Being  a sex slave is hardly as exciting and pleasurable as it might sound. Every year thousands of woman and children are abused this way.

CNN recently asked it’s viewers if they were sick and tired of all that shallow reporting? 94% of the viewers said yes. Even the question was so bloody obvious that one has to ask if not only the politicians, but also most of the mass media in that big country has lost contact with reality?

I recent weeks I watched the live reporting of the presidential primaries - and I was quite amused by the stupidity of it. The insights and talking points that the pundits and so called ‘experts’ used were chillingly flat - even I as an Non-American could see that.

This is not a dumbing down of a country - it is already dumb and shallow in the places were intellectuals should offer their brainpower to the people.

Apart from a few shining examples like Keith Olbermann I hardly see any TV journalist worth their money. Political agitation has become such a money game, that the messages they spread are so full of artificial flavor that they no longer need to have any nutritional value. American news has became like American Fast Food - it just bloats your mind, fattens your fears - but leaves you hungry and sick in the end.

A Day In The Life of Miss McDonald - just brilliant surreal consumerism combined with a dadaist performance!

Spending a gozillion euros/dollars on Wellness makes you feel well. Ever heard of cause and effect?

Just wondering if all that extra fat should have be shared with the less fortunate? Maybe christmas should be turned into a time of fasting and giving away all you can afford to others. Three days of less food, of no TV, no playstation, no entertainment then maybe we get some more spiritual enlightenment into society …

The way we produce food is simply stupid. We ship our calories back and forth across the globe - often several times, because one industrial food processing service might be cheaper at the other end of the world. But all this shipping costs huge amounts of energy and causes lots of pollution.

Produce locally, ship locally, eat locally. That would be sustainable. Today be can grow almost all exotic foods even in cold countries - and off season.

Climate Change, reduced consumerism, no more cheap flights to your favorite party location, less cheap petrol, more expensive food, responsible consumerism, less convenience food, less lead and cheap toys, more reusing things - less shopping for new stuff …

Sure all that complicated and a serious effort for humans.

But how would you explain to those two chaps why we fucked up the whole planet. Most animals will simply be destroyed by more and extreme climate change. Sure nature will survive and produce some new amazing species after we have killed ourselves and the rest of the inhabitants of planet earth.

We need change - but not at a snails pace and with much more brains. Aren’t we always saying we are the smartest life form on earth? Time to prove it.

It is amazing how much effort people put into visiting fish and water mammals like dolphins and whales. If we continue to eat, pollute and destroy their habit as effective as in the last 200 years there won’t be much to see in a short time.

Would you buy a car from this guy - of course you would if the price was right. Car Salesman just want to rip you off like everybody else - and if you could, you would also like to save as much money as you can. We are all Car Salesman.

The Christmas tree is labeled as a German invention. But who would have thought that Arab countries and the Chinese go mad for them? German consumers are currently facing a serious price hike, because ‘their’ trees are getting shipped or even flown out to "those foreigners".

So global consumerist culture trumps so called Christian traditions? Frohe Weihnachten …

The Economist has a great special this week about "The End of cheap Food" (essay and an article). Highly recommended.

There are several forces at work:

One is simply demand and supply. For years farmers in Europe have been over subsidized and told to use their lands to overproduce even more food. Now with need these extra capacities back. Since the production of biofuels is so heavily subsidized as well - demand has made it for example more lucrative to sell wheat for fuel production instead of making pasta (here some background on the state of Wheat production worldwide).

Most of all food production is distorted: for decades now poorer countries with an agricultural base had no chance of competing against European and American farmers - because they are heavily subsidized. Sometimes local production has been so damaged by the price difference that they had to close - so these poor countries actually had to import food they could have easily produced themselves.

What we need is curbed up production in all countries, less subsidies and more sensible production. It makes no sense to transport milk from Europe to China. That’s a lot of fuel wasted - fuel which gets more and more expensive.

Every bathroom Elvis needs one! Don’t forget to squeeze it hard, when your singing gets too emotional … let’s foam and groan!

