Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

Health Insurance, Pure Economy of Desire by The Critical Art Ensemble

Debashish — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:30:00 -0700

The Critical Art Ensemble is a collective of five artists of various specializations dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics and critical theory.
Here we carry part of one of their Tactical Projects on "The Therapeutic State."

Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (C Theory)

Rich — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:19:00 -0700

We use "Empire" in the sense proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to designate a post-Cold War planetary capitalism with "no outside," [1] but we modulate their account to take greater consideration of the internal frictions wracking this order since the millennium. By Empire, we mean the global capitalist ascendancy of the early twenty-first century, a system administered and policed by a consortium of competitively collaborative states, among whom the US still clings, by virtue of its military might, to an increasingly fragile preeminence. This is a regime of biopower based on corporate exploitation of myriad types of labour, paid and unpaid, for the continuous enrichment of a planetary plutocracy. Empire is an order of extraordinary scope and depth. Yet it also is precarious, flush with power and wealth, yet close to chaos as it confronts a set of interlocking economic, ecological, energy, and epidemiological crises. Its governance is threatened by tensions between a declining US and a rising China which could either result in some super-capitalist accommodation, consolidating Empire, or split it into warring Eastern and Western blocs. Its massive inequalities catalyze resistances from below, some, reactionary and regressive, others, like the global justice and ecological movement, protagonists of a better alternative.

What makes virtual games' technocultural form exemplary of Empire is their identity with its key means of production, communication and destruction--the digital network. More than any previous media other than the book, virtual play is a direct offshoot of its society's crucial technology of power. Sprung from the military-industrial matrix that generated the computer and Internet, games are today a test ground for digital innovations and machinic subjectivities: online play worlds incubate artificial intelligences; consoles plug to grid computing systems; games are media of choice for experiments in neurobiological stimulation and brain driven telekinesis. And, once suspect as delinquent time waster, virtual play is increasingly understood by state and corporate managers as training populations for networked work, war and governability.

We examine the relation between games and Empire in terms of the virtual and the actual, conjugating this couplet with intentionally fuzzy logic in two distinct yet overlapping ways. The virtual is the digital, the on-screen world, as opposed to existence "IRL". But "virtual" also denotes potentiality; the manifold directions in which a given, actual, situation might develop. [2] The technological and ontological virtual are distinct and should never be conflated. [3] But they are related, through the practice of simulation. Computers create potential universes. They model, dynamically, what might be. Such simulation is vital to a power system engaged in the high-risk military, financial and corporate calculus required for globalized control. It is from such simulation that virtual games emerged, broke loose into ludic freedom--only to now be reintegrated into the assemblages of world capital, as a means of inducing the "flexible personality" [4] demanded by digital work, war and markets. Yet this ludic apprenticeship can generate capacities in excess of Empire's requirements. Just as the eighteenth-century novel was a textual apparatus generating the bourgeois character required by mercantile colonialism (but also capable of criticizing it), and twentieth-century cinema and television were integral to industrial consumerism (yet screened some of its darkest depictions), so, we suggest, virtual games are the exemplary media producing subjects for twenty-first century global hyper-capitalism but also, perhaps, of exodus from it.

Economic Recovery? No Thank You

koantum — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:44:00 -0700

By Carolyn Baker
Something more fundamental — yes, cellular — occurs in my anatomy when I hear that the last two years of economic agony was merely a blip on the radar screen of the capitalist business cycle — yet another momentary whack from Adam Smith's "invisible hand".
I cringe when I hear the words "back to normal" because of what that means to me. "Normal" means hordes of Walmart shoppers stuffing cars and SUV's full of plastics from China and driving off to their suburban homes to devour or display them until the current fix wears off and their shallow, meaningless lifestyles demand yet another "mall injection". Normal means homeowners wearing several tons of house on their backs as they travel by car to jobs they despise to maintain mortgage, taxes, insurance, and upkeep. Normal means total oblivion to the polar bear whose heart exploded during the last half-mile of his frantic swim in search of any tiny chunk of ice on which he could rest in order to regain his strength and continue his quest for food. Normal means infinite patches of sickened brown trees devastated by the mountain pine beetle in an otherwise green Colorado forest. Normal means NASCAR and another nuclear power plant coming online and oceanic dead zones the size of countries. Did you hear? We're going back to normal — to parents working 80 hours a week while their kids become junkies, bulimic, or pregnant. Normal means slamming down more McDonalds Happy Meals chased with Red Bull and Prozac. Normal means that I have nothing to do with nature, and it has nothing to do with me, and furthermore, if I have anything to do with it, I'll do with it whatever the hell I like. Normal means that my reason for being is to consume, stuff my face, watch reality TV, obsess over celebrity gossip, chatter around the water cooler about pirates and tea parties, and grab a couple of hours of Ambien-induced sleep at the end of the day if I'm lucky.

Dialectical Nature: Reflections in Honor of the Twentieth Anniversary of Levins and Lewontin’s The Dialectical Biologist by Brett Clark and Richard York (Monthly Review)

Rich — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 22:56:00 -0700

Reference: 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution

Growing out of the work of these early critical intellectuals, a more developed, non-teleological science grounded in materialist dialectics came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s with the work of Marxist-influenced scientists—particularly Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins, and Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard, then the leading center of evolutionary biology. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Levins and Lewontin’s book, The Dialectical Biologist, one of the foremost examples of a genuinely dialectical materialist approach to history and science. Levins and Lewontin discuss a wide range of subjects including evolution, scientific analysis, science as a social product, and the products of science. Their discussions of these issues present a challenge to received thought with its naturalistic explanation of social conditions. Levins and Lewontin describe how mainstream science typically assumes evolution to be a progressive process leading to a state of equilibrium. Within this dominant view, an ideology of biological determinism is used to justify inequalities, arguing that differences in abilities among humans are innate and that these innate differences are biologically inherited. Additionally, Lewontin notes, it is too often assumed that it is human nature to confer more rewards and status to those with “better” abilities and the “right kinds of genes” (Biology as Ideology, 10–23). Such mechanistic, reductionist science is perfectly suited to the ruling-class ideology. At the genetic level life is reduced to independent, individual actors (so-called “selfish genes”), which carry out a Hobbesian struggle of all against all, thereby inscribing most natural and social characteristics within DNA. Likewise at the species level, constraints are seen as being placed on species that must either adapt to their environments or perish. A rigid natural order is presumed to exist in this doubly ahistorical universe that narrowly delimits the roles played by living things, including human beings, in their own evolution, and in the evolution of their natural environments.

In The Dialectical Biologist, Levins and Lewontin reject one-sided notions of mechanical reductionism and superorganic holism (common in ecology) and the hierarchical conceptions of life and the universe that they both generate. In presenting their approach, they critique both idealism and reductionism within the natural sciences. Instead Levins and Lewontin argue for a dialectical and materialist approach that understands that the world “is constantly in motion. Constants become variables, causes become effects, and systems develop, destroying the conditions that gave rise to them” (279). The universe is one of change due to existing and evolving contradictions, which force transformation in the conditions of the world. “Things change because of the actions of opposing forces on them, and things are the way they are because of the temporary balance of opposing forces” (280).

