More from Colectivo Tatu Morto here

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Neurons To Nirvana: Understanding Psychedelic Medicines Official Film Trailer from MANGU.TV on Vimeo.

Understanding Psychedelic Medicines

NEURONS TO NIRVANA: A feature documentary about the resurgence of psychedelics as medicine. Through interviews with the world’s foremost researchers, writers, psychologists and pioneers in psychedelic psychotherapy, the film explores the history of five powerful psychedelic substances (LSD, Psilocybin, MDMA, Ayahuasca and Cannabis) and their previously established medicinal potential.

More info: www.neuronstonirvana.com

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Human numbers are projected to swell to 9 billion and 90% of large fish have been extracted from the ocean, it is clear that to stop fisheries terminally collapsing all of us are going to have to eat less fish. However, it is vital to realise that each of us making this ethical choice will not, in and of itself, be enough to stop the over-fishing driving the death of the oceans.

Corporations are pulling the most fish from the sea. To stop them we need laws to limit their activities. Wild species need space to live, so just like on land we need large wild areas protected from human interference. The excellent video above outlines how such agreements come into being. I was disturbed when i checked out the comments underneath True Activists posting of the video. The most liked comment read “you could waste your time talking to politicians.. or you could just stop eating fish..”

I think this shout out strikes to the core of our challenge – it is not just ourselves we need to worry about – there is everybody else as well. The human superorganism isn’t just the sum of its parts just like an ant colony is more than just a lot of ants. Novel functions emerge out of the complex interaction of differentiated parts.

High-tech, corporate fishing fleets navigate by satellite are partly funded by governments and generate wealth for shareholders. A reduction in demand for their product in one market is not going to stop them. They will just increase sales in other markets, create new products, aggregate demand or genetically engineer “super-pigs” that grow twice as fast when fed congealed fish balls. Corporations don’t back off. They only move forward and those at the wheel only want to move faster.

The threat of a complete and devastating collapse of global fisheries requires us to consider the worst. If fishing fleets continue to extract fish at existing rates we will see extinction events like the loss of North Atlantic Cod. This is devastating economically, reduces a crucial protein source to billions of humans and may fundamentally destabilise ocean ecosystems leading to unpredictable run-away changes.

Overfishing by Alex Hofford

If we are motivated to protect the ocean and preserve the fish that live within it we have to organise to stop fishing fleets and create large-scale marine reserves that are policed. The tools we have to do this are limited. We can occupy the land and boats of the fleets to stop them sailing but we have seen how governments will violently protect corporate interests. Is anyone going to try something similar in Russia any time soon? Anyway, if one corporation is stopped another will step up to seize the resource. We need to get to the heart of the problem and change the rules of the game.

If we pull back into space we clearly see the problem. The algorithms determining the functioning of the human superorganism are out of sync with our planetary circumstance. The dials are still set as if we were small and growing into an abundant and limitless frontier – like back in 1831 when Darwin sailed on the Voyage of the Beagle. There were only one billion humans on the planet and everywhere they stopped they were met by the extraordinary wildlife of a thriving biosphere.

200 years of human population growth compounded with surging levels of consumption have created a very different planet. The cavernous excavations of natural systems have left them teetering on the brink, meanwhile, the wealth-concentrating function of corporations has created a remote elite with vast hoards of capital running organisations that span the world and answer to no one.

We need to adjust the controls of our superorganism so that it: stops expanding outwards, consumes less, functions more efficiently and produces less pollution. We can achieve this by, for example, shifting to an interest-free monetary system, limiting the economy, giving legal rights to natural systems and passing global treaties to limit pollution and ban war. To achieve these ends we must address governance issues and politics.

It isn’t just naive to think changing the behaviour of some individual ants will fix this situation it is disastrous because to protect what is left of nature we need to move quickly and decisively. This is the problem with environmental organisations that solely emphasise lifestyle changes – they distract us from the main causes of harm and let the powerful off the hook.

If we have reached the conclusion that our politicians have simply become administrators for large corporations and will work to concentrate wealth further even while the planet dies then surely then answer isn’t to back off and leave them to it!? If politicians are banqueting with bankers on the bones of our dying world lets not retreat into a muggy haze of personal development. Lets not kid ourselves that individual actions are enough. We have to get organised and change the system – thats called politics.

