via (netzplitik.org)

Bernard Lietaer hingegen wagt mit seinem Buch “Das Geld der Zukunft” von 1999 den Versuch dem Laien das Finanzsystem ohne den Gebrauch von komplexen geldtheoretischen Zusammenhängen verständlich zu machen, um danach Alternativen zum momentanen Währungssystem aufzuzeigen, die der Überwindung der fundamentalen Problemstellungen der heutigen “zivilisierten” Welt dienlich sein sollen. Die Überalterung der Geselleschaft, die Informationsrevolution, die steigende Währungsinstabilität und die ökologischen Konflikte, die sich durch den technischen Fortschritt ergeben haben, sind seiner Meinung nach sich weiterhin zuspitzende Erscheinungen, die zwangsläufig zur einer Veränderung unseres Leben auf der Erde führen werden. Lietaer geht von einer Art Epochenübergang aus und schlägt zur Überwindung der “Zeit zwischen den Geschichten” ein neues, mehrschichtiges Währungssytem vor, welches aus den jeweiligen Landeswährungen, lokalen Komplementärwährungen und einer globalen Referenzwährung bestehen solle.

Mir persönlich hat das Buch insofern geholfen, als dass es mir eine relativ einfache Übersicht über das Finanzsystem verschafft hat. Lietaer nimmt Bezug zu wenigen wichtigen Ereignissen der globalen Finanzgeschichte, w. z. B. dem Bretton-Woods-Abkommen, und lockert mit interessanten Einschüben die Trockenheit der Materie ein wenig auf.  Die Zusammenhänge erschliessen sich auch jemandem, der keine VWL Vorlesungen besucht und ich war verblüfft, wie einfältig ich bisher den Begriff “Geldschöpfung” verstanden habe.  Mit Hilfe dieses Wissens lassen sich dann auch seine Lösungsvorschläge relativ leicht nachvollziehen. Die Bewertung über die Wirksamkeit dieser Ansätze überlasse ich an dieser Stelle den Experten. Mit Sicherheit hätten einige Ausführungen ein wenig kürzer dargelegt werden können, zumal sich einige Aspekte mehrmals wieder finden lassen, trotzdem würde ich jedem Interessierten dieses Buch weiterempfehlen.

Actually i want to point to a great youtube video series by Tim Post, the founder of Lucidipedia.com. On the Lucidipedia blog, he recently announced that the site is undergoing another structural change and that he is working on a new video series focusing on more advanced lucid dreaming issues. The new series, as well as an older one for beginners, are now ready to watch on the Lucidipedia youtube profile.

Since then much has changed and it has become my favourite bittorrent client for Linux. Finally on July 15th the Deluge team released version 0.9.02 (1.0.0 RC2) of their software and I must say, i’m pretty impressed by what they did to this already good product. They totally renewed the GUI and made it very intuitive, it now looks very similar to uTorrent. Besides the fresh interface deluge still has all the features you need in order to properly download torrents, though most of the old plugins still have to be rewritten to be compatible with the new version, but this will only be a matter of time.

I recommend you to try this great client, if you are searching for a good piece of software to download your torrents. Since it’s mostly written in Python you can get packages for many different Linux distributions as well as for OS X and Windows on their download page.

Now, there are two problems for me with reality checks. I’m very bad in remembering things i have to doin the future, so i often forget to do them on several occasions during the day, though i manage to do them from time to time. They quite often gave me lucid dreams, but those moments were very rare. So first you have to make yourself check reality while being awake and the other step is to transfer that behaviour into your dream life. For me this is quite hard and not very reliable.

So i thought about a more failsafe way to gain lucidity. Coming back to helping dream characters, i thought that those actually are visual representations of our subconsciousness. They represent inner conflicts, conflicts with other persons or something else. In order to tell them to make you lucid in other dreams you first have to become lucid in that very moment, which is a huge barrier to that great technique as you must be able to master lucid dreaming quite good.

Wouldn’t it be possible to create such an entity in our subconsciousness, that operates in the background and tells us when we are lucid. I’m no psychologist or something, but aren’t there many subconscious programs idling in the background of our psyche in our daily lives, telling where to look, what not to hear and where to go, without us being aware of it in that moment? I thought we could maybe create our own little program and integrate into our mind using auto suggestions, (self) hypnosis or whatever technique is most efficient for this kind of operation. The program would be like “tell me i am dreaming, when this and that happens”. Wouldn’t this be some kind of dream character without a visual presence?