A dialectical relationship exists between a subject, such as an organism, or even human society, and the environment. They exist as one (in tension), given that an organism is part of nature. The former is dependent upon the latter for its existence, and both realms are transformed throughout their relationship, but “do not completely determine each other” (136). Darwin downplayed (but did not deny) the importance of the constraints placed on evolutionary change due to the structured nature of the ontogeny (individual development) of organisms, which potentially restricts the types of changes organisms can undergo in their phylogeny (evolutionary history). He elevated the conditions of existence—external environmental forces—to primacy in explaining evolution, so as to establish natural selection, not the final ends of natural theology, as the dominant force behind the transformation of species. Yet in so doing, he established a view of natural history as predominantly one-sided—i.e., the environment was seen as largely determining the evolutionary process, and not as equally the consequence of the evolution of life. Darwin recognized that variation is an internal process, in which causes external to organisms did not determine how things turned out. However, he generally assumed that any pattern to variation was of subsidiary importance for evolution. In order to grapple fully with the evolution of life and the transformations of the world, Levins and Lewontin stress, it is necessary to consider the complex interactions of both the internal and external dimensions of life. >

Is Capitalism a Disease? The Crisis in U.S. Public Health by Richard Levins

Rich — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 14:04:00 -0700

Reference: 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution

The scientific tradition of the "West," of Europe and North America, has had its greatest success when it has dealt with what we have come to think of as the central questions of scientific inquiry: "What is this made of?" and "How does this work?" Over the centuries, we have developed more and more sophisticated ways of answering these questions. We can cut things open, slice them thin, stain them, and answer what they are made of. We have made great achievements in these relatively simple areas, but have had dramatic failures in attempts to deal with more complex systems. We see this especially when we ask questions about health. When we look at the changing patterns of health over the last century or so, we have both cause for celebration and for dismay. Human life expectancy has increased by perhaps thirty years since the beginning of the twentieth century and the incidence of some of the classical deadly diseases has declined and almost disappeared. Smallpox presumably has been eradicated; leprosy is very rare; and polio has nearly vanished from most regions of the world. Scientific technologies have advanced to the point where we can give very sophisticated diagnoses, distinguishing between kinds of germs that are very similar to each other.

But the growing gap between rich and poor make many technical advances irrelevant to most of the world's people. Public health authorities were caught by surprise by the emergence of new diseases and the reappearance of diseases believed to be eradicated. In the 1970s, it was common to hear that infectious disease as an area of research was dying. In principle, infection had been licked; the health problems of the future would be degenerative diseases, problems of aging and chronic diseases. We now know this was a monumental error. The public health establishment was caught short by the return of malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, dengue, and other classical diseases. But it was also surprised by the appearance of apparently new infectious diseases: the most threatening of which is AIDS, but also Legionnaire's disease, Ebola virus, toxic shock syndrome, multiple drug resistant tuberculosi, arid many others. Not only was infectious disease not on the way out, but old diseases have come back with increased virulence and totally new ones have emerged.

How did this happen; why was public health caught by surprise? Why did the health professions assume that infectious disease would disappear and whey were they so wrong? In fact, infectious disease had been declining dramatically in Europe and North America for the last 150 years...

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - I

Debashish — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:03:00 -0700

Some relections on the continuing issue of techno-capitalism and post-human futures by Debashish Banerji. This is a first fragment highlighting Moishe Postone's commentaries on the late writings of Marx.

Why Save Capitalism?

koantum — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:08:00 -0800

...Now I'm not stupid enough to forget that capitalism is also a system that has allowed a substantial though relatively small group of human beings to amass titanic wealth and, so to speak, to capitalize on that wealth by exercising transformative power over the whole planet and everyone on it. If they were all wise and benevolent, that might be a satisfactory arrangement; they aren't, and it isn't. So any discussion of how human history (let alone human well-being) might continue after the demise of capitalism must get a good fix on the roots of greed and why it has persisted despite the abundant evidence of its perversity.

...To those who doubt that humans en masse are capable of such spontaneous and sustained harmlessness, I reply that the shift has already begun. The great tide may have ebbed that bathed the 60s/70s in the glow that boomers still recall, but the energy behind it is perennial and flows readily without an assist from Birkenstocks or granola.

The Mother's challenge to the financial world - 50 years ago

koantum — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 05:39:00 -0800

Money is meant to circulate. What should remain constant is the progressive movement of an increase in the earth’s production – an ever-expanding progressive movement to increase the earth’s production and improve existence on earth. It is the material improvement of terrestrial life and the growth of the earth’s production that must go on expanding, enlarging, and not this silly paper or this inert metal that is amassed and lifeless.....

Economic Barbarism: Naomi Klein runs the voodoo down on the financial bail out (Democracy Now!)

Rich — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 10:16:00 -0800

In other articles, I have argued that in her book: The Shock Doctrine (the rise of disaster capitalism) Naomi Klein has located the current economic ideology that Sri Aurobindo, more than ninety years ago in a work now known as "The Human Cycle", called economic barbarism. Interestingly, if one takes George Soros seriously (see comment) Sri Aurobindo was also prescient about the collapse of the Titan he speaks to in concluding the chapter Civilization and Barbarism

In these interviews Naomi runs the voodoo down on the rescue of the Titan and the possible criminal mismanagement of the largest economic bailout in history:

Click on "more" to see part 2 and 3...

Fredric Jameson's anti anti Utopianism: Archaeologies of the Future a review by P. Fitting

Rich — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 05:20:00 -0700

If anything Sri Aurobindo's vision is its own genre of Utopian vision. In a very real a sense it is the “completion of Utopian visions” (the divinization of Earth) Anyone in fact living in a community dedicated to Sri Aurobindo's vision lives in an Utopian community, which today might be called an intentional community. Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future, is in an omni-directional interrogation of history, class, structure, wish, will, imagination, transcendence, and post-humanity of Utopias

Jameson begins his study in full recognition of the spiritual Utopian urge. He quotes here from the evolutionary Science Fiction of Olaf Stapleton :

“It must not be supposed that this strange mental community blotted out the personalities of the individual explorers. Human speech has no accurate terms to describe our particular relationship . It would be as untrue to say that we had lost our individuality , or were dissolved in a communal individuality as to say that we were all the while distinct individuals . Through the pronoun “I” now applied to us all collectively, the pronoun “we” also applied to us."

I one respect namely unity of consciousness we were a single experiencing individual , yet at the same time in a very important and delightful manner distinct from one another. Through there was only a single communal “I” there was also, so to speak, a manifold and variegated “us” an observed company of very diverse personalities , each of whom expressed creatively his own utpian contribution to the whole enterprise of cosmical exploration, while all were bound together in a tissue of subtle personal relationships.”

Along with Lyotard, Jameson is one of the two beacons of post-modern cultural history. Although Jameson is perfectly cognizant of the failures of Utopian vision and the most recent anti-Utoipianism that runs through post-modernism, he probes the issue further to uncover what he calls an anti-anti Utopianism.

In this work rather than just applying post-structuralist scholarship as a solvent for exposing the ideologemes of Utopian fantasies, or simply deconstructing the “doxa” couched within the discursive formations of social, economic, and psychic, Utopian dimensions, his aim is also to reconstruct - and like Zizek whose wish it is to redeem the history of failed totalizing Utopian visions - he seems to wish to recover a vision of a new imaginative totality, while suggesting ways to remain mindful of the reification involved in collapsing the Utopian vision into any one of its dimensions

Utopian communities and Ashrams that aspire to something exceeding their humanity would do well to heed Jameson's warning below. If the intentional community one resides in fails to be mindful of how its multi-dimensional values and vision can collapse into class, cultural, ethnic, or personal battles its evolution will not end in the Superman, but rather as Nietzsche phrase it the contemptible Last Man.

" In addition we have been plagued by the perpetual reversion of difference and otherness into the same, and the discovery that our most energetic imaginative leaps into radical alternatives were little more than the projections of our own social moment and historical or subjective situation: the post-human thereby seeming more distant and impossible than ever"

The review of a portion of Jameson book is insightful even though its author Peter Fitting self-revealingly discloses he does not completely have his hands around it. (rc)

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - II

Debashish — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:04:00 -0700

This is a fragment constituting a continuation of Debashish Banerji's reflections on Techno-Capitalism as the epistemic regime of modernity and posible post-human futures at the eschatological cusp of history. Here the alignment of Marx and Hegel with the Enlightenment vision/teleology is contemplated and questions asked regarding a comparative alignment with the Neo-Vedantic teleology (if it can be called that) of Sri Aurobindo.

