Month: May 2012

Source: Counterpunch

I just read the news that on Monday, April 30, 2012, Tomas Borge had passed away at the age of 81 in Managua, Nicaragua.   Tomas Borge helped found the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1961, and, through years of arduous struggle, helped lead the rag-tag Sandinista guerillas to victory against the heavily-armed Somoza dictatorship – a dictatorship armed and supported until the bitter end by the United States which had installed it in the first place in the 1930’s. read more

Source: TomDispatch.com

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s — which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.

Some of them — Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land — were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now.  Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

The economics of the future is based on people and biodiversity – not fossil fuels, toxic chemicals and monocultures.

New Delhi, India – The economic crisis, the ecological crisis and the food crisis are a reflection of an outmoded and fossilised economic paradigm – a paradigm that grew out of mobilising resources for the war by creating the category of economic “growth” and is rooted in the age of oil and fossil fuels. It is fossilised both because it is obsolete, and because it is a product of the age of fossil fuels. We need to move beyond this fossilised paradigm if we are to address the economic and ecological crisis. read more