The Mozilla Story

Sound Design and Music Composition by Allan Levy

More info on this Thought Bubble.

When I first met Jonathon and Suzanna (founders of Thought Bubble), there were a handful of things we had in common; the books we’d read, documentaries we both liked and our love of Democracy Now! Soon the conversation turned to authors and activists we admired and I quickly told them how much I respect Naomi Klein. Seeing Naomi in The Corporation and reading No Logo opened up my eyes quite a bit as a teenager and led me onto the path where I am today. I was very pleased to find out Jon and Suz were fans too. After that, we often talked about creating a Thought Bubble for Naomi as soon as we could. Two months ago, the opportunity arose when a video was published of Naomi giving a speech where she spoke of how absurd it was that Canada’s Tar Sands oil had begun to brand itself as ‘ethical oil’.

You might have heard it before (and if you haven’t, it’s worth looking into), but Alberta’s Tar Sands are a true embarrassment for us Canadians: a human rights crisis for the Indigenous communities living in Alberta and British Columbia and an environmental disaster of epic proportions. Many pipelines transport this dirty oil all around North America, and our exports make us the United States’ biggest provider of oil. In the last few years, a new extension to a current pipeline has been proposed to carry Tar Sands oil all the way to Texas, putting some of North America’s most fragile ecosystems and waterways in serious peril. Recently, Bill McKibben and his team at 350.org helped spearhead a movement called Tar Sands Action and enlisted the help of people all over the US and Canada willing to express their dismay and anger about a possible new pipeline. As of November 6th, thousands of people have risked arrest, standing in front of the White House, as well as Canada’s Parliament in Ottawa, to protest.

When we heard this impassioned speech that Naomi Klein delivered at the Washington, DC Tar Sands Action Rally back in September, we knew it should be our next Thought Bubble. We hope this video will help spread this message and pay homage to all of the people fighting this cause. And for those who know little about it, we hope you will do as much research as you can and decide if the Tar Sands represent a healthy future for us and the Earth.

The truth is our time is running out. We should seize the moment and demand that we come off of dirty oil and push our politicians to hear our voices: No to the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Please take a look at Naomi Klein’s Thought Bubble and feel free to spread the video around, we’d sure appreciate it!

If you’re a regular fan of Thought Bubbles, you may have noticed our slightly desolate YouTube channel channel over the last couple of months. No, Thought Bubbles haven’t lost their importance in this world, nor have we become lazy in our quest to put mindful media out into the weberspace. We’ve taken on an incredibly exciting new project, that we’ve been dying to tell you about.

We’re currently in production on a feature documentary film called Sapience. The word is derived from our species’ title, ‘Homo Sapien’, which is latin for “wise man” (we’re going to go ahead and update that to “human”). In the film, the question we ask is, in the face of all the epic challenges and crises facing us today, are we truly acting wise? We’ve been compiling a cast of people who are wise; great thinkers, activists, authors of our time, and who can speak to this notion. People like John Perkins, Chris Hedges, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Clayton-Thomas Muller, Micah White, Dacher Keltner, Ernest Callebach, and more.

We have several months of production still ahead of us, but we have a lot in store in the weeks to come (including the release of our first trailer), and we hope that you can support us through this journey, and this most important ‘thought bubble’ of all (but don’t get it twisted, it’s not a thought bubble).

We’re continuing our regular Thought Bubble production, of course, so although we may be a bit slower than usual, we’ve still got some great ones coming your way. In the meantime, it’d be awesome if you could LIKE, TWEET, and spread some virtual love for Sapience as it progresses.

Here are ALL of our wise online outposts:
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Vimeo | YouTube | Flickr | Newsletter

At Thought Bubble we have a lot of respect for Chris Hedges’ books and columns. Recently, I read three of his books in one month and was truly inspired by his writing. Although every page reveals an ugly truth about our society and the world, the book’s conclusion always draws on the power of love. Here is a wonderful quote from The Empire of Illusion that stayed with me:

No tyranny in history has crushed the human capacity for love. And this love – unorganized, irrational, often propelling us to carry out acts of compassion that jeopardize our existence – is deeply subversive to those in power.