Manufacturing a Food Crisis (The Nation)

Rich — Thu, 22 May 2008 12:48:00 -0700

Nigerian child waits for food (AP photo)

This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls "de-peasantization"--the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives. Collapse of prices from trade liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana Shiva: "Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a 'consumer' of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally...."

As consumers step on the brakes, will the economy hit the wall?

Ron — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:00:00 -0700

After years of piling up debt and neglecting to save, Americans are reining in their free-spending ways -- which could signal a long road ahead... -- "We're at a watershed moment," said Jay P. Feldman, an economist with Credit Suisse in New York. "The era of consumers living beyond their incomes is at an end."

Most economists expect the gross domestic product for the first three months of the year to show that consumption inched upward a few tenths of a point, enough to keep the economy above the zero mark -- though barely. That pales next to the 2.5% and 3% leaps of recent years, and much of the rise will be the result of Americans' paying more, especially for food and gas, not buying more.

"This is going to usher in a period when consumption is going to be as weak as we've seen it in two decades," predicted Edward F. McKelvey, senior economist with Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York. ...

Recipes for Disaster (NYT Sunday Book Review)

Ron — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:00:00 -0700

...In light of the present [economic] crisis..., however, two eco-millenarian novels — an old one called “Ecotopia,” by Ernest Callenbach, and a new one, WORLD MADE BY HAND (Atlantic Monthly, $24), by James Howard Kunstler — are worth a look...

Literary utopias tend to emerge when an appropriate niche opens up. The niche that suited “Ecotopia” in the early 1970s and the one that now accommodates “World Made by Hand” have certain similarities. Shortages and unrest in the Middle East foreshadow the end of oil. A brewing recession gives rise to doubts about our economic fundamentals. An unpopular president wages an unpopular war. And across the country, a growing eco-consciousness raises hope that a different system might replace classic, marauding American economic progress. ...

Anatomy of an Economic Collapse (NYT Sunday Book Review)

Ron — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:19:00 -0700

...In his brief but brilliant book, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash,” [Charles R.] Morris describes how we got into the mess we are in, with bankers making loans that they expected to sell to investors through ever more complex securities...

One of the most important aspects of the financial architecture that is now collapsing was the way it allowed investors to believe they could make perfectly safe investments when they financed very risky loans. Or, as Morris puts it, “Highly rated bonds magically materialize out of a witches’ soup of very smoky stuff.” He adds, “Very big, very complex, very opaque structures built on extremely rickety foundations are a recipe for collapse.”

The collapse is now under way. In recent years Wall Street profits were built on leverage and on taking risks that were obscure both to regulators and even to the top managements of the banks themselves. Every three months now, we see banks disclosing huge losses from risks that they had never admitted they were taking.

No one — not investors, not managers, not regulators — is sure when this process will end. And that uncertainty has created a credit freeze, with lenders reluctant to lend both because they do not know whom they can trust and because they fear they may need the money to cover losses that are yet to materialize. As the recession gathers steam, there are likely to be more corporate failures than there need to be, because credit has gone from virtually free to all but unavailable. ...

When luxury [in India] is not a six-figure sum

Ron — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:00:00 -0700

...Everyone has their own view of what constitutes luxury. My definition—and this is hardly original—is this: Luxury is time, customization and discreet luxe. The reason I like my definition of luxury is because it appeals to the egalitarian in me. These three things—time, customization and discreet luxe—can be experienced at every price point. Customization, for instance, be it bespoke clothing or a customized pair of shoes, is easily had in India, what with our embarrassment of riches with respect to craftspeople, artisans, and traditional handicrafts. -- At Good Earth homes, an eco-community outside Bangalore, I came across a wonderful way to customize architecture. Instead of grids, their windows have whimsical metal sculptures of animals created by indigenous Bastar tribals. It supported local artisans, served its purpose of being a window grid and was laugh-out-loud playful. ...

Who's on Top in Tech-Readiness?

Ron — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:42:00 -0700

...the Global Information Technology Report... assesses 127 economies on scores of factors ranging from the cost of mobile phone calls and available Internet bandwidth to the quality of higher education. Not just a catalog of technical specifications, the report weighs these measures to determine which economies are best positioned to compete in the information-intensive 21st century economy.

The conclusion, as in previous studies, finds Nordic countries grabbing five of the top 10 slots, with Denmark and Sweden placing No.1 and No.2 for the second year running. Credit widespread Internet usage, supportive government policies, and good education. The U.S. came in at No.4, up three positions from last year. Although the U.S. gets top marks in innovation and education, it's pulled down by "red tape and rigidities" that stifle its business environment...

100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution: The dialectics of biology and culture; science, ecology & economics (part 6 of 6)

Rich — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:36:00 -0700

Perhaps it is best if the twain between science and religion do not meet. Trying to engage science and spirituality in a dialog has a long and troubled history. The incommensurable narratives of matter and spirit they both tell have proven time and time again troublesome for reaching any common understanding. In fact, if science and spirituality do share something in common it is that they all too often accuse the other of totalizing a universal narrative that usurps all ways of looking at the world that are inconsistent with their own.

Religion and science each have their own fundamentalist practitioners who would reduce the world solely to accounts told in their holy books or biology text books. One can not easily imagine an encounter between science and religion in which some violent reaction would not be triggered. Worse perhaps then the violent confrontation between science and religion is when either one appropriates the narratives of the other for the purpose of furthering their own ideological concerns. In the case of religion one example would be in their use of science to justify creationism, while in the case of science such appropriation usually results in one of the just-so stories of origins or cultural analogs of natural selection that Neo-Darwinism tells....

This holds true also for any dialog one would wish to begin between integral yoga and science. It would perhaps be best to begin such a dialog by first exploring Sri Aurobindo's dialectic between yoga and culture and then to look for resonances with narratives told by credible scientist regards the dialectics of science and culture. Better yet, in Sri Aurobindo's own work one finds him at times also critically exploring the dialectic between science and culture. It would therefore seem best to arrive at a dialogic platform to engage science and integral yoga using their diffusion in the semi-permeable membrane of culture, rather then by a direct confrontation as a means to begin the conversation.

100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution: Anticipating Science and Society (part 3 of 6)

Rich — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 21:56:00 -0700

One thing that can be said non-metaphorically about that the way Sri Aurobindo practiced yoga was that it was scientific. The perfection of his sadhana was a feat that required experimentation and one in which he sought demonstrable results. It should reasonably follow that his perspective on science would be one in which its truth claims were open to critical interrogation, just as were his experiments in yoga.

Given his penetrating intellectual insights into cultural change, his understanding of history as both progressive and cyclic, his multivocal criticisms of society, his integrative encounter with other voices and texts, his ability to effortlessly traverse the subjectivities of Europe and India and to transit freely between both ancient and modern zeitgeists, it seems reasonable to assume that he would size up science with a critical gaze....

Sri Aurobindo's project can be said to be a valiant attempt to find ways to integrate various levels of understanding and seemingly incommensurable experiences by respecting each ones particular articulation of truth while simultaneously harmonizing their unique claims to truth. But he also seems to have anticipated several recent scientific claims on the role punctuated equilibrium, symbiosis, complexity and emergence play in evolution as well as to have held perspectives that most social theorist share today. These social theories dismiss positivist arguments for reductive epistemology and highlight how biology can be used as an ideological tool. Additionally, early on at a time it was still popular, Sri Aurobindo discounted the more extreme implications of Spencer's Social Darwinism “survival of the fittest” strategy and clearly was repelled by the social engineering program of eugenics.....

$516 Trillion Deriviatives Bubble a Disaster Waiting to Happen

Ron — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:35:00 -0700

...a massive new derivatives bubble is driving the domestic and global economies, a bubble that continues growing today parallel with the subprime-credit meltdown triggering a bear-recession...

