The best writing advice I found is this: We are all the hero of our own story. In life, there are no supporting characters. Ask yourself this; have you ever, ever thought to yourself, ‘hmm, this isn’t actually my story. I’m simply here to make [insert person’s] life more interesting’?
Here’s a little secret. I, devout film and TV show follower, haven’t owned or really watched TV since 2004. As much as I love movies and stories, I really really can’t stand what TV has become. Reality shows are stupid, the news are Orwellian brainwashing tools (“War will bring peace, etc, etc”) and commercials are the biggest waste of human potential. They’re not even trying to sell us stuff anymore; they just assume we are already so stupid that we will jump up and buy whatever junk they put in front of us because they make it shiny and it’s on TV. Not that anyone has money to buy anything outside necessities these days anyway, so I guess now commercials are mainly there for tradition’s sake.
Luckily, none of this matters because YouTube has made it possible to evolve beyond TV. First off, if you haven’t done so already, install AdBlock. It will allow you watch YouTube uninterrupted and also block most ads and popups all over the internet. Sites will load faster, look cleaner and frankly I don’t know how anyone survives without it. It’s the first thing I install whenever someone lets me near their computer.
Corporate owned media, which is most TV channels, newspapers and radio, are not in the business of providing you with news. They are in the business of shaping your worldview in such a way so that they can continue to make profits off you. Keep the population calm and sedated while they pull strings behind the curtains, and when tempers do flare, it’s their job to direct that anger towards causes that won’t disrupt or interfere with the status quo, but rather serve to keep the population bickering among themselves. Mixing morality with religion and politics is always a sure crowd-pleaser (birth control! abortion! poor people are lazy?), scumbag politicians that are paid to distract making despicable comments can fill hours of debate every week, and if all else fails, nothing evokes more public passion than a racially loaded criminal trial like OJ Simpson and Trayvon Martin.
My very favorite thing about the mainstream media is their innocence. Every day brand new things happen! They are always shocked by this so I can only conclude that they wake up every day with amnesia. No headline is ever connected with a previous headline and putting things into historical context is a burden they simply cannot be held responsible for.
Thus, we are constantly bombarded with ‘news’ that only serves to clutter our brains, rather than inform and educate. Because, if you hadn’t realized by now, an educated populace is the enemy of the corpocracy.
The only way to combat this is to turn the TV off. YouTube is all you need for news. Here is my personal playlist for some hard hitting truth about the state of the world. Read More
I came across this interesting little brain nugget that asked ‘Is Social Media a new form of mass hysteria?’ and now I can’t shake that idea. Being a child of the internet the evolution of social media never seemed like a big deal to me. From 90’s message boards, to LiveJournal, to MySpace, to YouTube, to Facebook, to Instagram and everything that came and went in between, I just seized it, used it, and disregarded whatever didn’t suit me. But when you really sit down to think about it, social media has, and constantly is, changing our lives drastically. It is how we keep in touch with friends and non-friends, how we get our news, stay involved with our particular interests, share pictures and opinions, and in essence, shape our image. But we also shape ourselves. Read More
Halloween is coming up and as usual I’m left wondering if I’m doing it right. October 31st is probably the biggest celebration of the year in Honolulu. Since the seasons never really change in Hawaii it’s a lot of fun for us crazy islanders to have one night that just feels, well, different, from the monotone of tropical perfection. So, in true excess fashion, it is usually extended to a good two weeks!
I’m from a country (Norway) that didn’t really knew about Halloween until we learned about it from American TV shows towards the end of the 90’s. I threw my first Halloween bash at 14 with my three best girlfriends and we dressed up as vampires and ghouls, scared the pizza delivery guy and watched PG-13 movies because my mom was lame and wouldn’t rent me R rated ones. We were obsessed with the Friday the 13th series and I remember having to settle for some forgettable mind reader thriller instead. It was so embarrassing! Ha ha.
Fast forward 15 years and Halloween isn’t really about scary anymore – more like an equal dose nostalgia (like I indulged in above!) and being outrageous/sexy while getting really really hammered. And that’s why I think I’m doing it wrong. I use Halloween as an excuse to dress up as my all time favorite characters from the stories that shaped me. Read More
I think what makes me the most sad to read on my Facebook feed is not the stories about how corrupt and useless politicians and corporations are. I already know that, most people know that. But to see how cruel and heartless ordinary people can be in the comment fields underneath these stories is depressing.
