For today, a pastiche . . .
• huffpost, Jeremy Rifkin: Deepening the conversation on the Third Industrial Revolution
This is exciting news. Presto, 3D creation out of nothing, whatever you want! And when combined with green technologies . . . but, a little question nags at me: remember the revolutionary little video story of stuff? That was, frankly, really, and ashamedly, the very first time that I ever thought about how hi-tech stuff was sourced. How we rape the earth not just for wood (which is so obvious), but for precious metals and minerals, all dug out by basically third-world slave labor that ruins villages and pollutes earth and water. . . Will these “3-D printers” themselves be sourced the same way? Or can a 3D “something” come out of “nothing.” Just wondering.
• The Shock Doctrine (video)
If you haven’t yet read Naomi Klein’s incisive book and don’t want to spend the time doing so, you might want to watch this, instead. To me, Klein’s research into the economic policies of the famous Chicago School of Economics and how they impact impoverished people in 3rd world countries through resource extraction and crippling debt, all in the name of “creating infrastructure,” came as a shock to the heart and solar plexus.
• usatoday.com: Vatican Orders Crackdown on American Nuns
That even U.S.A Today is now carrying this two-day old story speaks volumes. I have a feeling that to order radical, feisty, social-justice oriented nuns to cease and desist is a bit like telling Occupy people to go home and get a job. There is no home. Our jobs are gone. The patriarchal Catholic Church is falling apart. Our old obedient way of life has ceased to exist. All good!
I’ll never forget seeing the cemetery at bucolic and forward-thinking St. Mary of the Woods College, outside Terre Haute, Indiana, one of those hellish havens for radical nuns. Their little cemetery was full of tiny white gravemarkers (the nuns), sprinkled throughout with the much larger and taller (phallic) white gravemarkers of the priests who, supposedly, were in charge of them.
I’m going to go there in July, to attend “Inner Transitions,” a Sisters of Earth Conference. Can’t wait!
Update: there’s now a petition to support the sisters! Go here to sign it.
• huffpost: Marijuana Activists Suing CU-Boulder Over 4/20 Campus Closure
So here we go. The rest of the story that I mentioned in my pointings three days ago. Time to get real and ratchet up the stakes. And, for heaven’s sake, keep our sense of humor!
• salon.com, Glenn Greenwald: Tarek Mehanna sentencing statement
Please read this eloquent, thoughtful, and heartbreaking sentencing statement by this so-called American Muslim “criminal” from start to finish. Astonishingly powerful and aware of what Glenn Greenwald calls “the real criminals.”
• commondreams.org: Thousands of Peasant Farmers ‘Reclaim’ the Land with Honduras Occupations
This story speaks for itself. It may be that we no longer need a formal “occupy movement.” That this notion, of occupying one’s own full self, of taking back our own inner power from the illusion that others have had it has penetrated the solar plexus and heart of enough people who are now beginning, everywhere, to move from the inside out. A truly “soft,” or velvet revolution taking place under our noses.
Meanwhile, of course, the old world continues to think it’s in charge. See, for example, the latest tomdispatch.com post on the still expanding Prison Corporate Complex.
And, for an unusually inspiring story of one who refuses to be moved by outside forces, no matter how “powerful,” read this from wanttoknow.info. A homeless vet who refused direct, insistent orders to kill an innocent woman in Iraq. He’s okay with being homeless, because his conscience is clear.