Why isn’t there a Saint for Chocolate? I think the Holy Mother Church would win back many modern people by providing relevant Saints for Shoppers and Lifestyle choices: Saint Fitness, Saint Porn, Saint Walmart, Saint Windows, Saint Latte …

Plus every business has to print the Saint on the related product - complete with URL and PayPal account for donation.

Can product mascots be spiritual? Can companies really sell themselves on a religious / spiritual agenda and company philosophy? Or should all commercial services and products be ‘clean’ and neutral?

Companies can certainly act in a nice and responsible as well as ‘moral’ way with their customers and the environment. But when it comes to my enlightenment - it’s only my business and nobody else’s …

I still remember trying to see Walkman for the first at a local department store (Karstadt). They were on display - but all chained to the counter. Bastards. Compared to today’s iPods or discmans they were pretty bulky and heavy. Most of all VERY expensive.

A few weeks later some privileged kids and youngsters had one of these. You could simply spot them by those glowing orange ‘rubber ears’ and their almost absent style of walking. These days it was VERY unusual for anyone to run around with headphones on.

I also liked the Walkman speech phenomena - people who talked while listening to their precious music always screamed - just like some people do today with their cell phones. Oh, what joy - made them always behave like idiots.

Similar the Walkman gaze - some people seemed to dream or stare at distant realms while listening to their music. Somewhere, some other sound planet …

With the Walkman also arrived the tape mixing frenzy. It was not enough to record any old record and just listen to it. You needed special remixes for special moments: one cool mix for jogging (another 80’s craze), one for video gaming (rush tapes) and of course for waking up in the morning on your way to work or school. Some of these tapes are burned so deeply into my memories that I still expect certain song combinations - just the way I banned them once on tape and listened to them a thousand times.

And the shitloads of batteries we consumed to keep those little buggers running. Plus the never ending quest how to transport it. The early ones were to big and heavy for your jacket - so you needed a special belt case, which was uncool. If you put your Walkman in your rucksack you might entangle yourself somewhere. Today we are used to have cables and electronic devices all around us - but in the 80’s hardly anyone carried anything ‘cable’ with them.

Also the world was a much quieter place then. The music anywhere revolution was just about to begin: MTV had to be invented yet and most stores didn’t feature roaring TV sets with ads or fast music videos. Hey, even McDonalds was a quiet place to crunch your burgers!

One thing I very much enjoyed was tape swapping with friends. You listen to mine and I check out yours dude. A few models had two headphone plugins - wow - that was cool to listen to great music together. Especially for couples …

Another rather uncool thing was reliability. I literally glued and taped some of these machines until they fell apart. And there was no way of fixing these broken jukeboxes. It was always cheaper to buy a new and smaller one.

Walkmans really made the phrase ‘My life is a Soundtrack’ possible and I still can remember certain moments in my life plus the tracks that I played that very instant. Crazy?!

What are your Walkman memories … drop a comment please …

On one side big media companies have greatly reduced their international reporter network and therefore lost ‘local competence’. On the other side a huge army of freelance photographers, reporters and cameraman has developed in the least two decades.

But the media mercenaries focus mostly on popular stuff that brings in the money. Unpopular topics are left to a few brave reporters and photo journalists. So commercial news is today mostly about ’sellable’ news. If you can’t sell a picture or a story you won’t report about it again, because you need to pay your bills.

This is why we need support alternative media outlets for journalists and a willing audience to pay these people.

We also need more institutions like the BBC and other democratic and state funded media organizations, who can afford to report unpopular causes and criticize the powerful.

Free markets for news organization is a disaster. To provide a balanced public service will always collide with the quest for higher profits. Let big media create the entertainment, let publicly funded news organizations make the news.

And screw Rupert Murdoch and all the big media tycoons.

Ok, it began with fast food and pizza restaurants. Grabbing a bite in our hectic days makes sense, having the same boring food all over the world doesn’t.