As a dreamer you might want to ask yourself, why you should actually make a difference between dream reality and waking reality. This has two advantages. Firstly, if you really “live” the presumption that dream reality and waking reality are equal, it becomes a lot easier to dive in the world of lucid dreaming. Secondly, it gives you a total new, more critical access to waking reality as you begin to realize that everything you experience is based on your own creation and how your brain deals with it. You will also notice, that you quite often enter dream like states, not only while actively day dreaming but even when you get from point A to point B or something like that.

In my opinion, both realities actually operate on the same layer. Things you do in waking life have direct influence on objects and persons in the real world, whereas things you do in dreams, in this case lucid dreams, might have influence on the real world later on. Still, on a neurobiological level dreams directly express themselves in reality under real physical laws, because they cause brain activity. What you do/feel/think has the same effect on those synaptic activity as it would in the real world. For instance, in very stable lucid dreams, you could train your soccer skills far away from anything that could interrupt you in real life and you might experience progress in real soccer as well. Many people also use it as an intelligent, productive way to work on psychological problems by dealing with symbols in their dreams that represent inner conflicts.

These examples show how you can direclty affect your real life by “hacking” your subconsciousness.  That’s why i see dreams as an important part of our everyday life. In an average lifetime, you would have spent a total of of about six years of it dreaming. So dealing with dreams in any possible way, not necessary lucid dreaming, might improve our way of life in many different aspects and i think that, if done the right way, it could improve whole societies. Though, i don’t actually think it will be exercised on a bigger scale, as working on lucid dreaming takes too much time and effort for most people.

But there was a big problem with Epiphany and Firefox after the upgrade to Hardy. Both browsers crashed very unreliably when a flash application was loaded (youtube, …). It was a known bug that was related to Ubuntu’s switch to PulseAudio. Fortunately i found this helpful blog entry by Markus Thielmann which provides a deb package for Flash 10 beta. This has solved that problem for me.

After some days using FF3 (Release Candidate 3), i have to say that it is stable (has not yet crashed for me once) and all in all seems to run ”faster” than FF2, in respect to GUI stuff and browsing. The new Awesomebar is indeed awesome, and because of Newsfox, i have now abandoned my old news aggregator. Here you can find out more about the new features of FF3.

I like how Wagenhofer deals with this highly explosive topic in a very objective way. All persons involved seem to speak freely and can state whatever they wish without the film being cut in wrong moments. Furthermore, he doesn’t use any dramatizing pictures or video snippets, like it is often done in other documentaries. Due to the fact that he uncovers diverse parts of the food industry, the film delivers quite diversified opinions.

After some time watching this documentary, the viewer will probably develop a very discerning view on what he consumes in every day life and question if the consequences are worth it. In my opinion the main statement of this movie is quite simple and already well known, but still it seems like we can’t totally face it: Social and envoirenmental problems will become worse on a global scale when today’s “developed” societies will continue to demand for such huge quantities of food for low prices, which comes along with an enormous reduction of taste quality. Globalization made it possible for humans on many parts of the world to consume almost every possible piece of food at any given time, whereas a much bigger part of humanity is still starving and irreversible damage is done to nature. The consumers themselves have to take action, as corporations only follow the rules of the globalized “free” market economy and, unlike the individuals of a corporation, will not align their actions with things like morals as long as they don’t benefit from it financially.

Unfortunately the WFW DVD is currently unavailable on amazon.com, but I’m sure you know other ways to get it.

The Dillinger Escape Plan – Mouth of Ghosts

In respect of the danger of international terrorism, the german Cabinet has decided a reformation of the “Law of the Criminal Police Office”, which includes:

• dragnet investigation
• use of undercover agents
• video surveillance (the BKA would accept surveillance of innocents if they have contacts to suspects)
• online search (the BKA installs a certain software to spy on the suspect’s data; plans to install the software by entering the suspect’s habitation have been discareded)

(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/BKA-Gesetz)

This is just a very imprecise outline of the bill which is still going to be passed to the Bundestag. There it will hopefully probably undergo some changes as some of the parliamentary parties have spoke out against certain parts of the bill.

The circumstances under which the “online research” will be coming into effect are also formulated quite spongily and i am probably not able to translate those bills adequately. Other sources in my blogroll do a much better job in reporting on this kind of news (though most of it is in German).

Still, my intention of this post was to point attraction at this very important issue. If we’re not attentive enough to recognize and interpret massive changes in certain laws that might affect us, or influential parts of society surrounding us (journalism, authors, scientists etc.), we might get into really big trouble when it comes to the expression of free thoughts and opinions when those laws get abused by despotic authorities in the present or future. Things like data retention get pushed into twilight by wiretapping scandals of huge communication companies throughout Europe and should become questioned by any citizen. Nowadays there are many different ways to speak out against stuff like that: one prominent source concerning data retention in Germany would be vorratsdatenspeicherung.de[en/de], but there are probably many others in your language.