Free DVDs @ “Money & Sustainability”, an IRBE event.

Institute for a Resource Based Economy…

…is some dope shit (and by that, yes, I do mean “fuck introductions”). They promote a new economic system that connects the environment and our economy to achieve a sustainable society. This system, labelled a ‘Resource Based Economy’, challenges our current growth economy and proposes a steady-state economic model based upon our scientific understanding of our planet and the resources and ecosystems which we depend on for our survival.

At IRBE we recognize that human beings cannot indefinitely grow our economies and our consumption given the limitation of a finite planet with finite resources. The evidence is clear that we are up against actual barriers to growth whether we speak about fossil fuels, mineral resources, deforestation, species extinction, ocean acidification and more.

IRBE has run an overview and discussion series featuring Chris Martensen’s “Crash Course” on the current global economic situation, and it’s home-hitting implications. They’ve featured the like of Bernard Lietaer, Jacqui Dunn, Charles Eisenstein, and a couple of 3D printinggenie’s asses named Rory and Adam.

Their event last night “Money and Sustainability” was a promising look at the possibilities of complementary currencies to ease the inherent fluctuations of the current model, as well as transition to a more sustainable way of living. Through real-world examples the authors explain how thousands of communities across the globe are reassessing and re-engineering money with astonishing social and environmental results. These strategies do not replace the conventional monetary system, but work in parallel with it, providing new options and resources that promote sustainable abundance and cooperation. In fact, since 1980 the number of cooperative currencies has increased from a mere handful to more than 4,000 mature systems today.

I picked up 4 free DVDs from the table set up there by IRBE’s sister organization, Zeitgeist Toronto. They were:

Zeitgeist: Addendum

 (2008) The movie that sparked the Zeitgeist Movement, director Peter Joseph discusses the monetary and banking systems, the social values they enforce, and a more sustainable hypothesis for the future from a scientific perspective. Featuring Jacques Freso. (2hr 3m)

  Zeitgeist: Moving Forward

 (2011) The 3^rd and latest Zeitgeist film Moving Forward presents a case for a transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs our global society.

 This subject matter takes a different perspective from those of cultural relativism and traditional ideology (nationalism, religion, etc) and moves to relate the core, empirical “life ground” attributes of human and social survival, extrapolating those immutable natural laws into a new sustainable social paradigm called a “Resource-Based Economy”.

 History – Zeitgeist: Moving Forward was released in 60+ countries and in 25+ languages on This large scale release was not associated with any major distributor, and sold out in Toronto’s Bloor (now Hot Docs) and Underground Cinemas. (2hr 45m)

 Awakening

 From space systems engineer writer/director’s youtube video of Awakening:

 “Awaken to the world around us, the problems we face, why they exist, and how to truly solve them once and for all. Please rip, share, push and promote this video. Make this viral, and educate the world! There are many groups and organizations around the world working to make it a better place. Here’s a very small list that I’d like to share…” (31 min)

 “The Rise of Our Social Immune System”

 A mix of documentaries and a lecture on one disc, compiled by Zeitgeist Toronto

 Humanity Ovedue –Short Documentary exploring the current state of the world and some of the social, environmental and economic changes which could be put into place to create a better quality of life globally. Interviews from Occupy London, The Eden Project and Ben Mcleish and Will Dixon from The Zeitgeist Movement. (16m 12s)

 Crossroads: Labour Pains of a New Worldview – A documentary exploring the depths of the current human condition and the emergence of a worldview that is recreating our world from the inside out. Crossroads* places evolutionary context to today’s escalating social unrest, natural disasters, and economic failures. It illuminates the footsteps of an integrated worldview, penetrating its way through the power of social networks to the forefront of our personal and collective awareness. (1hr 4m)

 Peter Joseph @ TED^XOjai:The Big Question: Environmental Misalignment –
This talk examines todays economy in light of our environmental misalignment and the value war of personal want and industrial/corporate “rights” and the finite carrying capacity of the Earth, and the dire interrelatedness between poverty, mental health, and overall levels of social prosperity. (10m 25s)

 Charlie Kaufman’s “We Are All One” (Excerpt) – (2011) In front of a sell-out Theatre at the BFI in London, Charlie Kaufman delivered the final lecture in BAFTA’s Screenwriter’s Lecture Series. This is an excerpt from the 70 minute speech. (5m)

Their sign read:

FREE (awesome) DVDS

Simply because you feel something does not make it so.