Our society, this system, is breaking down at record speed. Environmental destruction, economic collapse and massive overpopulation that leaves the value of human life near zero.
You don’t need a fancy degree to understand that a system which leaves this many people in poverty and despair is a flawed one. It is so disheartening to see so many so-called successful people call everyone else that isn’t at their level lazy and entitled. I just read an article about an immigrant boy with three degrees at age 25 cleaning toilets in a foreign land because his own country is in economic ruin due to the game of criminal bankers. And he is only one in millions. Millions. And most of the 200 comments said, “go home, we don’t need you. You are stealing jobs from our own youth,” and “that’s what you deserve for getting three useless degrees. Should have been a doctor.”
I think this level of cruelty and entitlement is a symptom of the decay of the system. I choose to believe that because I don’t want to live in a world in which people are just “bad”. I think people are scared but they don’t know it yet. Animals, including humans, are very intuitive. Sure, we like to hide behind logic but most important life decisions aren’t made from logic, such as choice of spouse and choosing this house over that house. And intuitively, we know that this system isn’t working and when it breaks down it will be every man and woman for him and herself. So maybe this cruelness is a way of preparing for survival.
The real tragedy is, of course, that we could change all of this in a couple of years. The knowledge is there, the technology is finally ready to unburden us of menial work. Today, it takes one farmer only one day to plant enough crops to feed a small town or village. Then he waits three months for the harvest. In the mean time, we could help each other build houses and learn crafts to enrich our minds. We could still probably watch TV because I know for a fact that most people who work in film love their jobs and would do it without the allure of monetary compensation. We could still have computers because I know a lot of people who build computers from scratch as a hobby, with no financial gain. We probably wouldn’t spend so much time in traffic watching our lives go by or most of our waking hours in a stuffy office that belongs to someone else wondering what is the meaning of life, because I don’t know too many people who enjoy that.
The only thing standing in our way is the collective story that we tell ourselves about how life should be.
We are living by rules set by faceless men who run banks and oil companies in faraway offices. Have you noticed how selective the concept of fairness is to most people? I think most people consider themselves pretty moral. If you commit a crime, like robbing a store or hurting another person, you deserve to be punished. But try to debate the inherent unfairness of land ownership, which is now only attainable through massive sums of money or family inheritance, and people look at you like you are crazy. How fair is it that every acre of this planet was distributed to people hundreds of years before I was born? Through no fault of my own, I was born onto a planet which has no space for me unless I agree to sign away 30 years of my life in servitude so I can pay for a crumbling house in a crumbling economy. That is, of course, after I spent 20 years in school to get an education that old people now like to tell me is useless and I should have known better than to pursue it in the first place.
Collectively, older people always fear younger generations. I think it is natural. When you are approaching sixty and you realize you spent your life playing by the rules in return for your little slice of heaven, whether that is a house, a career or family, it seems fair that everyone else should also play by the same rules while you are finally reaping the benefits of a life well played. Seems fair.
But then the rules changed and they didn’t tell us. This was very, very deliberate. Other than to the very rich, the economy is an illusion. The value of a house is 30 years of hard work? Please. You can build a very decent house by yourself in six months. People did that for centuries. Sure, it probably won’t have six bedrooms and five bathrooms but unless you live with extended family, you don’t really need that. And if you do, they can help you build it. The value of work has plummeted, the value of playing games on a computer has sky rocketed. A Wall Street CEO recently got a billion dollars bonus in addition to his ordinary salary of tens of millions. For what? Probably not for helping to build houses, or assure access to clean water or maintain biodiversity. You know, the stuff that actually matters.
So this is my promise to every single person who has been told, or made to feel, as though their existence is “useless”. In the only future that this planet can possibly have, there is a place for you. Your unique talents and skills will be crucial to rebuilding this planet.
