PP showed us this amazing video tonight, about what economics is about and what it should be about:
It is very interesting and great, watch it!
It questions our current society's focus on money, natural resources, lack of sharing and giving... I want that Gift Economy that he is talking about. Maybe, just like Paying it forward, we should be Giving it forward more in our lives.
In May this year I had to travel to Washington DC for a conference and took a few hours to see the sights:
The Washington Monument. Impressive.
The White House. I wonder how many spy cameras that are in the flower beds.
I wonder if the President ever sends out Secret Service to get him a Polish dog? This cart was right next to the White House.
This anti-war tent vigil has been going on for three decades, every day, every hour, every minute. It is right in front of the White House, and is more of a statement than a disturbance. I wish we lived in a world with more peace.
Outside the US Department of Agriculture they had planted parsley in the flower beds, and it was flowering nicely and greenly. So appropriate and unusual.
Inside the USDA was a small museum about food history, which included this great quote:
"...the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil." Abraham LincolnThey also had a lot of old posters from World War I and II.
When I grew up I remember seeing the movie Shangri-La on TV one Sunday afternoon, and I loved it. A hidden valley, far away in the Himalayas, a paradise away from everything else, isolated and self-sufficient. Last night PP showed me an old movie by Lewis Mumford called 'The City", which shows another kind of utopia - a village where workers live in nice houses without industrialization's horrors and pollution. It is worth watching, and you can find it here, in the Prelinger Archives of ephemeral films.
What struck me after seeing this movie is that there aren't any utopias anymore. We can't realistically dream about paradise islands where you can live away from the rest of the world. Everything is connected, affected, even if you want to be isolated. Every hidden valley, little town, or tropical island is affected by the global climate change, atmospheric pollution, radiation, and trash and toxins thrown into the sea, groundwater, or rivers. Over you satellites are watching you or give you connectivity to anywhere else in the world. All economies are linked, and what happens at Wall Street or in Asia's stock markets affect a country and village across the world.
So, the idea of Utopia has changed. Now we wish for small Utopian things, like affordable health care for all, toys without lead, and cleaner streets, while in the past you could dare to think big and dream away... I think this creates a kind of hopelessness and apathy in the new generations - it is much harder to change anything, the problems are big, global, and enormous. Even if you plan a small better village locally, you run into global and national problems and forces, since so much is controlled at a higher level, not locally anymore. Here in New Jersey, there used to be several local villages (like Roosevelt) built and based on Utopian ideas of fairness, sharing, and ethics. Now they are all just regular places like any other (with a few exceptions, like Free Acres).
Who even wishes for World Peace anymore? I do, but who really works for it? No big masses of people... I think the whole world view has changed since the hopeful 1960s, and gone downhill since then. The only way to change global things is for all of us to work together in all countries, and that seems pretty much impossible, sometimes even within just one country (US for example). Sad and depressing, unfortunately. Now the only real Utopias are new planets somewhere out there in the universe.
Maybe Utopia is just an impossibility, because humans are too selfish and competitive, and that all goes back to evolution and competition over scarce resources for survival? Still, I like the thought of better places for all...
Links for more information (to avoid the breaking up of your reading* I put these at the end)
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Where does the stuff go?
Utopia
Prelinger Archives: Lewis Mumford: "The City"
Shangri-La
Free Acres, New Jersey : Roosevelt, NJ
* Researchers have showed that reading online text with a lot of links in it breaks up the thought process and you get distracted and don't learn and think so much. At each hyperlink in the text your brain thinks "should I click on this or not", and you loose your thought and memories of what you just read. So even if you don't click on the link, you are affected, without knowing it. So, links at the end on this post. (Link to more about this here and here.)
And the next Peace Nobel Prize winner is: OBAMA. YES!!!! First Al Gore for his environmental work, and now Obama, oh, happy days! Here is some eye candy of our president.
He got it for his efforts: "to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" less than nine months after he took office. The Nobel committee believe in him too! Thank you Norway!
Overheard yesterday:
"Whoever would have become president in the fall would have made history, either it would have been a woman, a black man, or...... an old man."
