Germany’s leadership and population were shocked awake by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. Germany is not hard-wired for Russophobia the way America seems to be; it has long sought balance and engagement in its relationship with Russia. Moreover, Germany’s shame and regret over the German armed forces’…

As a loyal consumer of propaganda, I’m consumed with the overwhelming importance of the question of whether a vassal state government in Ukraine will in future be a vassal state of psychopathic politicians and obscure geostrategic planning cadres in Moscow or their counterparts in Washington. …

Here is a rather unsettling analysis of how the reprehensible invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Army may have been not only anticipated by the US State Department, but perhaps even deliberately provoked, in order to sucker the Kremlin into an unwinnable war. Secretary of State Blinken of USA and…

An interesting question as we consider how best to stop burning fossil fuels is: Why don’t we simply power the entire world with geothermal energy? We know it’s technically possible — even straightforward. In fact, the only reason *not* to do it is that wind and solar power (including accompanying energy storage systems) may be even cheaper solutions as we move toward carbon-free energy abundance. Each option — solar PV, wind power, and deep-well geothermal energy — has the technical potential to easily provide 100% of humanity’s energy needs all by itself. Taken together, they’re a feast.

A big issue for humanity and the biosphere is where we’re going to get materials for the cleantech future — in particular, where we’re going to get the metals to make batteries and connectors for more than a billion electric vehicles, as we set about replacing the existing fossil-fueled car…

Money is created every time someone incurs a bank debt. When you borrow money from a bank to buy a house, e.g. $350,000, you sign a ‘mortgage contract’ with the bank, promising to repay that money over a defined time horizon, e.g. 30 years, and to pay interest on the…

There are two reasons why our response to Greta is showing signs of being more powerful than was our response to Severn. One is that the world is more obviously on fire now. The other, perhaps more salient reason is… well, to find out, read on. Severn Cullis-Suzuki is the…

It’s pretty clear that the European Union needs to evolve further in order to remain stable and retain the loyalty of its nations and citizens. That’s been obvious since long before Brexit. In the European political discourse, there’s been a long-standing debate between people who want a Europe of Nations…

Fractal democracy (FD) would be a game-changing improvement over existing electoral systems, which have largely been captured by monied interests. A fractal democracy is a multi-level representative democratic system composed of nested sets of electors and representatives, with each group of electors composed of only a few people, e.g. five people per group. An FD hierarchy is composed of elected representatives of groups of elected representatives of groups of elected representatives, and so on. In optimal FD hierarchies, each group is the same size and each is very small, so that its members can get to know each other well. Five is a good choice of number of members of each consultative group. With five-person FD groups each choosing a representative from within their group and sending that representative up to the next level in the FD hierarchy, electors would consistently be represented by people they personally know well and meet with regularly, e.g. for one afternoon each month. This vastly improves accountability — especially when contrasted with elections every two to four years involving millions of voters in an electoral district choosing a “representative” they’ve never met in person, after being subjected to relentless barrages of propaganda that grossly distort their view of the candidates. Here’s an extraordinary fact: It would take only eleven levels of a five-person-per-level FD hierarchy to represent the entire adult population of the United States! While it’s implausible that the existing electoral system could be displaced by an FD system, since that would require a major overhaul of the US Constitution, there is no reason why an FD system couldn’t be used as a “primary” voting system to select strong candidates to stand for election in the existing electoral system. Such an FD hierarchy could also serve as a hierarchy of consultative policy formulation teams, thereby generating enormous momentum in favour of specific policy reforms advanced level by level from the bottom up. Moreover, the usefulness of FD representative hierarchies isn’t limited to government: FD systems can also be used for highly accountable, transparent, due-process-rooted self-governance of civil-society organizations or corporations.