stargeek
Style XP v2.0 Beta 3Style XP v2.0 Beta 3Style XP v2.0 Beta 3 12/03/2003 01:49 AM Style XP is not a skinning engine. It uses Microsoft's built-in visual style engine, but enhances it by providing many useful tools. Style XP can import, select, rotate, and manage themes, visual styles, wallpapers, and logons. Future versions may support sounds, cursors, screensavers, and packages of all the above. Instead of lines and gradients, the XP user interface natively supports the use of skinned bitmap controls (a visual style). This is Microsoft's own innovation. Style XP includes its own visual styles. [Shareware $19.95 8.12 MB] This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Style XP v2.0 Beta 3Grok Headline matches for Style XP v2.0 Beta 3Style XP 2.0 Beta 3 ReleasedStyle XP 2.0 Beta 3 Released 12/03/2003 11:08 AM SIGNATURE STYLE Goody Steinberg Letting
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 If
you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm
opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the
extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist
captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs,
using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments
to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and
a
great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community
self-sufficiency.At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments). The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor. The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations. The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms. Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed: It
is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an
unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the
EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global
tyranny,
unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken
seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous
tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them
effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is
a
challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of
political science and public administration.
I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task. |
Kodo JDO allows you to write database calls using Java statements
instead of SQL statements, by supporting the Java Data Objects
standard for transparent persistence. It is the most complete
implementation of the JDO specification for relational data stores,
and comes with tools for producing a schema from an object model,
producing class files from an existing schema, and a performance pack
(distributed caching and statement batching) that improves performance
by 15 - 30 times. It supports most relational databases, application
servers, and IDEs, and reduces the total coding effort by 20-40%.
Graphics3D is a free, Open Source C++ library for
game developers, researchers, and students. It is
a base of robust and high performance code common to most 3D
projects. It is not a standalone graphics or game engine--it is the
set of pieces you need to jumpstart your own engine or graphics
project. The library has two parts: G3D for pure math, and GLG3D for
interacting with hardware acceleration via OpenGL. You can use G3D
without GLG3D if you want to use another 3D API (like DirectX) or
don't like the OpenGL abstraction.
SHORE (Semantic Hypertext Object Repository) is a
hypertext repository that stores data about
documents and data described by documents. Access
to this information is provided as hypertext. The
repository stores objects that appear in
documents, together with their relations in a
semantic net. Hypertext navigation follows these
relations in the semantic net. The SHORE server
works as an HTTP server, and the client is a
standard Web browser. The repository uses PROLOG
as its query language and the XSB system as its
query engine.
Style One has a chief characteristic of trying to make everything better. When they are healthy, they are morally heroic, making sacrifices for the greater good, balanced in their judgments, uncompromising in their principles. They are concerned about what is right in morals, sometimes in esthetics, and sometimes in other things like literary or movie criticism or even manners. They are objective in their judgments and utterly clear about what is right and wrong. They are prophets and reformers.
If they become unhealthy, the vision narrows and their concerns diminish. They begin to moralize, they can get picky about little rules and they always go by the book regardless of consequence or circumstance. They develop either/or thinking and pay little attention to anyone's emotions.
Ones you may know: Judge Judy on TV, Laura Schlesinger (Dr. Laura on talk radio), Hilary Clinton, Ross Perot, Ralph Nadar, St Paul, Martin Luther, Harrison Ford, Tom Brokaw, Pope John Paul II, The Lone Ranger, Martha Stewart and Miss Manners.
What is your enneagram?
(Via Marju t.)
