Why "Getting Back to Normal" is Not an Option

Great article by Sara Robinson at Alternet, summarizing three important kinds of shift we may now face:

1. Per Joseph Stiglitz, we should stop waiting for the economy to "get back to normal"; it ain't gonna happen, because we face a once-in-a-lifetime shift in the basis for wealth creation, from a system based on manufacturing to one based on information. We have too many manufacturing workers and too few information workers. "Austerity and debt reduction will get us nowhere"; "[t]he current economic crisis is doomed to last exactly as long as we put off building [the workforce] necessary to the new information economy."


2. Per Thomas Homer-Dixon, empires rise and fall based on their control of the dominant energy supply, and the US also faces a shift from oil to renewables. He adduces evidence that no empire has ever survived such a shift, because "the reigning hegemons are always too deeply invested in the current system to recognize the change, let alone repond to it in time."
   
   
3. Per Gar Alperovitz, Jeffery Sachs, and Umair Haque, the real shift relates to the nature of our capitalist system. Haque identifies two kinds of good: those having "thin" value, typified by Big Macs, Hummers, and McMansions, tend to be artificial, unsustainable, and meaningless to anyone but the people who produce and consume them. Those having "thick" value tend to be sustainable and to have potential effects or uses that are moral or that multiply meaningfulness.
   
   Alperovitz points toward the growth in worker- or consumer-owned cooperative businesses and co-ops which, if continued, could result in a massive redistribution of labor and wealth. "America’s 30,000 cooperatives provide over 2 million jobs [, and t]he UN has declared 2012 to be the Year of the Co-Op, in recognition of the fact that nearly half the world’s population now belongs to cooperatives."

The sooner we let go of our assumption that going back to the way things were is desirable or even possible, the more we'll be able to help create the new world that's now arising.

Happy T.G.

Juan Enriquez on Homo Evolutis

I liked this talk. As I wrote in 2000, "We may already have commenced our greatest creation, the species that will succeed us and carry on." I wish we could hurry up and engineer better bankers and Congresscritters.

Something from Nothing.

That's the job description for gods and us as creators. Here, John Cage plays 4'33" by David Tudor.



"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it."

I agree with many of the comments on this video; also, for me, this piece evokes the ultimate inadequacy of all attempts at expression(/articulation) (although those attempts may be our salvation); the longing for space in which to hear one's self (as well as the need to narrow one's focus enough to hear the all-important background noise); the relief of a release from the burden of all of the foregoing, if only for a set time. All of that is too specific, but, I hope, suggestive.

The piece is very existential, I think; and I relate to it because I believe meaning is something we have to manufacture for ourselves, and we can do it out of almost anything, or nothing -- and that we must try to hold ourselves responsible for what we make.

Reminds me of a poem by Wallace Stevens (excerpt):

One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.

One beats and beats for that which one believes.

That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all

Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear

To a crow’s voice?

Worthwhile Obit

. . . here. (Thanks, snarky!)

Re- UFO's

I'm agnostic about pretty much everything. I operate on the basis of temporary conclusions; "truth" is whatever seems to have worked best so far in terms of predictive power – like, if you live based on certain assumptions, what's your subsequent quantity and quality of life? I have to say, a lot of us live by stuff that does not pass this test.

I don't know how seriously to take the recording at the link below, but it seems to me unlikely that we are the only life in the universe, or the most advanced. I find the possibility of UFO's more plausible than any number of articles of religious faith.

I don't mean to promote or disparage either – I'm dam' glad I've never been in a situation that required me to decide whether I actually believe in either an omnipotent deity or aliens.

I do happen to believe that whether one believes in a deity has little to do with how well one behaves. I think any sane person who's had the nurturing and education to think clearly about life (too few of us) will behave pretty much the same way (constructively), whether they believe in any o' that or not.

All that said, check out the Dr. Edgar Mitchell interview here.