freedom

Big

Small and big_HORIZONTAL_shutterstock copy

Sometimes, size matters.  Sometimes, we can only accurately define “size” within specific contexts. Most times, the situation is not about “size” per se but something considerably more profound. This post is a bit different from what usually appears on this blog.  It is meant to be heuristic rather than specifically informative. This is to suggest, that as you work through the superficially different videos below, ideally, you will come away with an integrated idea that no one video presents on its own.  Hopefully, you will develop ideas regarding large and small actions in the world, actions which uniquely apply to your own life situations. As always, as has been a major orientation of this blog, indoctrination is not the goal, but rather, expanding opportunities for personal enablement through information and imagination. So imagine this … (more…)

Where is Your Money?

A consideration of public banking

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
~Henry Ford

Cash wall 3

Where is your money?  Well…okay…if you actually had some, where would you put it?  Why? Wherever you store your monetary wealth, do you gain benefit from allowing that storage solution to reliably insure your financial security? Can you trust that solution to work in your best interest?

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Democracy That Isn’t

Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging …“civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy.  ~Sheldon Wolin from Democracy, Inc.

Demacracy as Fraud and Illiberal.pngIf we remain faithful to the cause of “democracy” as we know it, will everything turn out alright? Maybe? But maybe not. According to David Frum and others, we are beginning to experience what to the average mind appears as the unexpected fragility of democracy and democratic systems. Most of us feel this vulnerability as a “wrongness” within the current sociopolitical situation. To be sure, we differ on what is wrong and how to fix it, but most of us feel that our society is “off” in some way. Regardless of our current sociopolitical perspectives, Sheldon Wolin’s notion of “inverted totalitarianism” is most likely at the root of our troubles. Whether by its direct effects or the structures necessary to sustain it, our society has been skewed in various ways, skewed away from the revolutionary Thomas Paine’s notion of “democracy” and “freedom”.

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The Perils of Separation

In defiance of the FCC

State Defiance - Washington net neutrality

On March 5, 2018, Washington State governor Jay Islee signed into law some bold legislation – HB2282: entitled “Protecting an open Internet in Washington State”. In direct defiance of the abolition of net neutrality by the Federal Communication Commission or FCC, Washington State became the first state in the Union to defy what some consider the corporate takeover of the Internet at the behest of the United States federal government. Other state governments are resisting the FCC by warning Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) that no state government business will be conducted with companies that do not comply with former net neutrality rules. While appeals attempting to restore net neutrality on a national level are already in place, even if such a restoration is upheld by the Senate, the House of Representatives is not likely to reverse the FCC’s December 14th, 2017 decision. Armed with the knowledge that the vast majority of Americans (including most Washingtonians) favor net neutrality and anticipating the aftermath of the FCC ruling, Washington State and an increasing number of municipalities have mobilized to counteract the federal government’s seeming willingness to defy the will of the People.
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