» APPROXIMATE DEMOLITION IN CHINA

Approximate Demolition in Chengdu, by Brian Awehali

THE CHINESE ARE VERY SECRETIVE ABOUT THINGS WHEN THEY GO WRONG. You can't just go online or read a paper to find out what happened with this gloriously wrong-looking demolition in Chengdu. I heard a man was injured by debris, for example, but there seemed to be no way to confirm or disprove this. The site was fenced and there were multiple sentries posted throughout the day to keep people out, so this was taken at around 4am, using only the ambient light of Chengdu that reflects nicely off the ever-present canopy of mostly industrial smog.

» THE RIVER VS. WATER, INC..: An interview with Vandana Shiva

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, activist, and author of hundreds of papers and articles and more than 15 books. She is the founder and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy in India. Her work runs the gamut from establishing community seed banks to defending farmers and everyone else who eats food from the dire socioeconomic, environmental, and health consequences of genetically modified crops; from writing and agitating about water privatization to writing and agitating about corporate thievery of natural knowledge. This interview by Antonia Juhasz, about the ongoing struggle over the privatization of common resources and the need for a “living democracy,”  originally appeared in LiP magazine.

“I really hope that living democracy, articulated as the broader democracy of all life, will help us transcend these polarizations and work to protect all species while defending every human right of every excluded community.”

[From the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow - The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt.] 

Read the rest [PDF; 10 pages]

» HELD HOSTAGE TO HOPE: Derrick Jensen on Civilization & Its Discontents

“It’s not just false hope that’s the problem, it’s hope itself…’Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency.’”

A free-ranging interview with the author of A Language Older Than Words, Welcome to the Machine, and The Culture of Make Believe about civilization, violence, activism, pacifism, reasons for optimism, and why hope is a bad thing.

A counterpoint interview about Malthusian economics and cults of catastrophism is also offered, with social historian Iain Boal, “We’re Not Doomed; That’s the Problem.”:

Many people believe, at least a little, that the end of human beings–whether by ecological disaster, the collapse of the oil economy, or nuclear extinction–is inevitable. For some, this projected collapse represents a just termination for a species they consider parasitic and pathologically unable to establish an equilibrium with the natural world and the creatures who  depend upon it. Others laments the tragedy of our fate.

But what role do faith and belief play in all of this? What if the capitalist realities of scarcity and collapse have been mistakenly interpreted as natural inevitabilities?  

>> READ THE FULL ARTICLE (PDF; 8 pages)

[From the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow - The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt.] 

» HUMANS ARE A VIRUS WITH SHOES

People suck, and that’s my contention.
We’re a virus with shoes.
—Bill Hicks

I actually like quite a lot of people, but there’s much to recommend Hicks’ notion that people are viruses with shoes. It’s a fact that well over 40% of the human DNA chain is viral in origin, as Michael Specter writes in a fascinating New Yorker article, “Darwin’s Surprise”:

Nothing—not even the Plague—has posed a more persistent threat to humanity than viral diseases: yellow fever, measles, and smallpox have been causing epidemics for thousands of years. At the end of the First World War, fifty million people died of the Spanish flu; smallpox may have killed half a billion during the twentieth century alone…

Scientists have long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could take its place in the blueprint of our species, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.

One scientist interviewed for the New Yorker article, Thierry Hiedmann, contends that the mapping of the human genome project and recent findings about “endogenous retroviruses” show that genes and viruses are not, in fact, distinct entities, and that the concept of virus and humanity as enemies or combatants, rather than as co-evolutionary forces, is in error. Heidmann and others have even suggested that without viral influence, mammals might never have developed a placenta, which protects the fetus and gives it time to mature and led to live birth. “These viruses made those changes possible, [and] It is quite possible that, without them, human beings would still be laying eggs.”

So the stuff of us, the meat of our matter, is partially viral in origin. What of our language, and our culture? Continue reading →

» PROPAGANDA, PUBLIC RELATIONS, AND THE NOT-SO-NEW DARK AGE

by Stephen Bender and Brian Awehali
(from the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow-The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt)

Edward L. Bernays birthed the public relations industry in the United States. His clients included General Motors, United Fruit, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the U.S. Department of State, Health, and Commerce, Samuel Goldwyn, Eleanor Roosevelt, the American Tobacco Company, and Proctor & Gamble. He directed public relations campaigns for every president from Calvin Coolidge in 1925, to Dwight Eisenhower in the late 1950s. He was, in the estimation of cultural historian Ann Douglas, the man “who orchestrated the commercialization of a culture.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE (PDF; 6 pages)

» LISTEN TO THE BIRDS: In Praise of Captain Beefheart & His Magics


“Listen to the birds. That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren’t going anywhere.”
- Captain Beefheart, “10 Commandments of Guitar Playing“

Music can do a lot of different things. There’s music to comfort you, music to make you dance, music to make the time pass easier.

And then there’s music that whacks you upside the head, assaults you, is radically unconcerned with your comfort, and comes to get inside and change you, forever. Continue reading →

» REDEFINING PROGRESS: An Indigenous View of Industrialization & Consumption in North America

by Winona LaDuke
(from the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow-The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt)

Rethink your geography a little bit, set aside your thinking, and try to think about North America from an indigenous perspective. In doing so, what I’d like to ask is that you think about it in terms of islands in a continent.

I live on one island, White Earth reservation. It’s thirty-six miles by thirty six miles. It’s a rather medium-sized reservation, as they go in North America. That’s one island. A little bit west of me is Pine Ridge, a slightly larger reservation. Rosebud. Blackfeet. Crow. Cheyenne. Navaho. Hopi. Some of the larger islands are further north. When you go north of the fiftieth parallel in Canada, which is somewhere a little north of Edmonton, you’ll find that the majority of the population is native. 85% of the people who live north of the fiftieth parallel in Canada are native people.

How that is perhaps best reflected is in a place called Nunavut. Northwest Territories, a couple of years ago, was split into two territories. One of those territories is now called Nunavut because the people who live there are Inuit. They are the people who are the political representatives. They are the administrators of the school boards. They are the firemen. They are the doctors, the physicians. They have a form of self-governance in Nunavut where the majority of decisions are made by Inuit people. That area, Nunavut, is, including land and water, five times the size of Texas. It is a large area of land. It is the size of the Indian sub-continent.

A Nunavut community

So perhaps for that reason alone, it is important to know something more about indigenous people…

Let me talk a little bit about indigenous thinking, because I believe that is fundamental for understanding the conflicts that exist in the world today. In the world today it is not a conflict so much between the left and right, or the communists and the capitalists, so much as it is the conflict between the indigenous and the industrial.

(This far-reaching, increasingly relevant speech Winona LaDuke gave to students at North Carolina State University in Raleigh appeared in LiP: Informed Revolt and was also included in the magazine’s anthology, Tipping the Sacred Cow, now available online in PDF form.)

Read the rest [PDF; 10 pages]