“Only 15% of our stress is related to external/material circumstance…”

Circumstances don’t matter. Only state of being matters.

That is to say: after meeting the nutritional, medical, social, and educational needs of a human, they don’t get happier by doubling or tripling material comfort.

The way to fill that “hole” is to identify the potential we have inside of us. Ask what you really want to accomplish in life? What do you want you existence to have meant? What would you regret to have spent your time on (think of your parents)? And what wouldn’t you regret?

Your meditative practice, and the consciousness it creates, is a genuine contribution to a better, more sustainable and peaceful world.

A talk by Matthieu Ricard on the power of concentration and contemplative practices for compassion, insight, stress reduction, and optimal brain and body function.

A good book to read on a related note.  

Children with hand-grenades

Here is a video of out dear ex-(and let’s hope it stays that way)mayor. Skip to 1:00 for the main attraction. It exemplifies the ultimate immaturity of so many that run public offices. They’re children. Business minds and lawyers are not technically or emotionally equipped to do what they are tasked with.

So here I’ll express the regret I have that so much energy is expended in the focus on figure-heads and puppet-show controversies like the American abortion debate. There is not much to talk about, don’t dignify anyone who tries to drag it up. Mind your p’s, and don’t like ’em, don’t get ’em.

But we take icons, representations of reality that stir us emotionally, instead of the underlying processes with want addressing; these are messy or scary or ugly, and not nearly as glamorous or inducing of that good ol’ simple “I’m right, motherfucker” sensation. And so they’re ignored. Further, the focus on the root causes of human problems are seen as “oppressive” or “_____-normative”. As if while recognizing what is healthy and unhealthy to eat, one cannot admit the obvious need for variant diets amongst individuals. It does not do egos enough justice to recognize xenophobia or “otheritis” in everyone’s perspective, and ask its correction of everyone. Only those who fit an equally broad-stroke of generality must change themselves, I have “rights” as the “oppressed”. The right to deny reality. I wish I was so blessed (well, by such definitions, I AM, but I don’t wield my challenges, I seek to overcome them).

We are like children with hand-grenades. Please forgive how disjointed this has just become. It’s all one, little darlin’s. Stick with me. We use our very effective tools for the manipulation of reality to try to change reality itself, it seems. We can farm and build and travel so efficiently and effectively that we deny the effects it has upon our homes and selves, and do not even consider them in more than abstract terms on charters and agreements most of the time. We have productive and creative capacity in material venues far exceeding what we’ve collectively managed on a personal and spiritual scale. This is an age old observation. Technology is not -cannot be- a bad thing. But that every person can hold and fire a gun does not endow each with the reason to keep it, for most of its life, empty of bullets. That there exists the possibility to do something does not mean we are ready to do it. My fears in relation to the convergence of technological and biological beings in an advanced way stem not from any sci-fi nonsense, but from the real fear that a system that governs human capability in bionics and super-abilities and health-preserving technology on a monetary basis is ripe for a very disastrous new form of class warfare. Our social values are sick, and old, and useless -in fact outright harmful.

We are gross. We are overt. We are sensationalistic. We are reactive. And very very simple much of the time, but we put clutter in the way, cause the simple facts of reality are… well they’re certainly not a fucking hug from a giant teddy bear. The self-caricature of a self-caricature that are the modern semi-to-popular media (our governments, big journals and rags, major interest groups, UNs and so forth) seeks to put out what will get a reaction from audiences. Due to their nature, some are even directly governed, or are in part, by the reaction of the audience. A cycle develops where no one can rock the boat too much. The common denominator is as often heightened or lowered by mass-delusion or impulse as it is by deliberate propaganda or awareness or understanding. Probably more on the impulsive side, actually.