To grasp how significant this five-fold bubble increase is, let's put that $516 trillion in the context of some other domestic and international monetary data:
• U.S. annual gross domestic product is about $15 trillion
• U.S. money supply is also about $15 trillion
• Current proposed U.S. federal budget is $3 trillion
• U.S. government's maximum legal debt is $9 trillion
• U.S. mutual fund companies manage about $12 trillion
• World's GDPs for all nations is approximately $50 trillion

U.S. Economy: New-Home Sales Drop to 12-Year Low

Ron — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:00:00 -0800

Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Purchases of new homes in the U.S. unexpectedly fell to a 12-year low in December, ending the worst sales year since records began in 1963 and signaling little prospect for a recovery...

The median price of an existing single-family home dropped 1.8 percent in 2007, the first decline since records began four decades ago and probably the first since the Great Depression in the 1930's, the Realtors group said. ...

Catastrophe insurance industry losses reach $75 billion in 2007

Ron — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:00:00 -0800

The insurance industry faced $75 billion of losses from natural catastrophes during 2007, up 50% from last year despite a lack of "megacatastrophes," German reinsurer Munich Re said Thursday.

The losses rose from $50 billion in 2006, though this was still well short of the $220 billion reached in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Still, the number of natural catastrophes tallied 950 this year, up from 850 in 2006 and the highest figure since 1974, when Munich Re began tabulating such events. ...

The Malthusian energy-trap: old Europe, new China

Ron — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:25:00 -0800

Thanks to Rich for recommending the excellent openDemocracy.net, in which this article appeared. ~ ronjon

The price of oil is approaching $100 a barrel, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is accumulating faster than the most pessimistic scenarios are predicting, anthropogenic climate change is occurring. The recognition that the world's scientists, diplomats and media gathered at the Bali climate-change summit are arguing over - the necessity of moving beyond dependency on a fossil-fuelled, carbon-emission-based global economy - is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

Where is leadership in the quest for a new model to come from? The results of a BBC opinion-poll inviting the views of 22,000 people in twenty-one countries, released in November 2007, included the striking discovery that the Chinese were the most willing to change their lifestyle and accept higher energy prices in order to save the environment. ...

Forecast of Major Financial Disruption

Ron — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:25:00 -0800

...The actual solvency of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is relatively indecipherable due to the fact that their treasury management processes (and the risks of their own investment strategies) are not uniformly disclosed with sufficient transparency. The FDIC was set up for isolated problems with a few bad banks but is NOT prepared to “insure” the system in an industry-wide crisis. The actual liquidity reserve of the “insurance” that Americans view as their safety net is 1/100th the actual exposure of outstanding deposits. The actual coverage ratio for the Bank Insurance Fund (BIF) fell below 1.25% in 2002, the same year that less stable credit practices were adopted by America’s leading banks.

The funny part is that the Federal Government will be on holiday when all of this happens. There will be no one to put freeze actions and moratoria on actions. The only way you stop the cataclysm is to put together civil actions on deposit withdrawals.

As I discussed previously, the Chinese currency wild-card may become relevant far sooner than expected. An effort by China to convert its $1.4 trillion U.S. Treasury holdings into euros is not viable for many reasons – not the least of which is the European Central Bank’s inability to absorb such an event. As China continues its rush away from supporting U.S. Treasuries and as Middle Eastern investors are buying them up in more diversified holdings, a new “currency exchange” is unfolding. Realizing that they cannot liquidate their holdings, it appears that the Chinese are currently using their U.S. Treasury holdings as collateral for euro denominated purchases and long term infrastructure transactions. In other words, they may be “liquidating” their holdings as collateral and, in so doing, effectively migrating to non-dollar value without ever having to officially dump their current Treasury holdings. ...

China to become biggest carbon polluter this year

Ron — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 23:11:00 -0800

China will become the world’s biggest carbon polluter this year, overtaking the United States, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a bleak forecast of soaring global demand for fossil fuels. The rapid growth of the Chinese and Indian economies will raise global energy demand by 50 per cent by 2030, the agency said in its annual World Energy Outlook. India and China alone will account for almost half of the increase.

The agency pointed a finger at soaring coal demand, which threatens to upset carbon reduction targets, as it painted an alarming picture of a future of energy insecurity, soaring oil prices and a massive increase in carbon emissions. The dash towards prosperity in Asia will be fuelled by hydrocarbons - and mainly by increased burning of coal – with an inexorable rise in carbon emissions, hastening climate change.

Accelerating demand for oil, which will reach 116 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2030, up 32 per cent, will require huge investments to keep pace, the IEA said, and the sums are increasing. Inflation has taken its toll, and the agency reckons that $5.4 trillion (£2.6 trillion) must be spent to raise capacity, up a quarter from the estimate last year. It gives warning that plans to raise output from new projects may not compensate for the decline in existing fields.

“A supply-side crunch in the period to 2014, involving an abrupt escalation in oil prices, cannot be ruled out,” the IEA said in its report. ...

William McDonough: The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle

Ron — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:33:00 -0700

Here's another provocative TED video. McDonough shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world's largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan), and the sustainable cities he's designing in China. -- This blip is 20 minutes.

Stewart Brand TED Video: Why squatter cities are a good thing

Ron — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:48:00 -0700

I highly recommend watching this 3-minute video blip of Stewart Brand's TED talk. (See also SB's 1-hr. "City Planet" talk at Google.) ~ ronjon

Al Gore, UN Climate Panel Share 2007 Nobel Peace Prize

Ron — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:18:00 -0700

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to publicize and understand human-caused global warming. -- The Norwegian Nobel Committee this morning announced that the former U.S. vice president and the United Nations' climate panel will equally share the prestigious award for "their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

Gore and the IPCC were chosen from a list of 181 candidates to split the prize, worth 10 million Swedish kronors (about 1.5 million U.S. dollars). -- The award committee, based in Oslo, Norway, said their decision was intended to bring into sharper focus the actions "necessary to protect the world's future climate and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind.

"Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man's control," the committee added. ...

Nearly 80 percent of India lives on half dollar a day

Ron — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 11:29:00 -0700

Seventy-seven percent of Indians -- about 836 million people -- live on less than half a dollar a day in one of the world's hottest economies, a government report said.

The state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS) said most of those living on below 20 rupees (50 US cents) per day were from the informal labor sector with no job or social security, living in abject poverty.

"For most of them, conditions of work are utterly deplorable and livelihood options extremely few," said the report, entitled "Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganized Sector" ...

The biopolitical/dromological reversal, by Ian R. Douglas

Ron — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:11:00 -0700

I came across this interesting article when Googling the term "dromology" -- which Rich used in an earlier comment.

For Foucault, biopower was the essential missing link in genealogy of capitalist modernity. As he insisted in 'Discipline and Punish': " ... the two processes - the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital - cannot be separated." On the other side of the equation, Paul Virilio has stressed that his focus on speed in no way detracts from the importance of capital. As he insisted in 'Pure War': "Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed is the hidden side of wealth." And lest we forget, Marx also understood the political advantages of the collision of dromological/biopolitical technology: ...

Nowhere better do we find resonances of this "vulgar stimulation" than the ensemble of discourses that seem now in the ascendant (the discourses of globalism and globalization), fast overtaking the globe, and in the same movement creating anew a fast globe. These discourses, and their subsidiaries (informatisation, risk, competition, efficiency) - reflected and enacted in a whole panoply of specific practices - are all linked in the double movement sketched out above (the "will-to-speed" and "modern governmentality"). Taken together - I argue - we stumble across the unwritten history of globalization, and in that, the unwritten history of contemporary advanced capitalism.

