March 2011 Blog Posts (4)

Since the summer of 2003 I’ve crisscrossed the country speaking at colleges and theaters and bookstores, first with The Weather Underground documentary and, starting in March of this year, with my book Underground:  My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (William Morrow, 2009).  In discussions with young people, they often tell me, “Nothing anyone does can ever make…

The Trap is a Adam Curtis documentary film originally produced for the BBC in three episodes. It talks about the modern political realities, where the policies came from and the massive failures of those ideals and how they have ended up exactly where they did not want to be.



This episode 1 starts in the Cold War and shows the seeds that were sown to produce the modern political reality. Curtis examines the rise of game theory used during this time, and the way in which its…

This is a great article about the knowledge, skill and experience required to go up against entrenched powerful interests. 

They hang the man and flog the woman,

Who steals the goose from off the common,

Yet let the greater villain loose,

That steals the common from the goose.

  

-- Seventeenth-century English protest rhyme…

I have been thinking a lot about the ineffectiveness of regulatory systems, and the relationship to Ecologist Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons concept for understanding how we come to be at the brink of numerous environmental [and economic] catastrophes. In 2011 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Eastern Mountain Lion extinct, exemplifying a precarious system at best, and showing that impotent laws cannot…