The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman wrote of the power of these acts in his masterpiece Life and Fate:

“I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never by conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”

I wholeheartedly recommend checking out Chris Hedges’ books and his weekly column at Truthdig which he updates every Monday.

As a university student, most of my friends and acquaintances identify themselves according to their program of study. Psychology students, engineering students, business students and political science students (just to name a few) are all very different people, with very different outlooks on life. As young adults, our minds are being shaped according to the lenses through which we are taught to see: schools of thought in social sciences (Freudian psychology, Liberalism, Positivism etc.), free market ideologies in business, and mathematical analyses in sciences. We rarely stop to questions these “lenses” and trade them in for a more realistic and current take on issues. These types of vocational studies have done much to form us, but are simultaneously discouraging us from looking outward for information, and are creating separations between young people based on their field of study.

Our tendencies to devote almost every part of our being to what we study (or what job we have) is increasingly making us feel more comfortable in our complacency. A journalism student, for example, is the only type of person likely to make a habit of watching the news daily, and to care about the state of our democracy is only a trait shared by politics students.

Vocational schooling methods have removed us from the idea that on top of formal education there is self-education; the opportunity to learn by our own initiative, to read the news (and several sources at that) and to take a critical look at the institutions and people who govern our surroundings.

Ethics and consideration for social issues and current events have a place in all disciplines. Adbusters has made one of their most important campaigns, Kick It Over, a call to action for economics students to question their professors (and entire discipline) about their teachings of neoclassical economics. Smart Bubble Society’s core values center around the idea that there are career options for graphic designers beyond working for big corporations and advertising agencies (Jon even wrote a blog post about it here!)

Young people have inherited institutions and systems full of flaws and inequalities, a fact that should only help fuel our desire to look beyond what we are told and dig furiously to come to our own conclusions. Now is the time to break down the barriers separating social science students from art students and science students, and acknowledge not our differences, but our similarities; to look beyond our schooling for a more critical take on the state of things.

Education is at the heart of all of the issues facing us. One of the most important skills that one should acquire through education is critical thinking. Without a doubt, if everyone were to look at what is thrown at us every day with a critical outlook (notably pop culture, advertising and junk thought), we might witness a considerable drop in our level of distraction and apathy, and a rise in our awareness of the world. As Neil Postman warned in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985, it’s not the Orwellian future we should fear as depicted in the book 1984, but rather the one described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where, for one thing, it’s not access to information that’s a problem in society, but the fact that we “drown in a sea of irrelevance.”

I had an outstanding education. Critical thinking was fundamental in classroom discussions, projects and papers, and an integral part of getting a good grade and proving our understanding of a topic. Nowadays, I don’t know how much of that goes on in a classroom. You hear about high schools installing wireless networks, allowing mobile phone access, internet and computer access, all throughout school hours. We tailor education to fit the model of our technological consumption. Computer games or online courses are constructed to provide lessons in the place of real-live teachers. Traditional lessons are shortened to mimic our kids’ shortening attention spans. Texting breaks are implemented to facilitate our addiction to our cell phones.

At a time when our education is undergoing alarming changes as it stands, it’s even more disheartening to see just how little respect and reverence it receives from politicians and administrators.

Take the recent reforms to public schools proposed by Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna in Idaho (one of three actually, and two of which just passed in Senate). An incredible witty, talented and (clearly) well-educated high school student, Jonny Saunders, takes on this bill with a vengeance in front of his classmates and teachers. In the video below, he brings to light one of the programs within the education overhaul plan, where all ninth graders will be given a laptop and required to take four online classes during their high school education. And in true political fashion, the most nefarious part of it all is the firing of 770 teachers in order to serve a corporate agenda so that Tom Luna can thank his corporate campaign donors.

Jonny Saunders shows us how powerful civic action can be, and how crucial it is to maintain and constantly improve our education system, not tear it apart to serve the needs of our society’s ailments and politicians’ needs. There’s a lot of work to do in the field of education, and it doesn’t start with the firing of teachers and favouring corporate interest. Enjoy the video below, where the superintendent in question gets schooled by a seventeen year old.