The links are fairly simple. Dromology: the will-to-speed finds its final realisation in the destruction of the space (astronautical flight, space obliterated in proportion to the velocity of the vehicle). This destruction, as a social principle (Mumford's "desire to get somewhere"), has reduced the expanse of the world to naught, thrusting us into the global epoch. Governmentality: we need look only to the proliferating discourses of risk, competition, informatization, self-monitoring, self-organization, efficiency, effectiveness and excellence to get a taste of the ways in which the discourse of speed works to order the world into which individuals - indeed whole societies - are thrown. Each element feeds of the other: dromocratic power has encouraged the release of the will-to-speed through which we face what Virilio has termed the "negative horizon" (the implosion of space under the violence of speed). In parallel, disciplinary society has actively sought to produce this violence of speed (first in the military, then in the factory, then in the school, then in the prison) as a technical instrument in the ordering of populations ("populations at speed"). ...

TAI Alert! - Global Financial Meltdown?

Ron — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 07:56:00 -0700

TAI Alert! By John L. Petersen. -- It appears that we may be at the beginning of a major, historical disruption of the world’s financial system. Here’s what it looks like from here...

At the beginning of the sub-prime disintegration analysts discounted the potential impact of the trend, reminding all that would listen that sub-prime mortgages represented only some 4% of the total mortgages (or something like that). It was impossible that those failures would really be significant.

What they all missed was the systems nature of the problem. Narrowly focused on a few fund meltdowns they didn’t take into consideration the interconnections and dependencies of a number of tightly coupled variables that make up the system. I’m certainly not an economist or financial analyst, but I’d guess that it is fundamentally a non-linear system, subject to vagaries that are not deterministic and predictable . . . it therefore it is predictable that the system could (or would) exhibit significant shifts in behavior passing certain unanticipated tipping points.

There are quite a few dependent variables in this system. Personal credit card debt and the Basel II accords mandating international banking changes, as well as hedge funds, and China are important players. Here’s something about hedge funds from my friends at the Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance in London. ...

Towards an Ecological World-view, by Edward Goldsmith

Ron — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:12:00 -0700

For me, the most fundamental tenet of the world-view of modernism, with which we have all been imbued since our most tender childhood, is that all benefits are man-made, the product of scientific, technological and industrial progress, and made available via the market system. Thus health is seen as something that is dispensed in hospitals, or at least by the medical profession, with the aid of the latest technological devices and pharmaceutical preparations and education is seen as a commodity that can only be acquired in schools and universities. Not surprisingly, a country's wealth is measured by its per capita Gross National Product (GNP), which provides a rough measure of its ability to provide such man-made commodities, a principle faithfully reflected in modern economics.

For economists trained in these ideas, natural benefits - those provided by the normal workings of biospheric processes, assuring the stability of our climate, the fertility of our soil, the replenishment of our water supplies and the integrity and cohesion of our families and communities - are not regarded as benefits at all; indeed, our economists attribute to them no value of any kind. It follows that to be deprived of these non-benefits cannot constitute a 'cost' and the natural systems that provide them can thereby be destroyed with total impunity. ...

Apple tops Business Week's list of World's 50 Most Innovative Companies

Ron — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 09:54:00 -0700

Not so long ago, no conversation about innovation would be complete without the story of 3M inventor Art Fry’s eureka moment that led to the Post-it Note. Today, that tale, which verges on cliche, has been almost universally replaced by the story of the iPod, Apple’s omnipresent icon of design.

It should come as little surprise, then, that Apple tops the BusinessWeek-Boston Consulting Group’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for the third year in a row. That sort of staying power speaks volumes about the sort of innovation that matters today. Unlike the Post-it Note, which proves the value of lone inventors, the iPod epitomizes today’s innovation sensibilities. These include the ascendance of design, the focus on the user’s experience, and the power of ecosystems: The iPod is a hit because it works so seamlessly with the iTunes software. The company’s much-anticipated iPhone, which launches in June, will likely keep Apple high on our list next year too. ...

'The Great Turning' by David Korten

Ron — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 09:25:00 -0700

In The Great Turning, Korten argues that corporate consolidation of power is merely a contemporary manifestation of what he calls “Empire”: the organization of society by hierarchies of domination grounded in violent chauvinisms of race, gender, religion, nationality, language, and class. The result has been the same for 5,000 years, fortune for the few and misery for the many. Increasingly destructive of children, family, community, and nature, the way of Empire is leading to environmental and social collapse.

The Great Turning makes the case that we humans are a choicemaking species that at this defining moment faces both the opportunity and the imperative to choose our future as a conscious collective act. We can no longer deny the need nor delay our response. A mounting perfect economic storm is fast approaching. A convergence of climate change, peak oil, and the financial instability inherent in an unbalanced global trading system will bring an unraveling of the corporate-led global economy and a dramatic restructuring of every aspect of modern life.

Thanks to Mario Santonm for recommending this book. ...

ISEC: The International society for Ecology & Culture

Ron — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:47:00 -0700

I got to know the remarkable Helena Norberg-Hodge, the Founder of ISEC, back in the 70's, when she was setting up the Ladakh Project, for which she shared the 1986 Right Livelihood Award, otherwise known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize.' –- Her selfless, Buddhist commitment to protecting the indigenous peoples of the Tibetan high plateau from Western commercial development deeply impressed me. I'll always remember her inspiring photos of the unique and glowing faces of the Ladakh people who hadn't yet been exposed to Western culture. Knowing Helena, I can unreservedly attest to the quality and integrity of ISEC. ... ~ ron

Forty Initiatives that are changing our world (Resurgence Mag.)

Ron — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:12:00 -0700

This informative list of annotated links compiled by Resurgence Magazine includes interesting initiatives in the areas of Activism, Agricultural Development, Ecology, Economics, Education & Community, the Internet, Political & Corporate, Publishing, and Scientific Principles. The few I’ve had a chance to check out so far look like they’re indeed doing important work; e.g., ISEC (the International society for Ecology & Culture), which I’ll post more info about in my next article. — Recommended.

Resurgence Magazine: Promoting creativity, ecology, spirituality and frugality

Ron — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:38:00 -0700

...Resurgence publish[es] articles that are on the cutting edge of current thinking, promoting creativity, ecology, spirituality and frugality.

While the corporate world advocates "free trade" Resurgence questions trade without responsibility and money without morality. While our governments define the "national interest" and its politicians pursue power at all costs, Resurgence argues for politics with principles. While technology invades our lives in the name of speed and efficiency, Resurgence advocates science with a soul.

But Resurgence not only offers a critique of the old paradigm, it gives working models for an emerging new paradigm. Resurgence is packed full of positive ideas about the theory and practice of good living: permaculture, community supported agriculture, local economics, ecological building, sacred architecture, art in the environment, small schools and deep ecology. ...

The Institute of Science in Society (ISIS): Science Society Sustainability

Ron — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:37:00 -0700

The Institute of Science in Society says it's "The only radical science magazine on earth." I don't know if that's literally true, but at first look, this does seem worth a serious look. Thanks to koantum for telling us about it.

“SIS is the antidote to scientific mumbo-jumbo. It treats people as grown ups - capable of understanding and facing up to difficult issues - whilst demanding that scientists describe the challenges of science in terms people can understand. Every idea that SIS explores is an advocacy of good science. A must-read for all who wish to change society for the better.” Alan Simpson, Member of Parliament, UK ...

EarthTrack

Ron — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:15:00 -0700

Earth Track is working to develop comprehensive and accurate information on government interventions in energy markets through direct research and by forging partnerships with organizations and individuals around the world. By developing this data, we aim to inform local, national, and international bodies about how the interaction of their many policies affect energy markets, environmental quality, trade, and fiscal health. This information will ensure greater alignment between environmental goals and fiscal and regulatory policies...

