Core paragraph: President Obama has the right team in place to begin this strategic downsizing of the defense budget. Gates has been an outspoken advocate of cutting programs we can't afford, and he has strong backing from Adm. Mike Mullen and Gen. James Cartwright, the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military brass knows the country won't be secure if it's broke.
Phi Beta Iota: This article is corrupt on so many levels, from moral to intellectual to financial, it simply epitomizes all that is wrong with Washington.
Animation with narration: Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.
The Unreasonable Institute Empowers the Public to Choose the Next Wave of High-Impact Social Entrepreneurs
Global donations will determine which entrepreneurs gain admission to esteemed mentorship program
BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Starting Jan. 20, 45 social entrepreneurs will showcase their ventures in an online platform called the Unreasonable Finalist Marketplace (http://marketplace.unreasonableinstitute.org/). For 50 days, people from around the world are invited to vote with their wallets on the most viable ventures. The first 25 of the 45 finalists to raise $8,000 in the Marketplace will earn access to the highly acclaimed six-week mentorship program at the Unreasonable Institute. At the Institute, these social entrepreneurs undergo rigorous training sessions, including personal and entrepreneurial skill development, intensive workshops and hands-on guidance from leading thought leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs and investors.
The 45 finalists were selected from more than 300 applicants in 60 countries. Each applicant had to present a financially self-sustaining venture that has the ability to scale to serve the needs of at least 1 million people and demonstrates customer validation through sales or pilots. The finalists this year include a Chinese engineer with a prototype for waterless composting toilets; a 2010 CNN Hero from Kenya who has distributed over 10,000 solar lanterns; and an American inventor with a water purification system that can roll up to the size of a ruler.
Lester Brown — founder of both the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, author of over 50 books on environmental issues, recipient of 26 honorary degrees and a MacArthur Fellowship, and (according to the Washington Post) “one of the world's most influential thinkers” — has just published a cogent article on the rapidly emerging global food crisis in Foreign Policy magazine. He clearly outlines the problem and where attention and resources must be put to ameliorate it.
I knew such a crisis was emerging. I hadn't realized it was emerging so rapidly.
I offer Brown's article here with no further commentary beyond this: His essay — like most other insightful, data-filled articles of its type — omits the key fact that the political and economic systems that generate such situations are not built to respond to them in a truly life-affirming way. “Issues” and “crises” are symptoms of those dysfunctional systems. If social critics and activists spent half the attention and resources on actually transforming those systems that we expend on “issues” and “crises”, we would soon see those “issues” and “crises” being replaced by “solutions” and “creative initiatives”. This is a supreme example of the kind of thing that a wiser democracy — if we had one — would start to address immediately, if it hadn't already done so decades ago.
While many of us work to transform our political and economic systems, we need also to consider what to do in the meantime as these issues and crises continue to grow. So I also offer below two delightful articles on something that we can all do to ameliorate the impact of the food crisis on our own lives and communities. The articles describe not only the functionality of urban gardening but also its enjoyment — and its spread in the face of rising food prices. Significantly, such gardening is a key element in one of the more co-intelligent initiatives I've seen in recent years, the Transition Towns movement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns.
