Mediacology

I want to preface my comments by saying that I support the work of Doctors without Borders, and they were the first organization I donated to after the earthquake in Haiti. With that said, I was struck by the above poster I received in my email. It advertises a documentary about their work that will [...]

This year’s slate of Super Bowl ads indicate two trends: 1) a continued lack of imagination among the highest paid “creatives” in the world, and 2) a backlash against environmental activism. These Super Bowl ads were decidedly conservative by recycling standard demographic tropes to shore up the shrinking ego of the persecuted male species. [...]

Photo by me

As we watched the events unfold at Copenhagen, many of us felt powerless to infuse wisdom into the process. It seems as if the globe’s political leaders cannot transcend their own momentum, and remain stuck in a reality that defines everything in the context of numbers. One thing that Jacques Ellus points out [...]

Former Vikings, contemporary Danish are better known now for windmills, bicycles and excellent rain gear. Like many of the social democracies of Europe’s northern frontier, to some the Danes are actually Europe’s modern hippies, which they hoped to leverage with the “Hopenhagen” brand. History, it was hoped, would show that Copenhagen and its COP-15 UN [...]

Like most mediated Americans, I’m fascinated by the Jaycee Dugard story. To recap briefly, at 11 years old she was abducted by a drug-crazed rapist/pedephile who claims to be a messenger from God. He’s deluded to the point that he believes he has invented a machine which can channel the voice of God. Meanwhile he [...]

Devo has their take: “De-evolution is real”

Life in the Universe by Prof. Stephen Hawking | Rational Vedanta:

There is no time, to wait for Darwinian evolution, to make us more intelligent, and better natured. But we are now entering a new phase, of what might be called, self designed evolution, in which we will be able [...]

Back in my Berkeley days there was a “notorious” coop called Barrington, which was ground zero for Cal’s population of freaks. I put “notorious” in quotes because the term is relative, of course. The coop’s neighbors were convinced that it was actually a cult, arguing that Barrington’s motto– “Those who know don’t tell, and those [...]

What follows is a response to someone who felt that my elation from the results of the last presidential was “junk”:

What I was expressing, and I think others were too, was a shift in energy and an opening for new possibility. All of us are responsible for co-creating democracy, even if it has been reduced [...]

I have a new article up at Reality Sandwich. Check it out.

Reality Sandwich | Community Is Not a Demographic:

One of the few memories I have of high school (remember the ’60s saying, “If you remember it you weren’t there”?) is a book, The Forest People, in which anthropologist Colin Turnbull recounts his experience of living [...]

I’ve been accused of giving light poles the benefit of the doubt, so despite the occasional appearance of my snarky writing personality (I am Gen X, after all), I tend to be an optimistic person. So what follows is coming from a space I have never felt in my short but long Republican dominated [...]

Will eco-prison reform criminals? – World Environment – MSNBC.com:

The island is about 1 1/2 miles from the mainland, but that’s not what keeps inmates in. Few escape from Norway’s most pleasant prison because that could mean returning to a maximum-security unit.
All of the prison’s agricultural products are raised without artificial chemicals, such as insecticides or [...]

I don’t think any artist gets a pass for misogyny or gratuitous violence (Quentin Tarantino included), but we should be skeptical when pundits or presidential candidates rail against gangsta rap or “hip hop” culture given the unchecked misdeeds of the US military and entertainment business. Generally I take those terms as code for “black culture,” [...]

Image source: Apoplectic Press
What follows will surely put me on Bill O’Reilly’s Most Wanted list (that is if I hit his radar at all, which is totally unlikely), but I came to the conclusion today that the number one cause of global warming has to be…. Christmas. Consider the following:

The power consumed for all the [...]

I am now facing my first fatherhood crisis. No it’s not the fact that I haven’t slept more than four hours in a night in the past seven months, nor the daily grind of spit and poop. No, it came in the form of a three foot mouse named Mickey, an uninvited guest who landed [...]

What happens when this young man rules the world?

Stay Free! Daily:
A Wall Street Journal columnist blames twentysomething narcissism on Mr. Rogers (unfair!), Boomer-style permissive parenting (getting warmer), and the gospel of self-esteem (warmer still). What the press reports seem to miss, however, is the fact that this is the first generation of children raised in [...]

(c) ODTmaps
An interesting article on how the world can teach the US a thing or two. What follows is a snip that discusses “ubuntu.”
AlterNet: 11 Things We Can Learn from the Rest of the World:
Here’s a surprise. What Africa has to offer the West is democracy! History says Ancient Greece invented democracy. But the Greeks [...]

With the sound of the other shoe dropping, i.e. the subprime mortgage market collapse, we can now see that chances are very strong that the US Empire will be disintegrating very quickly. People seem to forget that they are spending something ridiculous like a billion dollars a day on Iraq, so we have to wonder, [...]

Some media thinkers have remarked that with the advent of satellite imagery that we inhabitants of Earth would become more continentally conscious because we would cease to see the political boundaries of maps and begin to see ourselves living on islands. The creation of regional markets and trade zones buttresses this observation. I certainly had [...]

In case you haven’t noticed, here at Media Mindfulness science fiction is very popular. Here’s another movie trailer for a sci-fi book, this one for Greg Bear’s Eon. I like this trend, although I hope the images from the clip don’t spoil the ones from your imagination. I remember seeing the Hobbit animated and being [...]