While global efforts are underway to curb climate change, restructure energy markets, and transition to cleaner energy sources, there is very little information on how existing policies impede the achievement of these goals. Without this information, both markets and governments make less informed decisions about what energy to buy and what new technologies to invest in. ...

Ethanol's Growing List of Enemies

Ron — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:08:00 -0700

...The ethanol movement is sprouting a vocal crop of critics. While politicians including President George W. Bush and farmers across the Midwest hope that the U.S. can win its energy independence by turning corn into fuel, Hitch and an unlikely assortment of allies are raising their voices in opposition. The effort is uniting ranchers and environmentalists, hog farmers and hippies, solar-power idealists and free-market pragmatists.

They have different reasons for opposing ethanol. But their common contentions are that the focus on corn-based ethanol has been too hasty, and the government's active involvement—through subsidies for ethanol refiners and high tariffs to keep out alternatives like ethanol made from sugar—is likely to lead to chaos in other sectors of the economy. ...

China: Rate Hike for a Hot Economy

Ron — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:50:00 -0700

Beijing's financial mandarins have tried ever-so-carefully to calibrate just the right amount of credit tightening to prevent China's $2 trillion-plus, high-speed economy from overheating—without going too far and engineering an unwanted slowdown. It has been difficult, given the massive liquidity sluicing through the economy, and China's still-undeveloped financial markets.

The narrowing interest rate differential could make the Chinese currency, and the prospect of more appreciation in the future, more attractive to currency traders. President Hu Jintao's government is also under heavy international pressure to let the yuan—widely viewed as undervalued— rise in order to cool China's export growth and massive global trade surplus—which hit $177 billion last year. ...

Everything You Know About AIDS is Wrong

Ron — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 14:36:00 -0800

...Oster argues that health is an investment. If you’re expecting to live a good, long time, you might be more inclined to make health investments than if you expect to die soon. If your life expectancy is only 40-50 years due to environmental factors, you might be more willing to take this 3% risk than a gay man in America who otherwise expects to live almost 80 years.

To test this effect, Oster looked at sexual behavior rates in countries that had high, low and medium levels of malaria. In countries with low malaria, there’s a very strong correlation between prevalence of AIDS and change in behavior - in countries with high malaria, there’s no correlation, or in fact, an opposite effect. There’s a similar correlation with maternal health and child mortality. This suggests that if you want to combat AIDS, you also need to deal with malaria, internal air quality and maternal health. ...

Sony's new "Gaming 3.0" PS3 virtual community "Home"

Ron — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 16:50:00 -0800

...Sony Computer Entertainment' Phil Harrison officially opened the doors on "Home" for PS3. This unique avatar-based real-time virtual community will enter a large scale beta trial in April and the service itself (which will be found after a free download on the XMB) is scheduled to launch this fall.

...Game 1.0 was represented by the disconnected console and static game discs; Game 2.0 was brought to us by connected consoles (or PCs) that offered static content; but Game 3.0 takes connected consoles to a new level by leveraging online collaboration and user-generated content. Suddenly the content is dynamic and, as Sony says, Game 3.0 "puts the spotlight back on the consumer." Harrison explained that Sony was influenced by the ideas put forth by web 2.0 – sites such as MySpace and YouTube that are driven by user-generated content. Harrison also made clear that Sony is not trying to trademark Game 3.0; they simply want to get the developer and gaming communities thinking about a trend which Harrison believes "will power the next decade of growth in our industry." ...

Is Piracy Really Killing the Music Industry?

Ron — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:11:00 -0800

I stumbled upon this remarkable website a few weeks ago and have become a regular reader. Its author, Daniel Eran, imo is one of the most informed observers of the computer and digital entertainment industry, especially the ongoing battle between Microsoft, Linux and Apple. Highly recommended. ~ ron

Various music industry trade groups claim that piracy is killing their industry, and are suing file traders and the sites they use. Are music sales, revenue, and profits down? Are MP3 downloads preventing music sales or do they instead help advertise new music? Are paid music downloads profitable or are they still insignificant?

...researchers at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina reported the results of a study of file sharing, based on a review of the log reports of 1.75 million traded songs over a 17 week period compared to actual album sales. -- They determined that even massive file sharing appeared to have no negative effect on sales, and in some cases appeared to have a positive effect on purchases. Other studies have reported that file trading does have the negative affect on sales one would logically expect.

In any event, it is hard to argue against the fact that the recording industry can gain more ground by making CD and online purchases more appealing than it can through raising CD prices and suing children. -- Rather than seeking to raise prices in iTunes with so called market pricing, and continue to destroy the retail market for music with unrealistically high list prices, music labels need to focus on putting their product in front of their customers and making it appealing to buy. ...

Nonalgorithmic Economics: The Evolution of Future Wealth, by Stuart A. Kaufmann

Ron — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:09:00 -0800

...We do not yet know what makes some systems more adaptable than others, but research on complexity has yielded some clues. Some of my own work on physical systems called spin glasses suggests that the level of central control over subsidiary parts of a system is an important consideration. Too much control freezes the system into limited configurations; too little causes it to wander aimlessly. Only systems that hover on the border between order and chaos exhibit the needed general stability and capacity to explore the universe of possible solutions to challenges.

The path to maximum prosperity will depend on finding ways to build economic systems in which new niches will generate spontaneously and abundantly. Such an approach to economics is indeed radical. It is based on the emergent behavior of systems rather than on the reductive study of them. It defies conventional mathematical treatments because it is not prestatable and is nonalgorithmic. Not surprisingly, most economists have so far resisted these ideas. Yet there can be little doubt that learning to apply these lessons from biology to technology will usher in a remarkable era of innovation and growth. ...

Apple CEO Steve Jobs Urges Music Industry to End Digital Copy Protection

Ron — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 02:09:00 -0800

In a letter posted on Apple's Web site Tuesday (dubbed ``Thoughts on Music''), Jobs joined the growing chorus of tech leaders and consumer advocates who have called on the major record labels to allow consumers to purchase music online in a format without copy protections.

``This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat,'' Jobs said.

Currently, the major labels require Apple's iTunes music store and its competitors to wrap their songs in software that's called digital rights management. DRM restricts what consumers can do with the songs, most notably how many copies they can make of them and where they can play them. So songs downloaded from iTunes can be played only on iPods, while songs downloaded from Microsoft's Zune Marketplace can only be used on Zunes. ...

Is India headed the right way?, by Francois Gautier

Ron — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:35:00 -0800

Thanks to Koantum for suggesting this article by Aurovillian Francois Gautier.
_______________________________________________________________
Today, there is a sense of deep satisfaction, of gloating even, in India... we see a much more dynamic and self-confident India, galvanised by the liberalisation taking place at this very moment.

But if one looks closer at what is happening here, one is bound to feel a little unsettled. For what we see today is an India veering blindly, without restraint, towards total globalisation and Westernisation. — Yes, there are great values in the Western world: Freedom, democracy, equality (not always though), respect for the environment, less corruption. And India must, and has already borrowed from these qualities. — But since the last two, three years, it seems the Indian political and intellectual mind is pushing these qualities to an illogical extreme, as if it wants to prove to the West that 'we are as democratic, as liberal, as free as you are.' — Thus, democracy in India has been hijacked. It takes a fortune to be elected. Politicians, elected by and for the people, once they are locked in the ivory tower that is Delhi, forget all about the people.

This process of copying the West to the point of aping it has, of course, already happened many times in the developing world. And it killed the soul of many countries, making them just another replica of the West -- with a youth that wears the latest Calvin Klein jeans, knows the No 1 bestseller on the Time list, can quote a few lines from Dante, reads The Times of India, but knows nothing about pranayama, has never read a verse from Kalidasa and does not know who Sri Aurobindo is. ...

Clean air or TV: Where will Asia find more energy?

