Category Archives: capitalist greed

Reclaiming Our Earth

The best thing I can do with my time on this earth is to try to show people by example that they don’t need to cling to the ‘safety net’ of exploitative industrial civilization; that there’s a better and easier way to live a life, and all it takes is the will to step outside the ring and be a human again; instead of the single-minded machines we’ve been coaxed into believing we are.

We’ve been flimflammed into accepting that we’re all unruly beings that require constant policing and governance to act civilly, that without force and the always loaming threat of incarceration, we can’t be trusted to act morally. This is a blatant falsehood. It is human nature to co-operate for the betterment of our community. It’s human nature to do good without monetary incentive or threat of violence. Debt, taxes, serfdom, the permanent polluting of our soil, water and air in exchange for momentary convenience; all these things are absolutely not our nature, and we can’t be whole again until we’ve shook free of them.

The only way I can see to stop the cycle of destruction is to create a better society without violence (government), wealth (exploitation) and hunger (wealth) and hope that people are inspired by it, and choose to leave their credit cards, microwave dinners and designer handbags behind to join a better world where human feet know the texture of soil again.

Destroying the old society with violence cannot work because the next civilization that rises from the ashes will just fall into the same traps we did and repeat the global destruction of natural, indigenous culture in seek of profit and power for the few at the top. People need to abandon the broken civilization willingly to break the loop and free Earth forever. They need to willingly step away from the broken material matrix and return to the earth that sustained their forefathers for millennia.

I saw an old lady complaining that some kids were playing too loud, and it was giving her a headache. I want to show her she can be happy too; that play and joy aren’t going to break the world. She needs to see with her own eyes, a better system in action; see it actually working. Only then can she let go of her fear and join us in the daylight.

Simple Living: Picking a Wild Salad

While foraging, I make a quick wild salad consisting of sea beets, corn marigold greens, yellow mustard leaves, mallow leaves and flowers, dandelion greens, prickly lettuce, smooth sow thistles, sourgrass, wild water-cured olives and lemon juice (from a street tree).

I wrote a brief article about a bad experience I had with Youtube’s
automated copyright violation system, and a company called
“Rumblefish”:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/02/26/2141246/youtube-identifies-birdsong-as-copyrighted-music

Basically, their system identified this video as containing copyright
infringing music owned by Rumblefish. They put ads on it, with the
proceeds of the ads going partly to Rumblefish, partly to Google.

Since there’s no music in my video, I disputed the claimed copyright
violation, and Rumblefish was sent a link to my video to check it and
see if Youtube’s automated system had made a mistake.

They checked the video, and told Youtube that there was no mistake,
and that they do own the music in the video. So the dispute was
closed, and there was seemingly nothing else I could do.

But I wrote an article about it on Slashdot, and somehow it went viral
today, spreading all over the web, and Rumblefish backtracked,
released my video and sent me an apology.

This is the notice Youtube sent me after Rumblefish reviewed my dispute:

“All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their
claims to some or all of its content:

Entity: rumblefish Content Type: Musical Composition”

I did email Rumblefish to complain, and posted a thead on Google’s
help forum, but they didn’t do anything until my article on Slashdot
went viral and woke them from their slumber.

So they’ve now released my video and removed their ads, but for a while they were making money from my video. I think if this were made more public, Google would be forced to change their system and this would stop happening. Rumblefish and other similar intellectual property companies have been gaming the system like this for a while now, and this is just the first time the public outcry has been big enough to force them to correct their behaviour.