A film by Helena Norberg-Hodge, Steven Gorelick & John Page
‘Going local' is a powerful strategy to help repair our fractured world – our ecosystems, our societies and our selves. Far from the old institutions of power, people are starting to forge a very different future…
FeaturingVandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Michael Shuman, Juliet Schor, Richard Heinberg, Rob Hopkins, Andrew Simms, Zac Goldsmith, Samdhong Rinpoche
Today, we know more about the universe than about our society. It's time to use the power of information to explore social and economic life on Earth and discover options for a sustainable future. Together, we can manage the challenges of the 21st century, combining the best of all knowledge.
The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator is a previously unseen multidisciplinary international scientific endeavour with focus on techno-socio-economic-environmental systems. The three main achievements of the FuturICT flagship will be the establishment of
a Living Earth Simulator (global-scale simulation of techno-socio-economic systems),
Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, scarcity of resources, emerging risks and conflicts, epidemics, etc.), and
an Innovation Accelerator (identifying innovations early on, evaluating them across disciplines and supporting co-creation projects between different scientific disciplines, business, and governance).
Comment: This is not a new idea but has expanded to a great extent. The 2004/2005 proposal “Re-configuring the Global Organisms' Operating System Through Mobile Democracy” mentions a whole earth simulation of knowledge layers + mobile connectivity to access & add to systems so that more people are involved in the shaping of our world. The Earth Intelligence Network in connection with Medard Gabel has been advocating an EarthGame + a strategic analytic model to jump-start a prosperous world @peace.
Below was posted at the Games for Change forum on the subject:
Evolutionary psychology is a good thread upon which to base our social evolution. You can use it to clarify old thinking that doesn't work, suggest that new thinking can become organic as adaptation to reality, and can even associate religion. However, the trope about Pleistocene psychology being something that is stubbornly with us is rather flimsy. I've just been reading David Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature, and he pretty well dispenses with that idea. I can't reproduce the whole argument, but it seems that we are being driven by cultural evolution, and that has produced plenty of modifications to stone age cognition. That has given us opportunity and danger, and it happens quickly. He cites a study of 18 generations of guppies that produced some big changes. Humans have had 400 generations since Pleistocene, and much has changed, even physically.
It would be merciful if, when tragedies such as Tucson's occur, there were a moratorium on sociology. But respites from half-baked explanations, often serving political opportunism, are impossible because of a timeless human craving and a characteristic of many modern minds.
Phi Beta Iota: Most may be missing an important point regarding on the Arizona shooting. We completely agree that the individual shooter in question was probably set off by the cross-hairs rhetoric, but what we think has been absent in the range of responses to the tragedy in Tucson is the divorce of the two-party system from reality and from the majority of the people. The bailing out of Wall Street with its ten million dollar bonuses, the tens of millions foreclosed and evicted, the 6-12 million long-term unemployed, the 22% current unemployment rate, NONE OF this, from our vantage, is being dealt with responsibly by the government.
The people are not stupid. Putting a banker in charge of Obama's time and what he sees at the White House is to some a last straw and makes clear what Robert Steele wrote in his quick book, ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig, i.e. President Obama and Congress are far, far too dependent on money and lobbyists and many feel a pox on both their houses.
Sadly, many Americans on both sides of the aisle believe that this is no longer a Republic. The government is busy federalizing state and local police and preparing for the worst. What the government does not realize is that the worst is when our children start speaking of emigrating to Canada or Denmark because they have better governments. That breaks our collective heart. Our government, across the board, has lost a great deal of its integrity. Gandhi had it right on truth and non-violence, but we are coming off so many decades of really ignoring the people, especially the common people and those who are poor or now always struggling to make ends meet, that we should fear for the worst.
NIGHTWATCH Extract China-US: Special comment. International news services broadcast video and translations of Chinese Minister of Defense Liang insulting and hectoring the US, represented by the Secretary of Defense. The Chinese tasked Secretary Gates to defend and to explain to the Chinese why the US sells weapons to Taiwan and conducts naval training in the Yellow Sea. China demanded they stop. Instead of rejecting the Chinese demands and leaving, Gates tried to defend what needs not defense in Asia – US national policy.
A couple of points are worth noting. The tongue lashing Gates endured at a Singapore conference last year by a Chinese general clearly was no accident. That insult focused on the same issues as the latest. Gates should have walked out of the Singapore meeting last year and should have walked out of today's session. It remains unclear what the US hoped to gain that merited humiliation.
China is not ready to be a cooperative partner in international security affairs as some analysts contend; resents and resists the tutelage or guidance that some analysts think the US must offer; and has no intention of becoming more open in response to US requests if only because the US wants it so badly.
Phi Beta Iota: See our Memorandum on Chinese Irregular Warfare. The US Government has hit bottom in terms of lacking legitimacy at home and credibility abroad. Ideology is not a substitute for intelligence, and civility is not a substitute for cultural understanding.
The unscheduled visit by United States Vice President Joe Biden to Islamabad this week underscores Washington's embarrassment and anxiety that it stands excluded from a regional initiative on Afghan peace process that could be about to take off. The rapid sequence of events over the past fortnight has taken Washington by surprise.
DefDog Comment: Most insurgencies last past 10 years it almost always requires a political settlement….thus we are seeing what could have been accomplished at the beginning by understanding the Pashtun and sitting down, Jirga style, and asking for UBL, who was granted sanctuary under the Pasthun Honor Code, Pasthunwali…..no cultural understanding has resulted in a 10 year waste…
Phi Beta Iota: The US Government is suffering from multiple disconnects–from its public, from reality, from strategic analytics, from cultural intelligence–from ANY intelligence relevant to all challenges at all levels–and finally, from integrity. Integrity is what allows well-intentioned people to cope with ambiguity. When they give up their integrity, they yield the field to those with political, ideological, and financial ambitions, and the public interest suffers–as does the welfare of our Armed Forces in harm's way.
By Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers (out in paperback on Monday)
Baseline Scenario, 9 January 2011
Highlighted extracts:
The Bill Daley Problem is completely bipartisan – it shows us the White House fails to understand that, at the heart of our economy, we have a huge time bomb.
…largest U.S. banks – have far too little equity and far too much debt relative to that thin level of equity…
Today’s most dangerous government sponsored enterprises are the largest six bank holding companies: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley.
No one can show significant social benefits from the increase in bank size, leverage, and overall riskiness over the past 15 years. The social costs of these banks – and their complete capture of the regulatory apparatus – are apparent in the worst recession and slowest recovery since the 1930s.
Paul Volcker gets it; no wonder he has resigned. Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, gets it. Tom Hoenig, president of the Kansas City Fed, gets it. Elizabeth Warren, the tireless champion of consumer rights, gets it. Gene Fama, father of the efficient financial markets view, gets it better than anyone.
Phi Beta Iota: Our generous and well-intentioned philanthropists appear to be unaware that the Federal Reserve, Morgan Chase, and Citi-Bank have pulled a Bernie Maddoff on them–they think they are being “taken care of” at the very moment when everything they have worked so hard for is most vulnerable to a massive melt-down. The control of the President's mind and time is the ultimate victory for anyone seeking to control the White House. It is “checkmate” against We the People. None of the bureaucracies in the Executive–and certainly not the so-called “intelligence community”– are capable of rescuing the President–he is a happy captive.
