JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

We live lives so completely dominated by commercialism and monetary exchange that we think of everything, even ourselves, in the terms of the marketplace. Not content with turning time into a commodity (to be earned, spent, wasted, saved), we now endeavor to turn ourselves into commodities, brands, our own tiny little multinational corporations - Me, [...]

While I was living in Europe I found myself involved in quite a few pub discussions about Precarity and its adjunct flexploitation. One thing that popped up in all of those conversations was the question of why there is no discussion of precarity in the United States.
I said then, and still believe that there is [...]

As Wendy McElroy, Fox News’ resident Libertarian pundit aptly summarized in a column for the Independent Institute, American political Libertarianism is based on Murray Rothbard’s synthesis of four schools of thought, the radical anti-statism of the individualist anarchists and wed it with Austrian economics, the foreign policy of the Old Right (isolationism) and the [...]

A couple of years ago, I wrote about how I wasn’t buying the idea of “good debt”with respect to home mortgages. Now, with foreclosure rates skyrocketing and the housing sector in the early stages of a pretty serious crisis, I am once again reminded of that idea.
Yves Smith, who writes the Naked Capitalism blog, makes [...]

It boggles my mind that there are so many businesses that have yet to comprehend the basic reality of the internet (Movie studios and music labels, I’m looking at you)
These businesses are in the distribution business, which is to say, they are in the scarcity business. For their products, scarcity is directly related to price. [...]

Okay, so now that the field has narrowed everywhere, I suppose I can mention what candidate I plan on supporting for President in November (assuming they get the nomination).
Starting with a complete list of candidates (Clinton, Edwards, Giuliani, Gravel, Huckabee, McCain, Obama, Paul, Romney) I began to look at issue positions, and narrowing the list [...]

Unless the national leadership of the National Organization for Women comes out and takes a stand against the rampant stupidity of the NY chapter, even the remaining few friends they have in the world will write them off as completely loons (no offense to any aquatic birds reading this).
It seems that the NY chapter of [...]

Does anyone actually care about what city is the most literate in the US, a country in which the vast majority of books sold or borrowed from libraries exist only to keep fat people on couches from feeling a vague shame when watching other fat people on daytime television?
Of course, when you measure literacy by [...]

Dear America,
I miss you. You are the land of my birth, the place I spent my formative years, and I have many fond memories of you. Even though I now live across an ocean, in a very different sort of place, I long for you, America. I long for what I have left behind.
For me, [...]

Today’s lesson is more of a question than a lesson, because I just can’t get it off my mind. Being back in the South, I am surrounded by

Obese people
Professed Christians

The thing that bothers me is how often these two groups intersect. It should be painfully obvious to anyone with even a passing understanding of the [...]

With regards to electoral politics, there are people who believe that politicians are differently motivated or differently principled based on the party affiliation, and there are people who believe all politicians (but not necessarily all possible future politicians) to be essentially the same; money-grubbing, power-hungry influence peddlers who are only interested in personal acquisition and [...]

As most of you are aware, I am back in Georgia, where I was born and raised, and the big news, as it always is in an agricultural state (yes, GA is an agricultural state, ask anyone but the recent transplants to ATL) is the weather, particularly the rain, of which there hasn’t been enough [...]

The German-based Energy Watch Group has released a study that claims world oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 2030. They go on to say that Peak Oil is not a problem for the near future, it is something that has already happened; last year. More at The Guardian…

Today I learned that what I yearn for, what I am learning the skills to do, while it may go under many names (voluntary simplicity, back-to-the-land, homesteading, etc.) is really better thought of as voluntary peasantry.
Peasantry, from the 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays (countryside), is a pre-industrial agricultural way of life [...]

As industrial action cripples transportation for a second day across France, it is interesting to note that une seule pluralité n’est pas un mandat. As Tom Peters pointed out back in May, Nicolas Sarkozy’s supposedly decisive electoral win came almost entirely from votes in the sixty and up demographic.
In the 18-59 demographic (otherwise known as [...]

Rollercoasters are only fun if you know you can get off…

Things are not so good in Hot-lanta these days: It seems that they could run out of drinking water within a month and foreclosures are at an all-time high.

The majority of what I write here is impersonal, in that it has as its subject life and society at a larger scale than merely me, though I do hope something of a unique voice shows through my muddled postings. However, having been recently inspired by Shimelle’s Learn Something Every Day idea, I have decided [...]

So, what exactly is the difference between a bipartisan consensus and a one-party system?

For some time now philosophers has been dealing with the intersection of neuroscience and ethics. Even the more far-out economists of the world seem eager to jump on the band-wagon and declare the end of Ethics, as that would clear the way for their particular view of the world to become unchallengeable.
It seems now that [...]