Kids, you live in historical times! This is 40 years after Martin Luther King Jr, and so much has changed, and so much is the same. I spent yesterday in Newark, the largest city in New Jersey, and I took some photos of urban despair and hope that I will post later. This is as far as I can get from my Swedish nature-romantic upbringing I think. People in Newark don't have the luxury of caring about mushroom picking in the forests or what do to on their vacations, instead they worry about getting a job, keeping lead out of their babies bodies, and not being killed and involved in gangs.
In 1968 there were racial riots here which led to the National Guard being called in and over 20 people dead. There is a great exhibit at the New Jersey Historical Society about this, and it is well worth seeing. The name of the exhibit is "What's going on?", just like the Marvin Gaye song/album, which came out a few years later and was an instant hit. Marvin Gaye wrote the song earlier but didn't release it until 1971 because he knew the lyrics about poverty, race and war would be controversial.
Here is how the song starts:
Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today
It is still the same in the world. We need peace, love, jobs, sustainability, and understanding now more than ever. On the other hand, I am more hopeful than ever for real change.
May our next eight years be better than the eight we have had here in the USA:
(From Masters of War:)
How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do
And this, from If not for you, a song I love:
If not for you,
Babe, I couldn't find the door,
Couldn't even see the floor,
I'd be sad and blue,
If not for you.
There is a really interesting opinion article in the latest issue of Newsweek by Fareed Zakaria titled "The Post-American World". I haven't read all of it yet, but I wanted to share some with you. It is about the changing world and how USA are no longer the superpower it used to be. He addresses the increased importance not only of China's economy but many other developing countries, the increased peacefulness of the world (even if we don't feel it), the anxiety of Americans, and how islamic militants are becoming less popular in muslim societies. USA is no longer the center of the universe, and I think this is a good thing. This connectivity among people and cultures that we can see developing creates instant and unexpected connections across borders and minds, and I think Obama's success is also part of this. The new web-based world works different than the old media and economies, and it will take time in some countries to adapt to it. Old stiff, self-important politicians from years past will especially be left behind (bye, Hillary Clinton). Here are some excerpts, and you can read the rest by following the link above.
"We are living through the third great power shift in modern history. The first was the rise of the Western world, around the 15th century. It produced the world as we know it now—science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the industrial and agricultural revolutions. It also led to the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the Western world. The second shift, which took place in the closing years of the 19th century, was the rise of the United States. Once it industrialized, it soon became the most powerful nation in the world, stronger than any likely combination of other nations. For the last 20 years, America's superpower status in every realm has been largely unchallenged—something that's never happened before in history, at least since the Roman Empire dominated the known world 2,000 years ago. During this Pax Americana, the global economy has accelerated dramatically. And that expansion is the driver behind the third great power shift of the modern age—the rise of the rest.
At the military and political level, we still live in a unipolar world. But along every other dimension—industrial, financial, social, cultural—the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. In terms of war and peace, economics and business, ideas and art, this will produce a landscape that is quite different from the one we have lived in until now—one defined and directed from many places and by many peoples."
"Why do we think we live in scary times? Part of the problem is that as violence has been ebbing, information has been exploding. The last 20 years have produced an information revolution that brings us news and, most crucially, images from around the world all the time. The immediacy of the images and the intensity of the 24-hour news cycle combine to produce constant hype. Every weather disturbance is the "storm of the decade." Every bomb that explodes is BREAKING NEWS."I got an e-mail from Al Gore today! It included his acceptance speech for the Nobel peace prize. You can read the whole speech here, but I wanted to highlight some of the excellent points. I think this year the Nobel committee showed real insight - no more politicians that fought wars and then ended it, but a real understanding that environmental needs is what life on Earth is all about. yesterday we watched this great eye-opener movie about consumerism and Earth's Resources, but I don't have the link here. But you should all watch it, it will make a difference in how you think about stuff! Right, AREA?
We have dealt with Alfred Nobel before on this blog, and Al Gore talks about him too:
"Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life’s work, unfairly labeling him “The Merchant of Death” because of his invention – dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace. [...]
However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: “They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.”
So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.
As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong.
We are what is wrong, and we must make it right."
Read more of the great truths in the speech on algore.com
Al Gore is getting the Nobel Peace Prize. Thank you Norway!!!
While you are enjoying these news, you can also enjoy these links:
