Busy Busy Busy

Me think the New Realist is being dangerously unrealistic in relation to his timetable.

4 major projects, all relevant, are picking up pace. Delighted but it means my updates here will be thin on the ground.

First up: the All Ireland Permaculture Gathering. This is the big one. Venue is confirmed… but we cant tell you that just yet. Needless to say, if you are interested in hanging out in a community of realists, then this is the gig for you. Plenty of updates to follow shortly. I am also editing the Permaculture Wicklow website and Facebook page, and have invested in a 27″ iMac and HD Camera to document the process entire.

Second: www.crewger.com.  Long gestating / never ending / new design imminent. Ill talk about this more when we are live.

Third: Abbeyfest. I’m organising film and African drumming this year along with the usual logistical stuff. Looking forward to this year. Hopefully it wont be as hectic as the last 2 years? (Never gonna happen).

Finally: Glendalough Arts Network. The structure of our Fireside Sessions: Tapas and Tales evening is slowly coming together and we would hope we can build a model that can be copied in towns and villages around the country.

Anyway, point being, I’m a little miffed with myself as I havent time to develop ideas on this blog. Maybe after June it’ll settle down.

The Inside Job up for Oscar Glory

Much as I love Banksy’s ‘Exit Through the Giftshop‘, and much as I know how worthy the other films up for Best Documentary Feature at this years Oscars, I am hoping that Charles Ferguson’s ‘Inside Job’ takes the Glory, if only to ensure more people are aware of what just happened in the financial world over the past few years.

For a full list of this years Oscar hopefuls, check out Empire’s run down here or visit youtube for added American banter, preceded by crap adds.

You can watch the trailer below.

And I found this great interview with the director on Permaculture TV.

The Leaders of the Free World are just little boys throwing stones

“Some things in life are bad, They can really make you mad”

Indeed, our leaders (in the business, cultural and political worlds) are usually top of the list here. Often it seems pointless to complain. What can I possibly do? I do not contribute. I am not heard. The power of my betters is too big and all encompassing.

Not so for the New Realist.

The New Realist understands that in the wider scheme of things, the actions of these men and women, though they may seem epic in the current age, matter less when the ages of the earth are considered.

Yes, games being played at a global level may lead to system collapse in our time, but the earth has been through much worse in its time, and will recover, though we will certainly not live to appreciate the rebirth.

And we can take comfort in the fact that the earth is a resilient mother, and may have a few tricks up her sleeve “before the whole shit-house goes up in flames”, as big Jim Morrison once so elegantly put it.

The ordinary citizens of the earth, those more interested in providing for their families and prospering as they may, have more power as a collective than they have dared to wield to date, and their is hope that they will realise this in time, and use it for the benefit of themselves and the earth on which they rely.

Regardless of what the original intentions of Elbow’s song were, the song tells me of a people disaffected by the work of our leaders in providing the world we dreamt of all those years ago.

“I’m so easy to please, yeah
But I think we dropped the baton like the 60′s didn’t happen, oh no!

I need to see the commander in chief
And remind him what was passed onto me

Passing the gun from father to feckless son
We’re climbing a landslide where only the good die young”

Mixing these lyrics with images with images from ‘Watchmen’ is pretty ingenious, as anyone familiar with the original graphic novel’s writer, Alan Moore, will agree with.

You’ll have to watch it over on youtube.

The Reality of Dawkin’s ‘Middle-World’

So what is real anyway? With all this talk of New Realism and the earth, what have the scientists to say. A good place to start is Dawkin’s ‘Middle World’.

I love how Richard Dawkins’ mind works. The guy is a rationalist. He doesn’t accept anything unless if can be reasoned or examined.

There is obviously a disgusting amount of content out there on the man, most of it relating to his bullish determination to ensure everyone understands the delusional nature of religion. I’ve read the ‘God Delusion’. It’s an amazing book. and a triumph of reason over institutionalised fantasy.

And his argument for the bullish nature of his attitude towards all religion in general is, well, reasonable.

Here I am merely interested in his concept of ‘Middle-World’ – “the realm between the microscopic world of quarks and atoms and the larger view of the universe at the galactic and universal level” as Wikipedia puts it.

The Reality of 7 Billion People = Time to Rethink Our Relationship with the Earth

Delighted and terrified at finding the below video on my travels and will definitely be buying this edition of National Geographic whenever it hits shelves on the (increasingly less so) Emerald Isle.

You should probably watch it first before I sound off.

The core line for me is “It’s not space we need, it’s balance’. But then, worryingly, it highlights two points that address only the imbalance among human communities. It mentions nothing about the increasingly dangerous imbalance in the earth system entire and our part in the overall story of earth’s eternal move towards a state of stasis.

We are elements in a system. We are not separate from the earth. We are not her master. We are not her doom or her saviour. We are the earth. Why? The earth is a system and, as before,  we are elements within that system.

We play our game, as all living beings do, and over time these games can, through various highly complex processes, lead to a state of overall stasis or balance within the boundaries of the earth system. Luckily, we evolved in a time of great prosperity in earth’s history.