Vote here to stop the industrial destruction of the deep ocean.

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By Ben Radley

Congolese miners at a tin mine in the eastern DRC

Since the beginning of the first Congo War in 1996, and particularly since the coltan boom of the early noughties, numerous international organisations – including the United Nations – have documented the rise of armed groups in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that control the production and export of minerals as a means to raise revenue.

More recently, powerful advocacy organisations launched a campaign connecting this phenomenon to the electronics used in our daily lives, helping to coin the terms ‘blood mobiles’ and ‘conflict minerals’. The most notable of these organisations, the Enough Project in Washington D.C., recruited a plethora of celebrities to help promote the campaign’s message, including Ryan Gosling and Nicole Richie (see videos below).

The campaign was and continues to be a huge success. In 2010, US Congress responded to the pressure and passed a law requiring all companies registered on the US stock exchange to prove that minerals they source from the Congo are not financing armed conflict. Earlier this year Canada passed similar legislation, and the European Union is set to follow suit in 2014.

Yet while the campaign narrative plays well into Western stereotypes of greedy African savages raping women while high on dope and opium, it’s only a partial analysis of the situation, mistaking symptoms of conflict for causes. In reality, cleaning up the Congo’s mineral supply chains has about as much to do with building peace for the African nation as David Cameron and hugging hoodies has to do with building a fairer and more equal Britain. Nadda.

Working conditions are tough, but artisanal mining provides an essential livelihood to millions in the Congo

To paraphrase Congo political analyst Jason Stearns, minerals are not what the conflict was about at the beginning, and they’re certainly not what the conflict is about today. Armed groups in the DRC are not fighting over access to and control of minerals as an end in itself, but as a means to finance their operations to address other grievances, namely unresolved political issues pertaining to land, citizenship and territorial boundaries.

More importantly still, anything that makes money is a target for armed groups. The eastern DRC is a war economy. Timber, charcoal, palm oil, cannabis, poaching, illegal taxation of populations, road checkpoints. Cleaning up one of these sectors without addressing the conflict’s root causes simply shifts the violence and extortion elsewhere. The M23, perhaps the most well-known armed group in the eastern DRC today, does not seek to control mining areas or attack mines.

Lastly, Congolese state officials are today responsible for the largest part of all human rights violations.[i] These same officials are now being empowered and entrusted to determine whether a mine’s minerals are fit for export to the international market. One rotten apple is simply being replaced with another. Until serious political reform takes place, it is difficult to see how punitive measures focusing on the eastern Congo’s mineral sector – the single largest employer in the region after agriculture – will lead to an improvement in the daily lives of the Congolese.

Of further concern is that the conflict minerals approach has nothing to say to the environmental costs of mining or our mass consumption of electronics. In fact, it encourages the establishment of industrial mining in place of the often less environmentally damaging practice of artisanal mining, as the closed supply chains operated by industrial mines are more easily able to conform to the requirements of mineral certification imposed by conflict minerals legislation than the open and complex supply chains of artisanal mining.

Livelihoods are lost at the risk of greater environmental damage and increased capital flight. This is the mining future the eastern DRC now faces, and indeed, the social and economic devastation caused by conflict minerals legislation in the region has been well documented.[ii]

This is perhaps largely why the conflict minerals agenda has gained so much traction in political circles. It provides politicians with their favourite magic formula of a humanitarian campaign holding the promise of great change which actually – by failing to address critical political, structural and environmental issues – promises nothing more than business as usual. And we all know, that’s no longer an option.

So, what are the options then? Here’s a few alternative approaches that might bring more meaningful and constructive results:

• Westerners looking to have an ethical consumer footprint should look to consume less and push hard for corporations to put in place circular supply chains – i.e. taking back old phones and reusing the minerals – and reduce the practice of built-in obsolescence, rather than making simplistic demands for action in a complex war-torn region.
• Westerners wanting to support the Congolese people should read this article on reclaiming activism from the policy lobbyists in Washington D.C., London and elsewhere, and follow its three core principles: activism should be undertaken in partnership with affected people, under their leadership; activism should seek truth and speak truth; activism should challenge power.