 As you may know, I've been maintaining (manually) detailed tables of contents of my blog posts (one per blog 'category') since I started. They're a bit clumsy, but they get a fair bit of traffic so I know people are using them. Right now they exist as six 'stories' and I thought it might be interesting to try to put them together into a single, interactive index. I'm competent in neither HTML nor Radio's 'outlining' function (I confess I don't even know how to use anchors properly -- the twisties below and the links in the graphic above don't work, and links below should really take you to the specific subcategory within the table of contents), so I can't make it pretty or functional, but you can get the idea of how it might work:  BLOGS
& BLOGGING:BUSINESSSocial
Networking
Blogs in Business Knowledge Management & Learning Innovation Entrepreneurship New Collaborative Enterprise Advice for Knowledge Workers ARTS
& SCIENCESLiterature, Language, Communication
Stories and Narrative The Arts Sciences & Social Sciences Technology Miscellaneous Posts ENVIRONMENTAL
PHILOSOPHYHow to Save the World
New Collaborative Enterprise Other Environmental Articles Overpopulation Animal Rights Activism Environmental & Social Economics & Law Stories and Narrative Other Philosophical Articles POLITICS
& ECONOMICSLiberty,
Democracy and the World
The Bush Regime & US Politics Globalization, Corporatism, Free Trade Governance & the Political Process Economics Environmental & Social Economics & Law The Education System Canadian Politics Iraq & the Mideast CREATIVE
WORKSMy six categories have a total of 40 subcategories, of which five (Blogs in Business, Technology, Stories & Narrative, New Collaborative Enterprise, and Environmental & Social Economics & Law) overlap categories and hence appear under two categories each. The ten most popular subcategories (most linked, and most commented-on) are shown in bold. This taxonomy is essentially the same one I use for my filing cabinet tabs and for my My Documents subfolders, except that they omit the 'housekeeping' type tabs and subfolders that house my background papers, messages and private and personal records. I am not offering this as any kind of framework for a 'universal' taxonomy. In fact, I've been adamant that any personal content management system needs to allow us to index our documents and messages any way we want, our way, at whatever level of granularity works best for each individual. Universal taxonomies just don't work. But if we think of a blog as the 'public area' of our personal content, the shareable part of our personal 'filing cabinet', I thought it might make an interesting case study in how we might best 'present' each individual's publicly-available 'stuff' for effective browsing by others. I see the blog, and at a broader level the 'tabs' of our personal content management system, our 'filing cabinet', as nothing more than 'addresses' or destinations to send content to. So although Microsoft would have us believe that 'saving' a document or message, 'sending' a document or message to someone else, and 'publishing' a document or message to a blog or website, are three fundamentally different functions and applications, I see them as conceptually indistinguishable -- they're all actions that move content from one specific space to another. That's why I have proposed a single, intuitive Workspace Manipulation and Document Annotation tool to replace virtually every application users have on their PCs today, a tool that would finally make PCs accessible to the billions of technologically challenged among us. But I digress... I can envision the Interactive Blog Table of Contents working in one of two ways:
Ultimately, I can see the development of an invisible (to the user) 'metadata layer', which would take our preferred organization of our personal stuff and translate it into some universal standard, and then as needed into each reader's personal organization of his/her content, so that for example if Jon Husband wants to browse my publicly permissioned content, he won't see it organized as I have, above, but will instead see it automatically reorganized and relabelled using his personal taxonomy and nomenclature. I believe this 'metadata' layer development will be one of the most interesting and important technology challenges of this century. In the meantime, if there's sufficient interest, I'll buckle down and learn enough HTML and Outlining to implement either solution (1) or (2) above for my blog. |
About a year ago,
I made my first public commitment<
/a> to stop just talking about How to Save the World, and actually
do something about it. Here's
my progress report:
Not a perfect scorecard, but not too bad either. The problem is, even if everyone in North America did these things it wouldn't be enough. As the acceleration of global warming and other interminable bad news on the environment, the endless victories of corporatists over citizens and consumers, our continued theft of our children's and grandchildren's heritage, the prevalence of suicidal economic policies, the endless global thirst for blood and imperialist adventure, and last month's US elections all showed, we're losing ground fast. We need to be doing much more. So while I'm still working on completing the actions I committed to last year, reading Bill Moyers' stirring and depressing speech has convinced me to add some more radical, and controversial, actions to my 'to do' list, to publicly commit to do more. Earlier this year I set out the political and ecological philosophy behind what I called 'Plan B', a set of radical solutions to use once it becomes clear that social and political activism, networking, education, and the plodding pace of new technological innovation simply aren't going to be enough to save the world from inevitable social, political and ecological catastrophe and collapse in this century. The principles of this philosophy are:
Plan B is designed to give people no choice but to change. Let's take fossil fuels as an example. We could have started developing alternatives to fossil fuels a century ago. There was no burning platform. In the 1970s, prices spiked modestly. The reaction of the vast majority was to demand that the government increase the supply and reduce the price. Governments complied, even though that meant first getting into bed with and becoming dependent on ideological enemies, and later launching imperialist adventures to take over the major sources of supply economically and politically. As long as there was any choice, no matter how socially, politically, economically and environmentally high the cost, people would not change. As we near the end of oil, we will see a resurgence of nuclear power plants, more strip-mining and burning of coal, the destruction of arctic wilderness, the ruin of coastal waterways, massive, and bloody and incessant imperialist wars with oil-rich countries -- anything to forestall the need to change. The cost will be horrendous. That's human nature. That's nature, period. Do not change until you absolutely must. For oil, the answer is to not give people a choice. That means rationing supply, and imprisoning those that buy in the black market. That means huge oil tax increases to make it unaffordable for most people to buy oil beyond the bare minimum, tax-free ration, with the taxes used to finance fast-track research on alternative renewable energy. That means prohibiting bringing on-board new sources of supply that merely delay the inevitable crisis, prolong the bad habits of reckless consumption, and ruin the environment for the sake of a few month's supply. That means higher income taxes to pay for the development of a completely new infrastructure based on alternative energy (corporations won't pay for it). All of these options are anathema to North American governments, which understand human nature and won't dare impose these draconian solutions on people after seventy years of preaching that government and taxes are bad and the market will fix everything automatically. So we need to make sure there is no choice. Since we can't do this by changing human nature, persuading people to voluntary reduce consumption, we have three options: Precipitate a crisis by interfering with supply (socially and environmentally conscious sabotage), precipitate a crisis by interfering with price and supply (persuade OPEC to quadruple prices and curtail production), or avert the crisis by coming up with innovations that reduce demand. The third of these options is not available because those with wealth and power would have to invest massively in these innovations, innovations that would reduce demand for their products, so it would be both politically insane for them to do so, and a violation of the modern 'maximize short-term profit at all costs' corporate mantra, and hence would subject these courageous corporate idealists to legal action and dismissal from their posts. We can and should encourage OPEC to drastically cut production and to quadruple prices (that's what many OPEC members believe is a fair price for their product now, but they're unwilling to risk an invasion by the West if they raised the price). Production cuts aren't in their short-term interest either, though steep price increases are (I'm sure awareness of this is what's behind the recent crude price volatility). Why would OPEC nations sell for $40/barrel when they could sell for $160/barrel with little drop in demand? The only conceivable reason is military threats from the West. If OPEC doesn't have the courage to confront Bush & Co and charge fair market rates for their increasingly scarce products (which seems to be the case), the only solution left is sabotage of the energy and transportation systems, done in a way that doesn't cause human or environmental injury -- preventing the supply from getting to the market. We need a lot of individuals to sabotage the system at its most vulnerable (probably pipelines, dams, power transformers, tankers, refineries, drilling platforms, border crossings and major hubs in transportation routes). At the same time, we need to take the opportunity to block traffic in the despicable goods that finance the flow of oil -- arms flowing out to oil countries, and the IMF-mandated flow of other underpriced locally-needed raw materials and slave-labour-produced manufactured goods from poor countries to rich. This monkey-wrenching needs to be done in a coordinated but non-hierarchical way by a large number of caring, ingenious, enterprising, self-disciplined individuals. But before we can do it, we need to research how best to do it, what and where the vulnerabilities are, hand ow to achieve maximum disruption of supply with minimum effort and no serious injury to people or the environment. I am confident that most of this knowledge is online, and the rest can be put online by those in the know so that the rest of us can share it. The result would be a constant and debilitating disruption of supply to the point where both consumers and producers say 'uncle' and start to change their behaviour because they have no other choice. I think it can be done. It will take great courage (I expect this blog is already under government surveillance and will probably eventually be attacked or taken down). And it will take great intelligence, to avoid it backfiring on us, and to ensure that, once the media get addicted to this story, they are getting our message loud and clear: We are selectively sabotaging the most serious excesses of the modern economy to bring about conservation of resources and the environment the only way we know will work. If we're going to save the planet, we all need to consume less, and we're doing our part to make that happen. So here are my additional commitments for actions for 2005.