And as a side note, yes, she can sing (you know who I’m talking about, and if you don’t, good). Sure, she’s cute. But why isn’t Jonny Saunders receiving a staggering 14 million views of his video and appearances on daytime talk shows?

Although we regularly encounter what we commonly refer to as ‘depressing’ news, events that are only setbacks, and the like, one of this week’s headlines rendered us gloomier than usual. The Cancun Climate Change conference closed today, and as promised, Democracy Now! started their coverage from Mexico at the beginning of the week. Here’s what one of the stories read:

“At last year’s climate meeting in Copenhagen, the room was buzzing with thousands of reporters. However, today climate change seems to be a forgotten story.”

Amy Goodman stood alone, in a room fit for hundreds of reporters and journalists.

Why is it that this year’s climate conference is barely being mentioned in the press? Last year’s talks were more than disappointing, but were at least given a fair bit of media coverage, and generated quite a bit of hype. The issues surrounding this year’s COP16 are closely linked with what the public is referring to as ‘cablegate’.

In the wake of the release of the newest Wikileaks diplomatic cables (as well as the war logs), it’s become clear how misguided and misled the public is by mainstream media. The documents have proven what those in the loop suspected; that many countries, fierce opponents of the US-led Copenhagen Accord like the Maldives, were targeted and bought out by the usual juggernauts or, in the case of countries like Ecuador and Bolivia, were cut off from funding.

Cablegate renders the so-called ‘ClimateGate’ events of last year a complete joke (if they weren’t already), and unfortunately, the media coverage of both Cablegate and COP16 has taken a backseat. The actual content of the Wikileaks documents seem to have fallen by the wayside, compared to the coverage being given to the organization’s spokesperson Julian Assange.

Surveying major “news” network websites, the most important topics seem to be Sarah Palin’s Alaskan adventure and Kim Kardashian’s new book. This is a worrying fact: the reporting of mundane pop culture events is sickly minimizing true news that should be in the forefront.

As the world appears to care less and less about climate change, the environmental movement and its activists will have to band together and ramp things up considerably, in order to counteract the apathy of the distracted, and misinformed general public.

I remember holidays many years ago, when I’d think to myself that I must have been born into the wrong family. Christmas seemed to become less and less like it was on TV, and more like a tradition I couldn’t understand, and therefore tried my best to resist. Gone were the days of decorating a tree, and us kids receiving dozens of presents. But nowadays, I couldn’t be more thankful for the change.

When the holidays come up in conversation, my friends often tell me how sorry they feel for me, considering my family omits Christmas music, traditional decorations and a tree. But I’ve come to greatly appreciate how my family celebrates, and how we spend our off time together.

In my opinion, the true culprits of the holidays are not the cheesy music and the kitschy sweaters, but traditions like Black Friday. Much like the diamond industry has rooted itself in the process of engagement and marriage, the holiday season is now defined by the discounts we manage to snag, and the presents we buy one other.

I first discovered what Black Friday was through Adbusters’ annual Buy Nothing Day campaign (now expanded to a full week of challenging the holiday status quo via the ‘Carnivalesque Rebellion Week’). Their creator and editor, Kalle Lasn, had done an interview on CNN about Buy Nothing Day, and it was only then that I realized how harmful this season of unabashed consumerism really was. When Lasn brought up the consequences of our shopping on the rest of the world; and notably the environment, the “news” anchor replied “Oh come on! If someone wants to buy their kid an Elmo doll, what’s the harm in that?” Unfortunately, we have become so far removed from the “externalities” of our way of life, that many of us cannot even fathom the idea that a talking doll (whose parts were most likely mined and manufactured in war torn countries, then assembled under terrible conditions and shipped across the world) could have a considerable effect on both people, and our planet.

Criticism of these traditions is often dismissed as mere bouts of over-intellectualizing. But questioning the conventions that are ingrained in our lives is one of the many ways we can move toward creating newer, more conscious traditions. Perhaps then, we could truly come to value these holidays for the time they grant us with family and friends, not shopping malls.