[Of the thousands of good links I've seen over the years, these are here partly by merit and partly by luck. For more, look through the archives linked on the bottom of the home page.]
core ideas
Two great essays by Curtis White in Orion Magazine,
The Idols of Environmentalism, and
The Ecology of Work.
PDF by Kevin Carson,
Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles. The big idea is that back in the late 1800's it became more efficient to do manufacturing in an autonomous network of home industries, and since then, centrally controlled corporate production has survived purely through deceit and violence.
Also by Carson, a critique of the
so-called Green Revolution, in which nice scientists thought they were saving billions of lives, when really they were helping industrial agribusiness to ruin the world.
The Theory of Anyway, that all the stuff we're supposed to do to because of peak oil and climate change is stuff we should be doing anyway.
The Machine Stops, a 100 year old story about a future where everyone stays in their room hooked up to a global information network, which turns their attention away from reality, causing the whole thing to crash.
Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable, focusing on complexity and system design.
An important article on the
Jubilee tradition, in which ancient civilizations would prevent violent collapse by periodically canceling debts and returning land to farmers.
The best Onion article ever:
U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion.
1491, an article by Charles C. Mann summarizing his book about advanced civilization in the Americas before Columbus.
Debunking the Tragedy of the Commons. If you go out and look, land held in common tends to be managed well, and privately owned land tends to be exploited. But in 1968 a eugenicist named Garrett Hardin pulled a paper out of his ass that said exactly the opposite with no evidence, and the owning classes thought it was brilliant.
Ian Boal: Specters of Malthus. Easily the smartest attack on Malthus I've seen, arguing that population only outruns food supply when there's non-local control of resources.
From the forums, an excellent summary of
corporate farming.
Toby Hemenway analyzes
foraging, agriculture, and horticulture.
NY Times article on
urban farmer Will Allen.
Jeff Vail on
Rescuing Suburbia, through "its potential to serve as the substrate for something entirely different from suburbia, but located where suburbia currently stands."
Charles Eisenstein's
Economics of Fermentation explains how lacto-fermented food and drink is allied to small local systems and economic freedom.
The Right to Raw Milk. I've never seen the science and the politics of raw milk covered so well in one place.
Daily Kos review of
Henry's Quest, a wonderful children's book about a medieval post-oil future. Related: an unfinished page on
future Medieval America.
My favorite grand unifying social philosophy, Chris Davis's
Idle Theory.
More about idleness,
Quitting the Paint Factory. I especially like the section near the end about the connection between busyness and fascism.
How to keep someone with you forever... in a bad way, by keeping them in a constant state of crisis and hope.
E.F. Schumacher on
Buddhist Economics.
Joe Bageant's best work, compiled from three talks:
Escape from the Zombie Food Court.
The intro to a book about
space permaculture. I've read the book,
Gaiome, and highly recommend it for the five or six people interested in both deep ecology and space exploration.
unfiled
RSA Animate takes the audio from speeches and illustrates them with a master cartoonist on a dry erase board, so instead of seeing a talking head, you see the ideas come to life.
David Foster Wallace commencement speech, mostly about thinking outside your accustomed frame of reference.
(alternate link)
A lengthy and fascinating
history of the world, from millions of years ago to the present. It focuses on weapons and fighting but is full of all kinds of cool stuff.
Until very recently,
Europeans slept all winter.
The best argument I've seen for the benefits of meditation:
Meditation: Why Bother?
Medical Dark Matter, showing that "healthcare causes only about 3% of health variation," and the rest is caused by social factors.
Science justifies
barefoot running.
How I quit heroin and other toxic substances, a great essay on drug addiction.
Myths over Miami, an exploration of the myth system of homeless kids.
Philip K Dick's essay
How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later. And another Dick essay,
The Android and the Human.
Walter Wink on
the myth of redemptive violence, which he calls "the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has even known." Also, Wink wrote the best article on
Jesus I've ever seen.
Business Reply, a sixteen page comic you can put in junk mail envelopes to give ideas to the people who open them.
How a single driver can smooth out traffic jams.
Dropping out in the 21st century, an article with a couple quotes from me at the end.
the fringe
Rudy Rucker's "Reality Is A Novel" Theory.
Rupert Sheldrake's summary of
morphic fields.
A very smart Jacques Vallee article, arguing that aliens are trying to contact us, but their reality and technology are so different from ours that we don't recognize their communications, or we dismiss them as too strange to be "real".
PDF: Incommensurability, Orthodoxy and the Physics of High Strangeness
The best theory I've seen about
ghosts -- that there are parallel worlds, intersecting and overlapping our own, and stuff can come through if there's electromagnetic interference.
And a related article, a nice summary of the
Holographic Universe theory and how it explains the so-called "paranormal".
Closer to dominant science, a suggestion that
in a holographic universe, gravity is created by information.
And my favorite trippy science article:
Does time come together like an island of boats floating on the open seas?
politics and complaining
Death Grip: How political psychology explains Bush's ghastly success. This is the most depressing article ever, showing that when humans are reminded of their own mortality, they turn into right wing zombies -- and the effect is even stronger on liberals!
The Politics of Victimization is the best essay I've seen on the psychology of American politics, comparing it to an abusive relationship. Also,
The Docile American.
David Graeber's
Hope in Common argues that hopelessness is not natural, but is produced and maintained by the ruling powers at great expense, and that expense is dragging down the economy.
Scary article about
Dominionism.
My favorite
Bush psychological profile.
An anonymous post about how easy it is to sabotage the infrastructure and therefore, since no one does it, how
there is no terrorism in the USA except for a few spectacles which, in this context, look really suspicious.
The Betrayal Of Adam Smith. America has never been capitalist!
Are cops constitutional? No! What we take for granted as the "police" are a recent invention of the centralized industrial state. Less than 200 years ago, all the nice stuff they do was done by regular citizens, and all the bad stuff they do, like breaking into your house and you're not allowed to defend yourself, was not imagined in the worst nightmares of the Framers.
The history of
Eugenics in America. Also, ironically,
Eugenics in Israel.
Transcript of a great
Bill Hicks performance.
What does income distribution in the USA look like?
The L Curve
multimedia
Awesome
postapocalypse highway painting.
Incredible flash game,
Today I Die. I recommend you don't click the "stuck" button but keep playing until you figure it out.
That's about the size of it was my favorite video when I was five years old, and I like it even more now.
And the same thing in the other direction:
Baroque Mandelbrot zoom.