Against these basic standards, the celebrity-led campaign for change in the Congo has – in different measures and at different times – come up short. It’s time for a new kind of advocacy. One that speaks truth to power, not half-truths on behalf of power.

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The team behind this article are making a film. Obamas Law is going off HERE

Early morning at a small mining village in the eastern DRC

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For over 30 years, David Suzuki has been Canada’s most beloved scientist. But on October 9, he publicly accused the Canadian government, Canadian corporations, and even Canadian citizens of serious crimes against our country, environment and planet. Now, he will stand trial for those claims and defend his beliefs in front of the largest jury in history: Canada.

Watch the live stream here on November 6 and deliver your verdict.

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Reclaim The Streets party, held in London’s Trafalgar Square, 1997

Peace, A Natural State is the preface to a new a new book by Gregory Sams called The State is Out of Date

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. Thomas Paine’s introduction to Common Sense – 1776

Slavery was thought normal throughout the world until recent centuries; sex between men and boys was fine for ancient Greeks; for centuries it was tradition to bind women’s feet in China; for two thousand years we thought the whole universe rotated around planet Earth; for more than two centuries we have believed that democratic politics could make big government serve its citizens. Once a belief or practice endures through enough generations it is endowed with the validity of tradition and considered normal. Our trusting response to traditional practice is like the naive belief of young children that adults must know what they are doing, simply because they have been doing it for so long. Even something as bizarre as war is considered normal behavior simply because, after a few thousand years, it has assumed the cloak of tradition.

As a young boy growing up in the wake of World War II, I remember thinking it perfectly plausible that if one person could bring about a great World War, as Hitler had recently done, then it must be possible for one person to bring about a great World Peace. I know better now.

Zoroaster, Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammed, and other prophets and interpreters of spiritual truth have given us some great pointers to inner peace, but the religions that organized after they died have not brought peace and brotherhood to mankind. Indeed, the Abrahamic three have caused a great deal of strife, squabbling over details of just what their same God said to Whom, while believing that if we all followed their chosen version of His word, only then would we achieve global peace and harmony. But people are different, times change, and morality is best developed from within.

Like many, I hoped that some inspired leader would come along, political or spiritual, to get the ball rolling in the right direction and unite us all behind their positive policies. Perhaps a combination of Christ, Gandhi, John Kennedy, and Hypatia of Alexandria would do the trick, provided this composite character could live forever. In despair of this miracle ever arising on Earth, some even anticipate imminent alien contact with a Ten Commandments type of scenario broadcast simultaneously in all languages to all televisions, cell phones, social networks, and radios across the globe. But would even this, an ultimatum from outer space, do the job?

The state’s priorities will not change. As we will see, self-interest, self- survival and self-advancement will always be the primary concerns of any ruler or government. In a democracy, the next election will always be the politician’s foremost consideration, and the short-term interests of society will take a poor second best, with our long-term interests hardly considered. When a government is said to be “in power” it holds that power for the simple reason that it is able to make us do or not do that which it decides is in our best, or its best, interest. Whether this power was won in a political bun fight or acquired through military force often makes little difference in the long run. Once a new state is seen to have a firm grip upon the reins of power, the world will recognize it and welcome it to the family of nations.

There are more questions than answers in this book. This is not a pessimistic view, but one based on the premise that our current methods of attacking the problems of the world actually block the emergence of organic working solutions. Nor will every aspect of every subject be aired, or copious examples delivered on every principle. The intention is to stir the pot rather than draft a finished recipe with measured ingredients. If I were to cite evidence supporting each point or assertion, then many of these chapters would fill a book of their own.. You can view this book as a jigsaw puzzle with a few of the pieces missing. The picture is there, and as you see it you will be in a better position to fill in the missing pieces yourself.

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom. Albert Einstein

 

Preface to The State Is Out Of Date – We Can Do It Better, Gregory Sams ©2013

Gregory Sams photographed by Alan Davies

 

 

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