Every part of this decaying system will have to be redesigned for the very simple reason that if we do not, we will perish. Whether that end will be natural (extreme weather, disease or starvation due to loss of biodiversity such as bees) or man-made (nuclear disaster, toxic food, pollution or good old fashion war) is hard to say but the solution is pretty simple. Scale back, cut consumption, grow healthy, strong, self-reliant communities wherever you are in the world. Grow a garden. Grow happiness. Grow mindfulness. The more you grow from within the less you need from external sources.
It’s going to be a while for the shopping malls to go away, for people to realize the madness of single-use anything, and for people to stop hurting so much inside that their fear manifests outwardly as cruelness. So until then smart, beautiful people will be forced to clean toilets, work eighteen hours shifts in sweatshops for a dollar a day and millions of hours will be wasted every day while successful citizens sit in traffic.
If you agree with this message check out my guide for 10 Steps to a Sustainable Life.
I would love to hear your ideas and how you try to live more sustainable in the comments.
Being bedridden with a migraine is definitely on my list of least favorite things to do but finding random little film gems is pretty high on my favorite list so I’m calling this weekend a draw.
After high school I worked on and off in an independent video store for a couple of years where the only perk was free access to a 30,000 titles film library. This was before the dawn of torrents so this was the best film education that money could not buy. I’m sure everyone who is interested in filmmaking knows this, but the best way to learn about what makes a movie good is to watch independent non-Hollywood movies. Hollywood movies are too flashy and too filled with good-looking famous people that feel like your friends to really notice if the story works or not. And because Hollywood movies are so expensive to make, they can’t be very complex because it has to reach a wide audience in order to make their money back. There can be no ambiguous endings and all loose ends have to be explained so that the audience can leave fulfilled on what is, just like fast food, basically empty calories. Read More
After spending Monday sighing over that the internet won’t shut up about Breaking Bad because it’s not really that good, I decided to catch up on Season 5 (I’d seen up to season 4 a year ago), probably because I hate feeling left out when it comes to Hollywood. That was three days ago. 14 episodes later I have re-emerged and I have pounded my fists on the bed and yelled at my computer on three separate occasions. I have also barely spoken to anyone nor seen sunlight. I’m a little confused as to what my life is right now.
But I love coffee so let’s talk about 
coffee! My journey to appreciate coffee started, embarrassingly, with Starbucks. Now I call it candy-coffee because let’s face it, most of the concoctions they sell are 3 parts syrup, 1 part coffee and 6 parts milk but at the time I was convinced that a white chocolate mocha (WCM) was this mysterious adult beverage called coffee. And it was delicious! It probably still is but at least now I know to call it by its rightful name: $6 liquid desert. Read More
To understand ‘the war on terror’ we have to understand this. It’s not easy reading by any means. I read a lot and I had to read it three times and take several breaks to fully understand it all, but it is essential reading to understand the root cause of large scale war and global conflict. The links between the global bank elite and the US government cannot be denied anymore, and all questions of instability have to be analyzed from this perspective – the complete takeover of the world’s monetary system by a handful of people that will not tolerate that some people may want to live differently from them.
“The ‘end-game’ would require not just coercing support among WTO members but taking down those countries refusing to join. Some key countries remained holdouts from the WTO, including Iraq, Libya, Iran and Syria. In these Islamic countries, banks are largely state-owned; and “usury” – charging rent for the “use” of money – is viewed as a sin, if not a crime. That puts them at odds with the Western model of rent extraction by private middlemen.”
“The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.” —Prof. Caroll Quigley, Georgetown University, Tragedy and Hope (1966)
Iraq and Libya have been taken out, and Iran has been heavily boycotted. Syria is now in the cross-hairs. Why? Here is one overlooked scenario.
In an August 2013 article titled “Larry Summers and the Secret ‘End-game’ Memo,” Greg Palast posted evidence of a secret late-1990s plan devised by Wall Street and U.S. Treasury officials to open banking to the lucrative derivatives business. To pull this off required the relaxation of banking regulations not just in the US but globally. The vehicle to be used was the Financial Services Agreement of the World Trade Organization.
The “end-game” would require…
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I was too young to really understand all the variables leading up to the Iraq invasion in 2003, but in 2013 I don’t have that excuse. I believe that Syria is our generation’s Vietnam war, and now is the time to decide what side of history you want to stand on. Only this time, the repercussions are truly global.
