Click and get started

A massive, history-making march in New York City.
Hundreds of coordinated actions around the world.

This is perhaps the most amazing video that I have ever seen. (Video shot about two miles from where I live.)

If you have never been to a festival, then you owe it to yourself to watch this wonderful, uplifting video.

While it is obvious that the consumer culture has no hope of longevity, in this beautiful video, “Episode 2”, you will see that no matter what, the best and brightest of our species will not only survive, they will THRIVE!

Episode 2: Practicing the New World

(Bruce Melton, Truthout, 21 February 2013)
[CLICK the above credit line for the full article]

Dry periods, which we normally refer to as drought times today, would be superimposed on top of the megadrought extremeness. . . . The results of the new research are critically deserving of an alarmist tone. That we could slip into profound continuous drought so soon is certainly a surprise to most of us, to say the least. The typical consensus opinion of unrestrained climate pollution impacts by the year 2100 only tells us that permanent drought will come to many parts of the world and, basically, that dry areas could become drier. The news that we could be experiencing permanent drought on the scale of megadrought proportions – beginning in only eight years – should be considered a global threat of the highest order. . . . The new models have more grid squares (higher resolution) in that they can “see” a smaller piece of the earth compared to the old models. The old models took forever to run on supercomputers, and so do the new ones, but we can see smaller areas and smaller scale climate processes are better represented now. The new models also include volcanoes, changes in the sun’s strength and more complex interactions between clouds and pollutants like nitrous oxides and sulfur dioxides (both manmade and natural), and their results agree better with observations of our past climate. . . . The results of the new scenarios and most current modeling (as compared to the old scenarios and models) are that warming is greater, drying in dry areas is greater and increasing wetness in wet areas increases further.

The video below was made by a friend of mine over the 90 days that it took her to row, yes ROW, across the Atlantic Ocean from Portugal to Barbados, 6,500 Kilometers!

(Allan Badiner, Alternet, November 23, 2012)
[CLICK the above credit line for the full article]

there is an increasing consensus that the medicinal benefits of psychoactive THC pale in comparison to the non-psychoactive cannabidiol (CBD) from the leaves of the same plant–raw and unheated. Depending on the strain, some plants are high in CBD but also contain a lesser amount of THC which is said to enhance the healing potentiality. CBD does not make people feel “stoned” and actually counters some of the effects of THC (for example, suppressing the appetite vs. stimulating it). CBD is beginning to be recognized by researchers at mainstream medical institutions around the world as a potentially very powerful weapon against cancer.  . . . Other studies point to CBD as having great promise as a defense against Alzheimer’s disease. In a 2006 study published in Molecular Pharmaceutics, a team of University of Connecticut researchers reported that cannabis “could be considerably better at suppressing the abnormal clumping of malformed proteins that is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease than any currently approved prescription.” The research team predicted that cannabinoid-based medications “will be the new breakout medicine treatments of the near future.” . . . Cannabis medicine has distinct advantages. CBD, as well as THC, can be given in massive doses with no side effects. In fact, it has performed very effectively as an anti-psychotic when given in high doses. . . . Meanwhile, it’s useful to note that since 2003, the U.S. federal government has held a “medical patent” for the marketing of cannabinoids as antioxidants or neuroprotective agents. The patent states that cannabinoids are “useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases such as inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and HIV dementia.”

(Countercurrents.org, 14 September, 2012)
[CLICK the above credit line for the full article]

Hunger is the number one reason behind riot. There are other reasons also. These include poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement. Trampled down humanity fights back. It’s, plain and simple. But, if there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge , and it makes sense. . . . In a 2011 paper , researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest. . . . The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this: [CLICK the above link for the graph.] . . . Pretty simple. Black dots are the food prices, red lines are the riots. In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. . . . CSI doesn’t claim that any breach of 210 immediately leads to riots, obviously; just that the probability that riots will erupt grows much greater. . . . For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses (for rich-world people like you and I, it’s like 15%). When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if a person can’t eat — or worse, a person’s family can’t eat — the person fights. . . . » Continue reading “One Year Away From Global Food Riots”