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Morning news dump and music by Paul Butterfield's Better Days

4 minutes of video: metaphor of human metamorphosis: becoming something unimaginably beautiful

The 1-minute video provides a metaphor for the human condition by evolution biologist, Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris: a caterpillar becomes so consumptive that an observer unfamiliar with the species might conclude its behavior is self-destructive. Nearing death, the caterpillar ends-up literally upside-down (as our world appears today). Inside the caterpillar, “imaginal cells” emerge with resonance of a foreign frequency for a new future. These new cells are attacked by the existing immune system. However, the emergence of imaginal cells outpaces the immune system’s capacity, with the evolutionary process supporting the emerging cells and causing old cells to die off.

A caterpillar can eat up to three hundred times its own weight in a day, devastating many plants in the process, continuing to eat until it’s so bloated that it hangs itself up and goes to sleep, its skin hardening into a chrysalis. Then, within the chrysalis, within the body of the dormant caterpillar, a new and very different kind of creature, the butterfly, starts to form. This confused biologists for a long time. How could a different genome plan exist within the caterpillar to form a different creature? They knew that metamorphosis occurs in a number of insect species, but it was not known until quite recently that nature did a lot of mixing and matching of very different genome/protein configurations in early evolutionary times. Cells with the butterfly genome were held as disclike aggregates of stem cells that biologists call ‘imaginal cells’, hidden away inside  the caterpillar’ all its life, remaining undeveloped until the crisis of overeating, fatigue and breakdown allows them to develop, gradually replacing the caterpillar with a butterfly!

Such metamorphosis makes a good metaphor for the great changes globalisation, in the sense of world transformation, is bringing about., as Norie Huddle first used it in her beautiful book Butterfly. Our bloated old system is rapidly becoming defunct while the vision of a new and very different society, long  held by many ‘imaginal cell’  humans who dreamt of a better world, is now  emerging like a butterfly, representing our solutions to the crises of predation, overconsumption and breakdown in a new way of living lightly on Earth, and of seeing  our human society not in the metaphors and models of mechanism as well-oiled social machinery, but in those of evolving, self-organizing and intelligent living organism.

If you want a butterfly world, don’t step on the caterpillar, but join forces with other imaginal cells to build a better future for all! – Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris, evolution biologist

Developmental biologist, Dr. Bruce Lipton on this metaphor in a 3-minute video:

Human Survival in the Sixth Extinction

New study finds human population growth behind extinction acceleration. Study co-author Professor Gerardo Ceballos explains our future.

‘We don’t need EU permission’: Greek parliament ratifies bailout referendum

As an equal member of the EU, Greece does not need to ask permissions from anyone to let the Greek people speak and have their voices heard, PM Tsipras told his parliament, promising that the state’s sovereignty and future will be decided via referendum.

Referendums have been used all across Europe as a way for people to directly express their will and have their voices heard, and Greece is fully in its right to conduct one PM Alexis Tsipras said during a late-night debate in parliament.

With Tsipras’ ruling coalition holding 163 seats in the 300-seat parliament, the body has backed Tsipras’ motion to hold a referendum.

The conditions for a new bailout deal and reforms proposed by Greece's creditors were an ultimatum and an insult, Tsipras said. During the rowdy debate in the Greek Parliament, the main opposition party, New Democracy, briefly walked out over a dispute with the parliamentary speaker, but later returned.

Why the threat of ISIL is exaggerated
The group's ability to sustain its 'nation state' remains very much in doubt, political and military analysts say.

One year since the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) took over Mosul and large swaths of territory in both Syria and Iraq, and despite the nine month-old US-led Operation Inherent Resolve to defeat it, ISIL is still standing, and expanding. The group's recent territorial gains in Syria and Iraq are alarming.

Political and military analysts interviewed by Al Jazeera, provide a more sober assessment of ISIL's capacity in both Syria and Iraq behind the sensationalism of the group's propaganda machine and Western punditry's fears of a wholesale ISIL takeover of Iraq and Syria.

ISIL's recent advances in Palmyra have fuelled the recent predictions in Western circles that the collapse of the Syrian regime is near.

A more realistic assessment, however, is that the conflict is mired in a military stalemate in which no armed group has a definitive advantage over others. The Syrian regime has indeed withered but is not facing a coherent or cohesive military force capable of defeating it militarily, let alone one that can force a negotiated political solution.