Corporate Dragons consume material resources and produce waste just like biological beings. They also exist in their own world, consuming and emitting money and information. Money is really just a *kind* of information as can be seen if everyone suddenly thinks a resource companies ("extractivist") reserves are "stranded". This has an immediate effect on the balance sheet and (therefore) the value of shares. Shareholders take an immediate "hit" without any offset appearing anywhere except as a corporate "write down" (and "expense") but the money is gone . For this reason, there are strong incentives for the company to minimize or hide information that would lead the public (shareholders in particular) to believe resources are stranded. Simply confusing the issue (misinformation) on Climate Change and the need to "leave it in the ground" translates into real shareholder value. The reverse is also true. Shareholders hope that a ...

You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead? George Monbiot 

Being "Stupid Smart" ... Aged 18, Jobs had knocked on the door of Buddhist monk Kobun Chino Otogawa and said that he believed he was enlightened, but didn’t know what to do with it. The monk, who died in 2002, asked for proof, and Jobs returned with a chip from a PC, a first computer he would name Lisa, after the daughter he had fought so hard not to acknowledge. “He’s brilliant, but he’s too smart,” was the monk’s conclusion.

Status report -- March 14, 2015 I am increasingly convinced of the importance of the Zen outlook on the world. However, I must confess that this conviction comes by wandering far off the path -- becoming deeply immersed in "not-Zen". I have not managed to work z azen  into my daily routine for a variety of excuses. It would seem that the lack of this practice is making it easier for me to "forget" the core Zen vantage point from which I need to look out upon the world--my "home base". The chaos resulting from looking after two dogs, one a crazy puppy, is now subsiding and I should be able to work zazen into my routine. I have found it easy to slip into reverie about my track record of failure and rejection -- combined with despair that, at 68, time is running out to make my life "meaningful".  All this is nonsense from a Zen point of view: the "me" in these stories are creative fiction. My "track record" is an extra layer of f...

An epiphenomenon is something happens when the whole exhibits properties that cannot easily be deduced from the parts that make it up. Such properties are called "emergent". The world is full of epiphenomena that we take for granted. For example, the complex behavior of water - even the fact that it can exist as a liquid - cannot be deduced from quantum mechanical properties of the H 2 O molecule. This is even more so of epiphenomena like hurricanes and tornadoes and emergent properties like turbulence. Yet nobody would claim that hurricanes and tornadoes are not *real* -- it's just that we can't (at present) create a firm bridge between what we understand of the molecules that make up hurricanes and tornadoes and what we understand about water molecules. When it comes to living things, epiphenomena are the rule rather than the exception. A colony of bees is a common example: the "behavior" of individual bees makes little sense at the "bee" level a...

A note from Chillyfinger to the Venus Project (creators of the documentary): "I viewed your recent documentary " The Choice is Ours " with interest. There is not much new in it. The facts are actually a lot worse than what you portray. The problem I have with the documentary is that it lacks a broad theoretical understanding of what is going on. Without some truly new and deep understanding of our situation, it's unlikely that we will make any more progress than we have for thousands of years. After all, all of the problems in your documentary have been with us since the dawn of civilization. The hidden message in your documentary is that the answer somehow lies in a better understanding of human psychology. I respectfully disagree on this fundamental point. For the last few weeks, I have been working on a blog http://dragontheory.blogspot.ca. This blog views world affairs and the problems you address from a different perspective. It assumes that Nations and Corpora...

"Profits are privatized but costs are socialized" - Chomsky - How The World Works This is an amazing Chinese documentary on the subject of "Dragon Shit" -- who are the dragons and who cleans up after them. Among numerous insights offered in the film is the fact that after creating massive deadly pollution over much of China, the Chinese steel industry could not survive without the subsidies from the Chinese government -- it actually loses money, even while leaving the ordinary Chinese citizen choking to death from dragon shit.