It is absolutely critical that these million individuals take great care to avoid causing harm or suffering, other than economic harm. Otherwise, extremists on either side of the political spectrum, and government agents, could exploit or defeat this movement. We need the media to understand that this principle is inviolate, so that they immediately rule us out as the source when an act occurs that causes harm or suffering. We are not terrorists, we are anti-terrorists. Corporatism is economic and political terrorism, and it is threatening all life on Earth. Our goal is simply to disrupt this economic and political system before it destroys our planet, so that there is no choice but to find a better way to live. |
 Yesterday I was checking my referrer log and came across a weblog called PTypes, which rates famous people, and bloggers, by personality type, and also draws linkages between three well-known personality typing schemas. I have commented before that the majority of bloggers seem to be INTPs or INFPs on the Myers-Briggs personality test, but the PTypes blogger list contains more 'Counselors' (INFJ) than either 'Architect' (INTP) or 'Healer' (INFP) personalities. More surprisingly, How to Save the World is identified as an 'Inspector's' (ISTJ) blog, which surprised me. I had always been a strong NT, and right on the line between E-I (to quote Neil Young, who seems to have a similar personality to mine, "I need a crowd of people, but I can't face them day-to-day"), and right on the line between J-P (I'm a compulsive list-maker, but I hate inflexibility). So I couldn't understand how the author of PTypes assessed me as ISTJ. Rather than argue, I decided to re-take the Myers-Briggs test. I Googled 'Myers-Briggs' and took the first four tests that came up, including this quite detailed one, which all produced the same answer: my personality has changed markedly since I started blogging. I've plotted the shift on the charts above. Using a small letter instead of a capital for close-to-the-border (less than 55-45%) scores, I've gone in one year from iNTj (a Thinker) to eNfP (a Change Agent), after not moving on the test for a decade. I suspect my blogging is more a reflection of changes in my 'personality' rather than a cause of them. But it's interesting -- is anyone else's personality changing, and why? Are personality changes fundamental and enduring, or situational and transient? Oh, and there is a 'disorder' associated with each of the 16 personality types when that personality becomes extreme or pathological. For INTPs it's schizoid (disengagement) behaviour, for INFPs it's histrionics, for INFJs it's avoidant, for ISTJs it's depression (maybe that's why the author of PTypes pegged me as ISTJ), for INTJs like I was last year it's schizotypal (social anxiety), and for ENFPs like I've apparently become this year it's paranoia. Not sure I buy this last stretch, since if I were borderline paranoic I would have self-censored some of my recent blog posts. |
 Seth Godin
of Fast Company and
Purple Numbers fame has a new BHAP (big hairy audacious project)
called ChangeThis.