With our current game, we will be lucky if our species does not bring about a temporary collapse of the system entire.

New Realism and Tantra

Pissy Irish day out there today but I’ve a good fire going here and revved up after a good Monday morning dance wave with the ever lovely Sherron St Clair and her band of dedicated movers and shakers.

A friend shared a you-tube video with me last night from a Tantra School in South Africa on the ‘unbounded nature of tantric practice’. You can view the video below.

I am always amazed by the ability of Tantric teachers to make absolute sense when speaking of issues of the heart, love and sex.

We are, at our core, energy – a life force moving through one evolved living being. This is truth, base, core reality and scientific fact. Those living beings naturally evolve complex ways of life and ways of dealing with the world around them for the sake of survival, and though the roots of these practices or thought processes are initiated and inspired by the core, they can deviate and dilute its presence in our minds and in our bodies.

I am talking here about conditioning – the evolved practices and thought processes we learn as we grow, important for individual and communal survival, but too often than not, ignorant of the core for various historical reasons. Hence the evolved Western attitude towards sex in general.

Could everyone PLEASE stop banging on about GLOBAL WARMING!!

I’m tired people. Very very tired people.

For years we have witnessed the disastrous attempt by certain powerful individuals to superimpose a monetary industrial system over the grand natural system of the earth.

The systems that these individuals have built, and to which we are all now reliant on for our most basic needs, continues to treat the earth as nothing more than a sewer and a pantry.

Despite what we are led to believe, when you consider the reality of the situation facing the global population today, you have to come to the conclusion that this system simply does not work. It is a global system, the global population is in crisis, and the current system does not have the realism or the impetus to face up to the basic cause of all of this.

The economic systems we are a part of, and the political systems that bolsters them, are not working within the parameters of the reality on which they depend for their very existence, namely, the earth system. The system that has been superimposed over the natural world does not recognise that it is part of, and completely dependent on, a larger system.

Our theme for this year is…..

The genius of the below speech is that it reflects the feelings of anyone who lived during times of crisis and felt powerless.

Even if you don’t have all the answers, it is never good enough to sit back and just accept that this is the way the world works and I am powerless to affect it, especially when it is you who is getting f$ckd over.

If you want to control a population, you cloud them with fear and a sense of powerlessness. Regardless of the fact that you do not hold a position of power, the best way to let your ‘betters’ know that you are still there and wont be letting them away with their plan is to just get MAD!

It is what the Irish people DID NOT DO during the recent take over of the country, and it proved essentially that we, the people who fought a foreign invader for generation after generation, have become a nation of administrators and consumers with no back bone.

So that is what we are going to do here at the New Realist. We are going to get MAD!

Wrong ‘Person of the Year’. Wrong Social Network.

This week, TIME Magazine have named Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, their Person of the Year.

Jillian York, writing for Alazeera, considers it a ‘dubious honour’ for many valid reasons. There are the obvious and long running privacy concerns, and the problems that the ‘real name’ policy when signing up has for activists around the world.

And the obvious large large-trunked mammal in the room is Mr Julian Assange and his pesky Wikileaks crew, who continue to spoil the party for a lot of the ‘great’ institutions in the world with its inconvenient habit of leaking the truth.

“Assange is undoubtedly the man of the moment, and in a sense, the whole year; though WikiLeaks’ latest release of Embassy cables has attracted a swarm of media attention, earlier releases of the Iraqi Collateral Murder video and the Afghan war logs made a huge public impact.”

So onto Mr Zuckerberg. He received the accolade for

• “Connecting more than half a billion people” – Yes half a billion people do use his product. But this is not to suggest that 500 million people are communicating with each other in a meaningful way, working effectively or somehow joined symbiotically now that they have a Facebook account.
• “Mapping the social relations among them” - Is this such a big deal? Really?
• “Creating a new system of exchanging information ” – Members share photos. Send emails. Market their businesses. WordPress, MySpace and every other social networking, information exchange service out there do the same thing. Often better.
• “Changing how we live our lives” – This is a real stretch. You could argue the internet has changed the way we live our lives. Facebook is just another management tool that uses the true revolution that was the internet to build its own private marketplace. You could argue maybe that its addictive nature and social core has brought more people online, but then it is no different to online gaming and the way it has changed the lives of gaming enthusiasts.

The Rise of Collaborative Consumption

Great to see a revolutionary movement being led by an attractive, pleasant, uncontroversial person such as Rachel Botsman. She could actually do more damage to the traditional capitalist model than Julian Assange, Che Guevara or Naomi Watts could ever do, and the C.I.A cant touch her.

She is making a resources led society hip, and that is no mean feat. It is always better to build rather than to destroy. People, especially today, work better with encouragement and positivity than with criticism and negativity.

P.S. Anyone have a copy of this book to share with me?

Vimeo wont embed for some reason so check out this video first = WHAT’S MINE IS YOURS from rachel botsman on Vimeo.