Then came the Coffee Shops to give us the extra needed caffeine kick and sugar rush - plus some free wireless access. Well, still makes sense - although I hate the standard Ikea-Starbucks nesting instinct that’s developing globally.

But who needs a cell phone store - one for each provider - on every highstreet? It’s not that we need a daily supply of ‘phonettes’, batteries or ‘call minutes’?! We maybe upgrade our phone once a year or change our contracts maybe every two?

These shops are there mostly for presence, marketing and showing off their brand. I rather have some good old sandwich shops or some other specialized merchant that sells anything BUT a cell phone, a burger or a Latte.

Our inner cities have lost their unique mix of local shops and retailers. Almost all over the planet the big shopping centers offer the same crap from the same crappy companies. So much about free markets, choice for the consumer and competition.

BBC article: UK ‘landfill dustbin of Europe’

According a EU study there is a huge difference between the recycling rates in Europe and how much trash is thrown onto landfills per person.

As one can expect the Nordic countries are the cleanest while nations like Ireland, Britain and Spain have a long way to go to reduce their dirty lifestyles.

Don’t forget to read this article (also BBC) how some nations approach recycling and handling trash.

Read this nice article at the Telegraph website - and don’t forget to click the big image to watch the video.

Nicely done Guinness - I am sure these people had no cars, furniture or books left after the shot was done.

Thanks to Edosan for another insanely great link.

What constantly amazes me is that American Christians are against abortion, but for a harsh and brutal prison system - and even for the death penalty.

Plus many of them own guns for ’self defense’. An eye for an eye? Are your sure you are not Jews - worshipping a pretty violent and nasty God? Or simply hypocrites?

Overpopulation is still one of our biggest problems. Humanities growth is unsustainable for our own good and the rest of nature. This becomes especially clear in the case of the global water crises. Here some insights from the ‘old’ (2004) BBC special report Planet under pressure. Check part 2 ‘running dry’ for some gruel news.

But I am afraid nothing has changed in the last two years - the poor are still thirsty:

* One billion people without access to clean drinking water
* 2.6 billion without adequate sanitation
* Rapid urbanization increasing pressure on water resources
* 30-40% of water ‘lost’ through illegal tapping and leaks

(Source: UN World Water Report)

If you are really interested you should also read the recent BBCs comment page regarding the water crises. We need conserve water, stop overpopulation and the total commercialization of water supply. Water is a common good, it needs to be protected, but not overpriced so it becomes unaffordable for the poor.

I really hate it when movie studios release a few months after the ‘normal’ edition an additional super duper extra bonus golden collectors edition.

I really really really dig Twin Peaks, but do I really need to see lost clips of Agent Cooper on the toilet or some video clips from a nerdy Twin Peaks convention?

The quality of the normal DVDs is actually brilliant. The digital remastering really improved the quality a lot! And Twin Peaks itself is as cool, intriguing and charming to watch as evaaaar!

Thanks Moira for that tip.

One thing I hate about modern movies, toys, books and video games is that they don’t leave any space for my imagination. I don’t need to see that scary monster -  let my imagination create one. I don’t need to see a gazillion spaceships in every details - let my imagination create that spectacular. Don’t show and explain every bloody detail … leave that work to my imagination.

No surprise that so many modern kinds are so dumb, because they have no blanks to fill in, so their imagination isn’t challenged to do ANYTHING. The same applies to adults as well … because they simply fill in the blanks with money.

Imagination, association and creativity are skills that need constant training and input with great inspiration. No training, no skills = results in a dull mind.

The thing about genetics that scares me most is that we could create creatures only serve our weird social and emotional needs. It’s already bad enough that we slaughter, abuse and eat most of them anyway. Cats and dogs should be enough for emotionally deprived humans.

source: humandescent.com

Just because you own an official Yoga mat and think that animals should be treated nicely this doesn’t make you a spiritual person. That humble feeling and that cosmic love everybody is talking about comes after selling out your ego, not buying new stuff for it.