The idea is that we need to be more open to well-articulated opposing
(or at least different) points of view on important issues. The 'This'
in ChangeThis is Your Mind,
and by changing it, you will become part of a broader, urgent change
movement. The vehicle that gets the ball rolling is something called a
Manifesto. Seth has plans for some online Manifestos penned by some
very big
names.It's a very intriguing idea, but I don't think it will work, not because of the Internet's limited reach or because of anything inherently wrong with Manifestos, but because it's out of sync with human nature. Here's why, IMHO:
(Diagram is from an earlier post on The Decision-Making Process) |
 We have many myths about nature. Most of them are about 'wildness' -- savagery, hardship, suffering. Most of our stories about nature are of the 'Man vs. Nature' variety, about 'survival in the wild', as if that were some extraordinary thing. We build these myths to keep people from running away from our well-meaning but damaged, terrible, unsustainable culture. Richard Manning in Against the Grain has just exploded another of the myths about our culture: He provides a compelling argument that the Great Wall of China, a work of staggering and gruelling human labour visible with a telescope from the moon, was not built, as we were told, to keep the Northern hunter-gatherer cultures (the 'Mongol Hordes') out, but rather to keep the stooped, slave labour in the 'new' civilization culture's peasants in. If you really believe nature is savage, turn off the hysterical nature documentaries and read Bernd Heinrich's Winter World, about how, even in Northern winters, even the tiniest 'wild' animals live joyful, carefree, comfortable lives. And then read David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous to find out how you, too, can reconnect with lovely, peaceful, easy, sustainable nature. The myths we teach our impressionable children about nature, from dragon fables to Old Yeller, are usually about nature's terror and the need to defend and return back 'home' to our 'safe' civilization. There is an astonishing amount of animal cruelty in children's stories, and it is an extremely predatory and desensitizing indoctrination technique. We reinforce these dreadful lies about nature's savagery by sending our children to under-supervised day-care operations called Summer Camps, which, despite their locations and stated objectives, are not at all about nature, but rather deplorable and usually incompetent immersion courses in social skills. At least the British are honest enough to do this without pretext of it being a 'natural' experience: Their social indoctrination is called Boarding School and occurs principally indoors. Whatever its intention, the principal effect of Summer Camp is to untether children from their parents' protection and their need for privacy, and force them to 'get along' with others, find their place in the social pecking order of their 'peers'. For the shy, the weak, the uncoordinated, the physically and emotionally scarred (and that's most children) it can be living hell. For psychopathic children and predatory adults, its lack of supervision provides the ideal environment for honing their manipulation skills on unprotected and vulnerable victims. Whatever this may be, it is certainly no way to introduce a child to nature. Even psychopathic adults use the 'natural experience' cover to prey upon weaker adults. This activity was most famously depicted in the film White Mile, where the aggressive company CEO (played by Alan Alda) bullies younger staff who want to 'get ahead' to go on a 'character-building' white-water rafting trip where they are absolutely at his mercy, and where nature is set up as the straw-man enemy. This psychological brutality is also evident in many cults which use social isolation and deprivation in a pseudo-'natural' setting to break down resistance to the cult leader's propaganda. I recently witnessed a plane-load of teenagers returning from a six-month 'working field trip' billeted in peasants' homes in Paraguay -- these kids were raw with emotion and filled with horror and loathing at the thought of returning 'home' and 'abandoning' the poor Paraguayan families who had opened their homes and hearts to them. Absolute gut-wrenching culture shock. We humans are so easy to socially recondition, so vulnerable to programming and re-programming! Our psyches are so fragile that, especially with the young, we must take great care not to tear them even by the simple act of exposing them to new ideas. This is very dangerous stuff. Damn our adaptability. Not surprising, then, that most people view nature with great fear, as something to be conquered or survived. Most of us have no alternative experience of it. And not surprising that so many of the well-intended 'communing with nature' alternative living experiments have collapsed or been hijacked by psychopaths or megalomaniacs. If we were to start with young people, how could we expose them 'naturally' to nature: Teaching them gently the Spell of the Sensuous without so unhinging their psyches that they would be incapable of returning to civilized life and working within it, and without exploiting their ideological vulnerability? (I know, I'm a hopeless liberal -- I refuse to use propaganda to advance the cause). Because if we don't show them nature, what possible hope is there for our world when we can only romanticize (or demonize), idealize, try to imagine a natural way to live and love and be? We learn (especially as children) what we're shown, not what we're told. There are almost no remaining models of natural life to show them, to correct the entrenched, neolithic misperception of nature as something brutal, savage, dangerous, frightening, threatening, hard, and apart. As James Taylor puts it in his song Gaia, we are taught, and left with no alternative but to:
Turn away from your animal kind,
Try to leave your body just to live in your mind, Leave cold cruel Mother Earth behind -- GAIA, As if you were your own creation, As if you were the chosen nation, And the world around you just a rude and dangerous invasion. I was at a conference a week ago with some of the most creative and intelligent people on the face of the Earth, but when I talked to them of the importance of wilderness, these mostly urban geniuses had no idea what I was getting at -- they could not imagine what I meant. I think we need to abandon the route of in-class nature documentaries and the one-day (or six-month) field trips (and 'summer camps'), and instead invent and design something completely new: Model Intentional Communities that will give children and adults the opportunity to rediscover nature, and our true nature, first hand. Just as we save endangered species and try to build their populations back up in 'natural' settings, we should try to recreate, and show, alternative human cultures, so that people brought up in our monolithic and troubled culture can be exposed to people living in balance with wilderness. Not in order to learn how to 'survive' it, but to learn how to be part of and at peace with it. Glenn Parton talks about this in his essay Humans -In-The-Wilderness. I advocate the development of a
human lifestyle in which people live in small villages sparsely
scattered through a wilderness environment. Although this framework or
groundplan is borrowed from aboriginal peoples, it is far more
flexible
than has been thought. We can devolve or scale-down modern
civilization
to closely fit ancient land use patterns without returning to the
Stone
Age.