Ron — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:50:00 -0800

A toxic purple haze of diesel exhaust hangs over the rice and jute fields here in northeastern India, and bird songs are frequently drowned out by the chug-a-chug-a-chug of diesel generators. — Across the developing world, cheap diesel generators from China have become a favorite way to provide electricity. — They power everything from irrigation pumps to television sets, allowing growing numbers of rural villages in many poor countries to grow more crops and connect to the wider world. — But as the demand increases for the electricity that makes those advances possible, it is often being met through the dirtiest, most inefficient means, creating pollution in many remote areas that used to have pristine air and negligible emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases...

Another popular approach being tried in India and elsewhere -- using solar energy to recharge lanterns by day -- has run into difficulty even as diesel prices would seem to make it more competitive. — The problem is that prices for photovoltaic panels for solar energy have surged as governments in industrialized countries, especially Germany, have encouraged greater use of renewable energy, said Hemant Lamba, the coordinator of Aurore, a renewable energy service company in Auroville, India. — "It's harder to do any solar energy projects in India," he said. ...

Biovillage approach represents the greening of development

Ron — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:14:00 -0800

Selvi Alagappan rises early each day to tend to her small patch of crossandra and jasmine flowers in the rural Indian village of Mangalam, in the Union of Pondicherry. These and the mushrooms she cultivates in a nearby shack bring in a monthly income that, while still below the poverty line, keeps her large family from going hungry. — Two years ago, however, starvation was very much a reality for Selvi and her family. But like many other participants of the Biovillage Project, a collaborative development programme described by its authors as "pro-nature, pro-women, pro-poor", Selvi was given the tools and technical assistance to increase her household income and get her back on her feet again.

The project is run by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, a local non-governmental organization in Chennai, with funding and technical assistance from the Government of India and international agencies including FAO, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). The project began in 1992 with 42 participants in three villages. It now operates in 19 villages with a team of 24 project specialists. ...

Chennai Declaration: UN urged to help achieve hunger-free world

Ron — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:05:00 -0800

The United Nations (UN) has been recommended to set up a Statutory Body comprising G8 and G20 nations to provide political oversight to the global and national efforts to achieve the goal of a hunger-free world by 2015. — The recommendation was made in the Chennai Declaration that was adopted yesterday on the concluding day of the three-day international workshop on "Food Security: A Great Threat to Human Security" held at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSRRF) in Chennai in India.

"The goal should be eradication of hunger by 2015, and not halving the proportion or the number of the hungry in relation to any chosen base year," the declaration recommended. — It said all the member states of the UN should make the right to a balance diet, clean drinking water, environmental sanitation, primary health care and primary education a basic human right...

The programme will be completed today (Thursday) through visiting Biovillage and Auroville, a MSSRF project in Pondicherry. ...

Capitalism 3.0: Planning a Big Upgrade (WC)

Ron — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 15:34:00 -0800

...For those unfamiliar with the book, Barnes argues that there is private wealth and then there is common wealth—in the form of nature, structures supported by the community and society (such as parks, streets, capital markets, the internet), and cultural and intellectual wealth (the wealth of ideas). Private wealth, he argues, is produced partly by appropriating common wealth, and private profit often externalizes costs into the commons. And he proposes a solution. ...

Ceres: Investors & Environmentalists for Sustainable Prosperity

Ron — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 17:44:00 -0800

Ceres (pronounced "series") is a national network of investors, environmental organizations and other public interest groups working with companies and investors to address sustainability challenges such as global climate change.

Mission: Integrating sustainability into capital markets for the health of the planet and its people.

About Us: At its founding 17 years ago, Ceres introduced a bold new vision to the business world. That vision is of a world in which business and capital markets promote the well being of human society and the protection of the earth's biological systems and resources. Ceres advances its vision by bringing investors, environmental groups and other stakeholders together to compel companies and capital markets to incorporate environmental and social challenges into their day-to-day decision-making. By leveraging the collective power of investors and other key stakeholders, Ceres has achieved dramatic results, among those: ...

Letter from Davos, Day 1 - A Tipping Point? (WorldChngking)

Ron — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 17:28:00 -0800

I’m a bit of an odd duck here, a public interest activist among the world’s most powerful business and political leaders. These are the people with the power to effect the critical changes needed to address climate change, the people whose hearts and minds I try to win over every day at Ceres. And now they’re all here in one place.

Immediately upon arriving at the World Economic Forum I find reason for optimism – climate change dominates the formal agenda and the hallway conversations. Did I make a wrong turn somewhere and walk into an international environmental conference?

At the first plenary session, the assembled masses, mostly captains of industry, are asked if they favor mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions and 71% are in favor. Am I dreaming? This could be a tipping point because one year ago this would have been unthinkable. ...

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) to deliver first 5 million units this year

Ron — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 13:19:00 -0800

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Initiative unveiled its final industrial prototype of the XO - a laptop computer with a toylike look. But to say it's a toy is misleading. The device is intended to bring the most isolated tribal village into the Information Age, with the ultimate goal of offering one to every child on the planet. [Except for India, whose education bureaucracy vetoed OLPC participation last year.]

By keeping the price low, the OLPC initiative hopes that governments in the developing world will be able to afford them. Already, Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Thailand, Uruguay, and, most recently, Rwanda have committed to participate in the program. Rwanda hopes to have laptops for all of its schoolchildren within five years. ...

Prof. Suarez-Villa’s website on the rise of technocapitalism

Ron — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 16:06:00 -0800

Thanks to RY Deshpande for the reference to Prof. Suarez-Villa’s website on the rise of technocapitalism:

Technocapitalism is a new form of market capitalism that is rooted in technological invention and innovation. It can be considered an emerging era, now in its early stage, that is supported by such intangibles as creativity and knowledge.

Intangibles are at the core of technocapitalism. Creativity and knowledge are to technocapitalism what tangible raw materials, factory labor and capital were to industrial capitalism. During industrial capitalism, tangible resources acquired the greatest value, as factory production, repetitive labor and massive output ruled the day. In the emerging technocapitalist era, however, those material resources are becoming secondary in importance.

Intangibles are therefore vital for technocapitalism. Creativity and knowledge are the most valuable resources of this emerging new era. They, for example, already account for as much as three-quarters of the value of most products and services in existence, and that proportion is bound to increase over time. In contrast, the material resources that were most valuable for industrial capitalism are losing value relative to those intangibles in most every product or service.

New economic activities are emerging that are representative of technocapitalism. Biotechnology, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, software design, genomics, molecular computing and biorobotics, for example, are likely to be hallmarks of the twenty-first century, as electronics and aerospace were in the twentieth. This new ecology of activities and sectors is more reliant on creativity and knowledge than any of the old industries of industrial capitalism. ...

Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation (LA Times Investigative Report)

Ron — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 16:07:00 -0800

Ebocha, Nigeria — Justice Eta, 14 months old, held out his tiny thumb.

An ink spot certified that he had been immunized against polio and measles, thanks to a vaccination drive supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
But polio is not the only threat Justice faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it "the cough." People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Justice squirmed in his mother's arms. His face was beaded with sweat caused either by illness or by heat from the flames that illuminate Ebocha day and night. Ebocha means "city of lights."

The makeshift clinic at a church where Justice Eta was vaccinated and the flares spewing over Ebocha represent a head-on conflict for the Gates Foundation. In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works. ...

Nobel Winner Muhammad Yunus Warns of Dangers of Globalization

Ron — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 13:46:00 -0800

The Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus, who invented the practice of making small, unsecured loans to the poor, warned today that the globalized economy was becoming a dangerous “free-for-all highway.
“Its lanes will be taken over by the giant trucks from powerful economies,” Dr. Yunus said during a lavish ceremony at which he was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. “Bangladeshi rickshaws will be thrown off the highway.”
While international companies motivated by profit may be crucial in addressing global poverty, he said, nations must also cultivate grassroots enterprises and the human impulse to do good. ...