Taylorism, scientific production, individualization, the specialization inherent in complex systems (though ours mostly cluttered with the useless complexity of commercial production), the worship of the young, beautiful, powerful ego have and the villainizing and oppressing of their opposites and alternatives have given us Carbon Man. The budding appendage homo sapiens sapiens that will in time go extinct, either through it’s own evolution into a Post-Carbon Man, fueled and sustained by other, hopefully cleaner processes, or its own demise, as an oil-dependent economy drives off its cliff, and slowly falls; starvation and mass unrest. The loss of a million Alexandrias in the survival of a fraction of our skilled and learned humans. I do hope we live on as post-carbon people.

This Carbon Man only sees moving, brightly coloured objects. Only feels fear and its opposing vice, righteous rightness. It only sees violence and dominance as its tools for change. It only understands laws and commands, only obeys under threat and duress. It is repressed, and internalizes its role. It becomes a self-appointed guardian of the status-quo. Post-Carbon man is held buoyant on the surface of reality by the child’s wings and rings and jackets. They are intensive (but rarely extensive) bouts of pleasure. The tv-dinner communality of Super Bowl Sunday. Tasty treats and traditional meats. The refuge of popular banality. “Nobody gets THAT far, so I won’t  try”.

The implications this has on our political system are evident: Rob Fords get elected. Rob Fords insensitively offended and ignore thousands of constituents, and, lacking the technical understand of the infrastructure, social systems, ecologies, biologies, and so forth they are tasked with operation, they cannot but fuck up royally. They arouse controversy. They court it, and pursue it down the hall squealing, relishing in the slop of rightness. They must be right. Call them ignorant, call them short-sighted, reactive, naive, or dead, do not call them wrong. But as George Carlin points out, they emerge from among US. We are their source. We produce them, and we are their supplicants. The status quo pumps through the veins of this system. God, I’m rambling.

When we impeach them, the same thing that created them, the basic inability to accept the different, the new, the less immediately pleasurable, the less familiar, proceeds to pump out more. We cannot change the things we must: our fear of death, our monetary-market system and its restriction and burden and violence, even our opinions or choices, lest we be flip-floppers or unfamiliar to those who loved what we were. Conformity, familiarity, and convenience are the girders in a structure that should not stand. Structure, there should be no structure. We are intellectual nomads, following the North Star of the reality as it is, without end or rest, wherever it shall take us. This is our next step.

BC Suicide Pact and How Doctors Won’t Help… Much

I’ve read of a recently publicized (heretofore unsuccessful) suicide pact made by a group of young ‘Natives’*, around 12-15 years old, and that story can be found here. Under pressure undisclosed in the article, they have been narrowly prevented from completing this pact, not before many of the poor things drank themselves unconscious. Now of course the pressures in action here are no secret, especially if one makes a habit of looking for them.

The homes and ways of life many of these children’s ancestors had established, not always peaceful or healthy themselves, were rendered utterly impossible, disintegrated, and demoralized by the arrival of European disease, religion, and trade opportunity. Combined brute force from Europeans, the poor foresight of the human mind, and the compounding dependence of Natives on Europeans has taken a once strong, proud, and largely effective culture and smashed it to pieces. Further, it’s glued some of those pieces awkwardly to a piece of cardboard and handed it back as if in genuine reparation of the damage. Sadly, the methods we employ do not come close to addressing the root causes of the problems now experienced by the Natives of Canada, and indeed almost every ‘treatment’ applied anywhere, created by the system in place, mandatorally ignores the role of the abstract profit motive, the ownership of natural resources, and the lack of basic elements of self-actualization in the solutions that are applied to such problems as suicide pacts among disoriented, traumatized youth. Some pay lip service to these, but, by virtue of the paradigm that got them elected or hired, they are unable to challenge it’s governing principles, which themselves are the problem.

I was hospitalized recently for a minor mental breakdown I had on my university campus. I was crying loudly into the coat I’d bunched up over my face, and when I came up for air, campus security had arrived. Here is a case-in-point of the fundamental inadequacy of both systemic responses to depressed/demoralized/suicidal people, and to after-the-fact solutions to these situations in general.

Security and I talk for a while, and while the conversation is the “good advice” that any person reasonably accepting of reality knows, but of course, it never helps in the moment. ‘Cause it’s not (only) a lack of intellectual understanding that causes us to do the detrimental things we do to our selves and others. The police then arrive, running through the procedures they’re required to do, necessitated by the mass anonymity of our culture. Because they don’t know me, they have to assume to worst and prepare for that. They were polite (moreso than I) and took me to the hospital (voluntarily at this point) to “talk to someone”.

I’m left there alone, and promptly lose all the progress I’d made in calming myself. I get in about 30 minutes later, still convulsing with unreasonable cognitive dissonance. I couldn’t tell you (both in genuine ignorance and privacy) what I was upset over, but that’s not the point anyhow. I’m visited by an MD first, and after 2 minutes of discussion he leaves. I’m then called a ‘form 1’, a person likely to be a harm to themself or others, despite my clear acknowledgement that people usually come in for these reasons, and sensible explanation that I wasn’t one. Again, how can the doctor trust this well-spoken, even charming kid? He doesn’t know me. Perhaps I’m a gifted sociopath who will jump a bridge the second I’m let out. Again, not in genuine compassion, but due to legal obligation, I’m restricted unnecessarily for 6 hours, greatly exacerbating the stress. Resistance, including not donning the hospital gown, would find me restrained and forcibly clothed. Motherfuck. My meditation practice kicks in, and I swallow a hard reality. Had I ACTUALLY been suicidal, I’d have been much more likely to attempt and succeed by this point, directly due to “the help I needed”, as the article refers such “rescues” by hospitals. I request politely to be revisited by this doctor, and when declined, I offer several suggests to help further what I must assume is their goal: Ensure the safety, comfort, and de-escalation of mentally-suffering patients. Going for a supervised walk. Wearing my clothes. The psychiatrist hurrying the fuck up for fuck’s sake (kept this one to myself). Nothing.

Needless to say, psych arrives, and I’m declared fit to leave within about the same time as it took the MD to not get to know me and pass superficial judgement upon someone practically blindly. The psych at least seemed to know to take me seriously, at face value, and to establish if I was of sound mind and reason with me accordingly. I was, and she did, and I left fucking pissed, not even wanting to talk, as I had simply come to do.

And this is what the false-alarms go through. The interment and sterility and impersonality, save the few compassionate nurses you’ll find, that mental-health patients experience is not help. Help would be the presence of familiar (if also some unfamiliar) supports who understand individual needs, in a scientifically designed comforting space (colour, composition, etc. of a space provably increases or decreases, stress- white fucking walls and bleach-smell don’t do any good for anyone). Further, the provision of socialization, social-identity and a place in the community, basic food, water, shelter, exercise and liberated spare-time, and an instilled love of learning and understanding of co-operation, acceptance, patience, and impermanence are the ingredients needed to preclude suicidal feelings in the first place. I stop talking when I don’t know what I’m talking about, so how to create these for every individual I won’t comment on. However, we do need to acknowledge the flaws inherent to the system we all choose to live in, the unavoidable effects they have in deprivation, scarcity, differential advantage, excessive and avoidable social stratification, unhealthy competition, materialism, and ego. If we wanna actually change things, I mean. Otherwise just keep saying “Yes we can” and keep your face in your ass.

In fact, the most important realization we have yet to make is that most people are mentally unhealthy, in preventable curable ways, as a direct result of this system. But this point will take me down too long a road for the present, so I’ll leave with that.

 *In quotes and capitalized to distinguish the proper noun, frankly founded on faulty reasoning, from the actual definition of the word, ‘one who originates from x’, ’cause who on this planet is an alien or foreigner? The lines we draw (and even those drawn by the sea as it rises and falls over time, altering our coasts in the process) are not real, and thus a native of what we call Canada is an arbitrary distinction, both because it’s just Earth of which we are all equally native and entitled, and because there’s no reason to give humans the dominion over it, nor have the people alive today (or even all of their ancestors) necessarily and provably been the “first” to live on any given portion of the land. And then, even if they WERE, nothing follows that gives them more or original rights to anything about the land. Traditonal or historical agreements with an equally unauthorized “government”? Fuck off. It’s an important distinction to make, I feel, if we are to live as a united species in a holistic understanding of reality, a prerequisite to peace and sustainability, inner and outer.