So we're not talking about a back-to-the-land commune that refuses to use technology and shuns the 'civilized' world, but rather a series of communities of, say, 100-150 people each, plus perhaps another 20 guests at any one time who would stay no longer than a month, and bring in new ideas and take away their learning of another way to live. These model communities would meld the best of do-more-with-less innovation and technology (the Internet, solar energy, hydroponics etc.) with the best of natural community (zero growth, 100% sustainability, everything recycled, no pollution, no hierarchy, LETS money, no private property or separate 'family' dwellings etc.) These communities would 'use' only a tiny proportion of 'their' land for human purposes, leaving the rest as wilderness for other creatures, for learning and exploration and discovery and reflection and connection but not exploitation. Their population density would vary depending on the carrying capacity of the area, but on average would probably not exceed one person per four acres (a globally sustainable level). Everyone would live as part of a self-sufficient, self-managed and self-selected community, and everyone would also live on the doorstep of wilderness. The people would work only as hard as they needed to, to be comfortable -- perhaps an hour per day each (as primitive man did according to revisionist history, and certainly enough in a modern egalitarian society with the benefits of today's technology). The rest of the day could be spent in leisure, in learning, in discovery, in making love (possibly, as Glenn suggests, with more than one partner, at the collective discretion of each community), in art, in writing or other expression -- whatever each individual wanted to do. Members would be free to travel, and through the Internet and communications media and visitors there would be lots of interaction with other Model Intentional Communities and with the 'outside world', but if they stayed away too long they would be asked to give up their membership in the community. What would be needed to make this work would be someone to donate the land, without recourse or obligation, and some self-selection mechanism for determining who the members of the communities would be. Building on a small standard set of inviolable principles to ensure egalitarianism, no-growth, and wilderness protection, each community could develop its own rules and code of conduct (or operate without rules, if it so chose). It would probably take some time, and learning from failure, before these model communities would stabilize and be ready to accept visitors -- their only obligation to the civilized world. Now imagine a young person exposed to such a community for a month in adolescence or high school. She would probably find it fun (certainly more than classwork, anyway), charming, stimulating, but not appealing enough to want to stay. But when she graduated and realized the devil's bargain of civilization -- the trade-off of ecocide and wage slavery and emotional suffocation in return for 'financial security', she might well decide then to join an existing Model Intentional Community, or start her own, spreading out and refusing to buy the crappy consumer products and over-priced postage stamp building lots that drive the current economy. In short, she, and many or most or all of her similarly-exposed classmates, might walk away -- millions each year, until diverse Model Intentional Communities flourish across the globe, and the old economy, with no 'consumers' left to sustain it, crumbles away, and with it the old politics and the old social rules and the old hierarchies and the old education systems, and a new culture that values wilderness and well-being rises in its place. That's my dream. It cannot work, of course, in a world of six billion people, let alone the 12-14 billion we are likely to see by the end of the century. But if we show people another model now, a better way to live, maybe it's not impossible to believe that people will willingly, eagerly reduce their family sizes to no more than one child per female adult, so that, within a couple of centuries, our population is down below one billion and we can all live this way. We could therefore do what early 'civilizing' cultures like the Anasazi and Incans perhaps did, when, after experimenting with urban civilized culture, they suddenly and inexplicably walked away from their cities and returned to a non-hierarchical and natural life. What a valuable education that could turn out to be. |
 A
new Dutch government program called SeniorStart
"aims at stimulating successful entrepreneurship by older (45+) people
who have lost or left their jobs or are re-entering the workforce
after
an extended period, by
creating a dedicated (virtual) professionally-staffed National Service
Centre and supporting the
sharing of knowledge and experience between experienced senior
entrepreneurs and new startups through regional networks".The National Service Centre offers the following services.
