wildest dreams thought I would say California is producing more marijuana than Mexico," said Bill Ruzzamenti, a police officer specializing in the marijuana trade in California's Central Valley. "But there are people willing to spend the money on what they perceive to be primo bud as opposed to the Mexican crud," he added.

http://attackthesystem.com/2009/04/why-i-am-an-anarcho-pluralist/

 What liberals and conservatives have in common is that they are both into having—owning, possessing, controlling, and manipulating money, power, people, material wealth, and things. Having is one of the ways Americans deal with the human condition—separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and death. To illustrate how irrelevant the terms “liberal” and “conservative” have become, consider the case of Sweden and Switzerland, two of the most prosperous countries in the world.

Sweden is the stereotypical democratic socialist state with a strong central government, relatively high taxes, a broad social welfare net financed by the State, and a strong social conscience. Switzerland is the most free market country in the world, with the weakest central government, and the most decentralized social welfare system. Both are affluent, clean, green, healthy, well-educated, democratic, nonviolent, politically neutral, and among the most sustainable nations in all of history. By U.S. standards, they are both tiny.

Switzerland and Sweden work, not because of political ideology, but rather because the politics of human scale always trumps the politics of the left and the politics of the right. Under the politics of human scale, a politics that trumps our now-outdated and useless “liberal-versus-conservative” dualistic mindset, there would be but one fundamental question:

“Is it too big?”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_greeks_get_it_20100524/

Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-friedland/hey-god-is-that-you-in-my_b_588161.html

interesting article on how the rate of faith in divinity doesn't correlate with sexual behavior, but DOES seem to correlate with a belief in romantic love.

Does God matter? A huge amount of research has now been conducted on whether religious belief and practice constrain the onset and promiscuity of young people's sexuality. American sociologists have found that really religious young people have intercourse a bit later and with fewer partners. But the more people have looked, the less religion seems to matter.

Just as in the case of Representative Mark Souder, the Congressional cheerleader for abstinence-only sex education who had sex with his staffer and was recently forced to resign, God does not do a good job guarding their private parts. We found that belief in God has no impact on young people's sex lives. College virgins are no more likely to believe in God than non-virgins. Even those who took a virginity pledge are not sexually different from those who didn't, except they have had a little more oral experience.

Researchers have been looking in the wrong place. God is not working in people's underpants. But God, it turns out, does matter to young people's love lives. A student's belief in God is strongly associated with whether he or she conjoins sex and love. When compared to those who don't believe in anything beyond the physical world, young people who definitely believe in God are twice as likely to make love, as opposed to just having sex. Those who believe in God, and even more so a loving God, it turns out, are much more likely to have romantic sex and to find it difficult to separate out sex and love. If you want a lover, one of the best places to look is among those who believe in God.

Why does belief in God promote the making of love? There are various possibilities. The first is that our monotheisms make love into a sacred value. People who believe in God learn to value love. The second is that religion makes sex into a guilty pleasure. The religious need to love to justify their sex. But I think there is third reason, one that points to love as a structure of faith central to the making of our world. A relation with the divine is one in which you acknowledge your lack of sovereignty and self-control; admit that you are not your own basis, your own source; and depend on an other for your being whom you will never really understand or control. Religiosity and real romance are parallel orders of experience.

Whether religious faith is a template for loving or loving is the ground out of which we imagined our one God, romantic love is a historical achievement, one of the critical ways we moderns constitute ourselves as individuals. The desire to give oneself to another, to be entrusted with another's being, to hear the call and respond, is a font from which social solidarity, equality, and justice all derive. Love is an unlikely, even impossible, life course, but nonetheless an essential driver of much that is great in our world. Love is the prerequisite of our kind of history. When we no longer believe in it, we cripple our capacity to make it.

To me, it is more frightening that there are increasing numbers of young people who doubt the existence of love than that of God. It may be that God doesn't want us fornicating, but love's vulnerability to decay is ultimately more threatening to our political union than which sexual acts are objects of prohibitive legislation.

http://futurismic.com/2010/05/04/new-fiction-windsor-executive-solutions-by-chris-nakashima-brown-and-bruce-sterling/

In today’s Internetherworld, ‘fact,’ 'reality,’ and the ‘official story,’ have vanished in a cabinet of monstrosities. Beset on all sides by collapse, bereft of the mass consent once engineered by mass media, we breathe legends, rumors, folk-tales, pop-songs, and terror.

http://hilobrow.com/2010/05/03/cthulhu-is-not-cute/

just awesome

i don't recommend having a 40-hour a week job. bad for the soul. neither do i recommend working from 11pm to 7am Weds through Sun. it tends to absorb one's entire life. that is all.

On this day in 1938, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann first synthesized the psychedelic drug LSD at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. It was five years later, on repeating synthesis of the almost forgotten substance, that Dr. Hofmann discovered the psychedelic effects of LSD after accidentally absorbing some through his fingertips on April 16, 1943.

 Google Wave invites? anyone?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=magazine

one of the most important grimoires of the modern age is about to see the light of day. i for one am extremely interested in perusing the record of Dr. Jung's mystical freak-out.

What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”

He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”

Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.