UN Study Shows Richest Two Percent Own Half World Wealth

Ron — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:31:00 -0800

The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth according to a path-breaking study released today by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER).
The most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken also reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.
The research finds that assets of $2,200 per adult placed a household in the top half of the world wealth distribution in the year 2000. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world required $61,000 in assets, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1%, a group which — with 37 million members worldwide — is far from an exclusive club.
The UNU-WIDER study is the first of its kind to cover all countries in the world and all major components of household wealth, including financial assets and debts, land, buildings and other tangible property. ...

"Two myths that keep the world poor," by Vandana Shiva

Ron — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 09:53:00 -0800

...Jeffrey Sachs...is not a simply a do-gooder but one of the world’s leading economists, head of the Earth Institute and in charge of a UN panel set up to promote rapid development. So when he launched his book The End of Poverty, people everywhere took notice. Time magazine even made it into a cover story.
But, there is a problem with Sachs’ how-to-end poverty prescriptions. He simply doesn’t understand where poverty comes from. He seems to view it as the original sin. “A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor,” he writes, then adding: “The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much of the world was left far behind.”
This is a totally false history of poverty. The poor are not those who have been “left behind”; they are the ones who have been robbed. The wealth accumulated by Europe and North America are largely based on riches taken from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India’s rich textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the genocide of the native American tribes, without African slavery, the Industrial Revolution would not have resulted in new riches for Europe or North America. It was this violent takeover of Third World resources and markets that created wealth in the North and poverty in the South. ...

Global fisheries in peril

Ron — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 02:42:00 -0800

All of the world's fishing stocks will collapse before mid-century, devastating food supplies, if overfishing and other human impacts continue at their current pace, according to a global study to be published today by scientists in five countries. ...

BioPower Systems, Ltd. - Biologically Inspired Ocean Power Systems

Ron — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 13:28:00 -0800

BioPower Systems Pty. Ltd. is commercialising award-winning biomimetic ocean energy conversion technologies. We have adopted nature’s mechanisms for survival and energy conversion in the marine environment and have applied these in the development of our proprietary wave and tidal energy systems. -- Our technologies inherit benefits developed during 3.8 Billion years of evolutionary optimization in nature’s ocean laboratory.The resulting systems move and sway in tune with the forces of the ocean, and naturally streamline when extreme conditions prevail. This leads to low design thresholds and associated low costs. ...

Inc. Magazine introduces "The Green 50 - Do Good, Get Rich: The Eco-Advantage"

Ron — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 12:45:00 -0800

Introducing the Green 50, a collection of entrepreneurial companies that are showing what it means to run good businesses, attack the most pressing problems of our time--and make serious cash along the way. ...

"Happy Birthday iPod: A revolution in your pocket; Welcome to the era of the shuffle"

Ron — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 12:19:00 -0800

...the odds are good that even as you observe this, your own ears are exploding in sound -- maybe the just-downloaded croonings of Bob Dylan's latest offering, a classic Philadelphia Orchestra symphony or an amateur "podcast" featuring a barroom-style discussion of last week's NFL games. Or perhaps your device is displaying a scene from last week's episode of "The Office." -- If so, you are tethered to one of the 60 million -- and counting fast -- iPod music players sold by Apple Computer in the last five years. And though it may seem you are doing it simply because you like the music and are pleased by the award-winning industrial design, you can congratulate yourself for participating in something a lot bigger than the tiny iPod: a revolution that has helped topple the idea that record labels, studios and broadcasters should set the terms for how and when you entertain yourself. Instead, Apple's ubiquuitous gadget has ushered in the era of shuffle. ...

"Global warming will devastate world economy": New Royal Society report

Ron — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 10:54:00 -0800

LONDON -- Unchecked global warming will devastate the world economy on the scale of the world wars and the Great Depression, a major British report said Monday. -- Introducing the report, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said unabated climate change would cost the world between five and 20 per cent of global gross domestic product each year. -- He called for "bold and decisive action" to cut carbon emissions and stem the worst of the temperature rise. -- Report author Sir Nicholas Stern, a senior government economist, said that acting now to cut greenhouse gas emissions would cost about one per cent of global GDP each year. -- "The evidence shows that ignoring climate change will eventually damage economic growth," said Stern's 700-page report, the first major effort to quantify the economic cost of climate change. ...

Prof. Muhammad Yunus & Grameen Bank Awarded The Nobel Peace Prize for 2006

Ron — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 13:28:00 -0700

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006, divided into two equal parts, to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank for their efforts to create economic and social development from below. Lasting peace can not be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Micro-credit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights. ...

China’s New Leftist (The NYT Magazine)

Ron — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 16:30:00 -0700

... At our last meeting, Wang also spoke more about a subject Cui had brought up with me: how the rise of China and India throws up new challenges and possibilities with profound implications for the world at large. “Western societies have been on top for the last two centuries and shaped the world with the decisions they made,” he said. “China and India will now play equally crucial roles in the new century. But what will they be? I think it is very important for Chinese and Indian intellectuals not just to imitate the West. They have to explore alternatives to the Western model of modernity. Otherwise, the ‘consumer nationalists’ are already saying, ‘America was on top; now we are on top.”’ -- Wang laughed, and added, “This is not interesting.”

YouTube, Google, and entertainment industry: Future Merger?

Ron — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 09:50:00 -0700

...both YouTube and Google are working behind the scenes to secure the rights to a wide swath of video content from the entertainment industry, which would clear the way for a potentially lucrative partnership. ...

EngagingChina: "The low-down on China's high-growth economy"

Ron — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 15:14:00 -0700

Here's an interesting blog covering China's exploding economy, with an emphasis on investment opportunities and risks:

"China is a land of seemingly boundess opportunities but also considerable challenges, particularly for western businesses engaging with this giant market for the first time. EngagingChina aims to help you reap the rewards offered by China's fast-growing economy and avoid the pitfalls. -- We do not pretend to offer an insider's guide to doing business in Shanghai. Nor can we tell you where to find an internet cafe or fast food joint in Jinan. There are plenty of sites out there that do that. But in their enthusiasm to describe this fascinating country, you risk not seeing the wood for the trees.

Our focus at EngagingChina is strategy, pure and simple. If you want to know where the high-growth opportunities lie in China's new economy, or if you need to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, then EngagingChina is for you ...

U.S. drops from 1st to 6th in world competitiveness ranking

Ron — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 09:37:00 -0700

The United States fell to sixth place in the World Economic Forum's 2006 global competitiveness rankings, ceding the top place to Switzerland, as macroeconomic concerns eroded prospects for the world's largest economy.

In a report released on Tuesday, the World Economic Forum said Washington's huge defense and homeland security spending commitments, plans to lower taxes further, and long-term potential costs from health care and pensions were creating worrisome fiscal strains.

Is the United States going bankrupt?

Ron — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:53:00 -0700

A ballooning budget deficit and a pensions and welfare timebomb could send the economic superpower into insolvency, according to research by Professor Laurence Kotlikoff for the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, a leading constituent of the US Federal Reserve. ...

'Give Peace A Chance,' by John Tierney, New York Times

Ron — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 11:04:00 -0800

You would never guess it from the news, but we're living in a peculiarly tranquil world. The new edition of ''Peace and Conflict,'' a biennial global survey being published next week by the University of Maryland, shows that the number and intensity of wars and armed conflicts have fallen once again, continuing a steady 15-year decline that has halved the amount of organized violence around the world. By JOHN TIERNEY New York Times, May 28, 2005

Dramatic decrease in organized violence

Ron — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 10:33:00 -0800

All forms of violence are headed down, and the crucial years are between 1985 and 1990, which is just the time when after a continual increase (see the first three charts), the number of democracies jump up. The way to understand this is that in the late 1980s, democracies achieved a critical mass in the international system, a tipping point for violence. ...