The project is financed by the Taskforce on Older People and Employment, the GAK (Industrial Insurance Administration Office), the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the WISE (Working Network and Information Centre for Senior Entrepreneurs) Foundation. It was co-developed by WISE and MKB, an umbrella group of over 500 trade organizations and business associations. This is a wonderful initiative, one that deserves to be studied and emulated in other countries. Now, what I'd really like to see is a network that connects these older, experienced aspiring entrepreneurs with the other group that desperately needs advice on how to set up a new business -- young people just graduating from school and unwilling to enter into a lifelong contract of wage slavery as menial employees to pay off their student loans -- and then advises both groups on how to set up and operate a successful entrepreneurial business. |
 Fareed Zacharia describes two distinct qualities, constitutional liberalism ("the rule of law and basic human rights"), and democracy ("selection of government through free and fair, competitive, multiparty elections") as the cornerstones of a healthy, peaceful and sustainable state. He laments the rise of "illiberal democracies", where democratic governments have deemed their ballot victory to put them above the law, eroding basic constitutional freedoms and corrupting the democratic process. As the result of an horrendous double blow yesterday, the U.S. has lost its credibility as either a democracy or a constitutionally liberal state. First, the arch-conservative and deeply partisan U.S. Suprem e Court ruled, by its now standard 5-4 margin, that gerrymandering is not unconstitutional. Ruling on the outrageous redistricting plan in Pennsylvania, which essentially guarantees incumbent Republicans two thirds of the state's seats in Congress although they have a minority of the registered voters, the Chief Justice threw it back to the executive and legislative branches, saying, incredibly, "Our legislators have reached the
point of declaring that, when it comes
to apportionment, 'We are in the business of rigging elections.'" The Court made it clear that there is not
really any point in anyone in the U.S. bothering to vote in future
Congressional elections because gerrymandering has already determined
the results in all but a handful of districts. But in abrogating its
responsibility in a baldly partisan manner, the Court also said that
it
is up to the 'legislators' to fix the system, and that even though,
under Zacharia's definition above, the U.S. can no longer call itself a democracy,
they will not declare this completely fraudulent practice
unconstitutional. The NYT calls on both parties to introduce
"nonpartisan redistricting", as is done in Iowa, Canada, and just
about
every true Western democracy, a process that the thoroughly corrupt
judge Scalia denied, in his argument for the majority supporting the
continuation of gerrymandering, was reasonably possible. But asking
the
legislators to regulate themselves is like asking the fox to run the
hen-house. The judiciary, not the legislature, is responsible for
protecting the country against laws that are undemocratic and
unconstitutional, and it has utterly and disgracefully failed to do so
in this ruling.The second blow came in an announcement from the ACLU that its constitutional challenge of the Patriot Act cannot be publicized because the Justice Department has put a 'gag order' on the challenge while the Presnit campaigns around the country for renewal and expansion of this outrageous law. So, first, we have a law that allows the arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, denial of constitutional rights and freedoms, and unlimited rights of search and seizure of anyone by the paramilitary FBI/Homeland Security brownshirts, with no need for demonstration of reasonable cause, just the issuance of a vaguely worded "national security letter". And the perpetrators can hide behind "national security" to deprive the victims of this law, their families and their lawyers, of any information about why they have been victimized, and who authorized it. And now, to muffle any criticism of the law, the Justice Department is prohibiting opponents of the law from even talking to the public about challenges to it. So, again, under Zacharia's definition, the U.S. is now no longer a constitutionally liberal state -- the rule of law, and basic human rights and freedoms, are both abrogated, and in no small way, by the Patriot Act. There