On one hand you have “western” proxy governments ruled by a handful of multinational corporations that profit from war, environmental catastrophes and keeping the global workforce in poverty. Add to that a bloated military that costs over $600 billion a year and suddenly the need for perpetual war doesn’t seem so far-fetched. And the most incredulous part? This is still considered by most to be the “right” side. Because it is the side backed by media and the people in power.
I could write a whole dissertation on why humans apparently crave hierarchies and why we see to have an almost worship-like mentality towards those who mange to climb to the top. Most herd or pack animals function in the same way so it’s probably genetic, but it can’t be denied that humans crave father figures, someone who is ultimately in control, when life can be so very unpredictable. So while we may not always like our rulers, it is very comforting that someone is there to look after us. I mean, what other explanation can there be? USA is arguably one of the most educated countries there ever was, and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that speaks to the fact that no one is charge has anyone’s interest in mind but their own destructive agenda, yet hundred of millions of Americans will fervently argue otherwise. The fact that their democracy has been hijacked is unthinkable because no one in charge or on TV has told them so. They have even managed to convince us that we deserve to be paid $7.25 an hour when companies profit billions and billions a year from our hard work.
Anyone who says otherwise is instantly labeled a ‘conspiracy theorist’, which is really just a fancy word for ‘nutjob’. (Noun: nutjob: A person of inadequate sanity or lacking normal perceptions of reality; Adjective: normal: conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected.)
I just find it so interesting that pretty much every single person labeled ‘conspiracy theorist’, either publicly in the media or just by friends, is almost always a person who value peace and truth above all. No one is saying the world will ever be perfect, but it can probably be better than it is right now. Some say doing the same thing over and over while expecting different result is the definition of crazy. Well, I say the definition of crazy is to bomb entire cities, countries and people, and then expect peace.
This other side, call it what you will, consists of people who have mostly nothing to gain by their resistance to those in power. Most of us still lead pretty comfortable lives, yet our concern is mainly for those who don’t. Those millions of people trapped in war zones, the over twenty million refugees worldwide, and the future generations who, if we continue on this path, will have to grow up in a world full of violence and an environment so depleted it will not be able to support them.
Do you want to know make me absolutely certain I am on the right side of history? Because I don’t even have children, and given the present condition of humanity I am not sure I ever will, yet I am more concerned about the future of this planet than any person in power. As much as I love to travel, I am willing to accept even higher airfares as we wean ourselves off cheap oil. I welcome the idea of having to grow my own vegetables rather than having to buy everything flown in from half across the world. That’s not capitalism to me – that’s idiocy. Sustainability ultimately means to look inwards, the opposite of globalism. Look towards your community and what you can do for it to thrive and it in turn will take care of you. It means focusing on the small pleasures that truly give life meaning, which tends to be the opposite of materialism. Globalism has failed, but it did teach us a very important thing. Even though we are geographically far apart, we can still stay connected and care about each other.
But back to Syria. Right now the world’s opinion is against the USA. The only way the military can engage in Syria is through lies, deceit, and this is important, our approval. If the public opinion cries out loud enough maybe we can halt this operation that, let’s not kid ourselves, has been in the work for years and years. It is not for your ‘freedom’, it is not for anyone’s freedom. War never has, and never will, bring freedom. It does bring, however, traumatized people, broken people and vengeful people. Vengeful people who will start new wars.
I think the path to freedom begins with knowledge. Once you know the players and the end games, you can begin to take a stand. This kind of empowerment cannot be given to you by the same people who benefit from your ignorance.
Check out this video for more information:
Jon Rappoport’s Blog: Why do they try so hard to end our freedom?
I love the internet. I really do. Before the internet our access to information was rather limited. I have given myself the challenge to ‘unlearn’ historic truths that we just take for granted because our fifth grade teacher told us so. We are, for obvious and time-saving reasons, indoctrinated into a certain world view from an early age. Here are the good guys, these are the bad guys, and here’s why and how this war was fought. Usually the good guys win and our worldview remains safe and orderly. We can even illustrate it in a nice little chart. Read More
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