My flat-mate Hannibal is an avid ‘skralder’. That’s Danish for dumpster diver. So much so that a group of media students made a short film about Hannibal and his friends who go dumpster diving late at night. Though I didn’t partake in the hunting and gathering depicting in the film, I did help cooking the [...]
I just finished reading Naomi Klein‘s latest book, The Shock Doctrine. Klein is a celebrated critic of multi-national corporatism and neo-liberal economic policies, and the Shock Doctrine reads like a black book of neo-liberalism similar to the Black Book of Communism. The Black Book of Communism sought to document the history of repressions in Communist [...]
The Story of Stuff is a very clever and well-executed film about our relationship with our planet. You should go watch it now. Come back afterwards and read the rest of this post. It’ll take 20 minutes, but it’ll be worth it. It may come across as a bit preachy at times, but the points [...]
Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and founder of the Creative Commons project, which I have mentioned several times on these pages, recently changed his main research and activist focus from copyright law to examining the dynamics of political corruption. As he explains it on his Wiki: I want to discuss “corruption” in a very [...]
At the Danish Social Forum, there was a film festival called “This way out” which showcased a collection of the latest political documentaries. I saw Johan Söderberg’s film The Planet a visual feast examining the same issues as “An Inconvenient Truth” – but it does so in a more poetic and somewhat less factual way. [...]
This weekend, I went to the Danish Social Forum, which is a Danish version of the World Social Forum – a gathering of various grassroots organizations seeking to bring focus to the many alternative ways that the world can develop, all under the heading “another world is possible.” Mainly, I went to see the the [...]
Wednesday, I went to see former Chess World Champion and current Russian Human Rights Champion Garri Kasparov receive the grandly named Herbert Pundik Freedom Prize. Kasparov proved to be a fairly eloquent speaker, and he managed to summarize the enlightenment ideal of Human Rights very precisely, and underline its importance once more. What surprised me [...]
One of the entries for the Index design award was the Dropping Knowledge website. It’s a fun, if somewhat difficult concept which lets anybody ask a question, and gives anybody else the opportunity to offer their answers. It is an attempt to use the new sort of participatory culture to find or reach contemplative answers [...]
My recent post on Simplified Politics was inspired by a Thomas Sowell quote sent to me by my friend Kristian: The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have [...]