is no longer freedom of speech, freedom of dissent, freedom of assembly, right to a speedy and fair trial, or right to information about government actions. Rule of law has been subverted to the absolute authority of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to do whatever, in its discretion, limited only by the whim of the government of the day, it wants to do. To someone living in a democracy and a constitutional liberal country, as I do, where gerrymandering and laws like the Patriot Act are unthinkable, the fact that these two rulings occurred in one day, in an election year, with hardly a peep from the mainstream press or the candidates, is absolutely terrifying. Although, to be sure, these outrages have not yet been used in the U.S. to the extent that similarly undemocratic and constitutionally illiberal processes and laws have been used in Cuba, China, Iraq, North Korea and others of the most "unfree" states in the world, there is no reason to believe, after yesterday's double blow, that they couldn't be, and won't be in the future. Especially when (not if) the next terrorist attack on U.S. soil occurs. History is replete with examples showing that the decline from liberal democracy to ruthless and tyrannical dictatorship can occur quickly, and begins with a single step. Yesterday, the U.S. took two giant leaps along that path. The rest of the world can only watch, and shudder, at how easily and quietly the fall of a once-great country is beginning. |
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My Blog Functionality Scorecard
Everyone has their own specifications for what they'd like blogs to do. Advanced users, comfortable with the technology and able to tweak their blogs to do some amazing (and some silly) things, are quickly leaving the rest of us behind, and there are millions of others who took a quick try at blogging, threw up their hands, and gave up. This article is an attempt to create a scorecard of what blogs can and cannot presently do, and what they should be able to do. The objective is to spec out a blogging tool that is better (more useful), faster and simpler, at next to no cost. My benchmark for this scorecard is my father. If I could explain to him how to use a blog feature over the phone, it gets a 'green' score. If my brother, who lives a few blocks away from him and is an engineer, could set it up for him so he could use it, it gets a 'yellow' score. If it's not available at all, or unfathomable to novice users even with help, it gets a 'red' score. I consider blogs to be rudimentary content management, publishing, communication and social networking tools. So I have taken the content management, publishing and social networking functionalities that I identified as critical in my Personal Knowledge Management chart, and added the functionalities implicit in my Communicati ons Decision Chart, along with some intriguing additional features that readers have told me about recently, and these 20 functionalities together make up the scorecard. If you think important functions are missing, or some of the functions I've listed are trivial, let me know. No list will satisfy everyone, of course. Here's the explanation for my scores.
PS - If you'd like to try out an alternative to the blog Comments Thread, here's a more robust discussion space, courtesy of QuickTopic: Discuss Pushing the Blogging Envelope |
 Some articles have a long shelf life. Case in point: This BusinessWeek cover story from four years ago called Why Service Stinks. Bottom line is that, like everything else in the US, and to a lesser (but growing) extent elsewhere in the West, your value as a consumer (and as a citizen) is a direct function of your wealth and your propensity to spend it. So if the computer of the person who's serving you says you're the buying rep for a ten billion dollar company, believe you're going to get great service. But it that computer says you've only bought one thing from them before, and it required service under warranty: "Sorry, we seem to have a bad connection." *click* This is part of a larger malaise that tries to make us believe, for the benefit of the corporatist aristocracy that owns and runs more of our lives every day, that we are only what we buy. If it's easier for you to buy a replacement for the shoddy item you bought, than to return it or get it fixed, then if you can afford to do so you'll replace it. The vendor will therefore make sure it's easier to buy new than repair or return it under warranty. And if you can't afford to buy a new one, the v |