"On Forgetting the Obvious"

Article by Robert Kaplan about the Military-Civilian divide in the US.

Labor Standards and Corporate Responsibility

NYU Wagner podcast here, reporting research by Richard Locke, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Political Science at MIT, into Nike's monitoring mechanisms of its suppliers and the impacts (or lack thereof) on labor treatment.

Monitoring doesn't work well. Relationships between retailers and suppliers (frequent visits to factories) do work well. Cultures in corporations need to change - that's when things take off. Also, upstream effects of ordering habits of large retailers.

"...the discourse of amoral managers in exotic lands, you know, is just one piece of it; maybe we can clean up our house at home and have a pretty interesting impact."

Tea Party debate on NPR

"...if the tea party movement ever sends a signal that the gay agenda is okay with them, that same sex marriage is okay with them, that abortion is okay with them, the energy's gonna bleed out of the movement because that's not where the rank and file are that make up the tea party movement at the grassroots level."

A telling quote from a debate between a couple tea party leaders disagreeing on the basic tenets of the movement. Though fiscal conservativeness is at the core of their platform, it comes bound as a package with all this other sh*t.

People radicalize to resist.

In so many ways it's a shame.

As much for the failure of other means of resistance as the for the radicalization.

What is good, level, earnest, well-meaning gets lost in it all.

The bright side of impending doom

Humankind is converging upon its collective annihilation. This is, unlike so many other things, an objective reality. As we come closer to realizing this reality, the intensity of it's felt heat may yet serve as a catalyst for effective pushback against its arrival.

People are fond of saying we are more conscious and enlightened now than ever before. I'm not sure I agree. But if there is one thing that sets us apart from historical humankind it is that we are being forced to organize collectively in the face of pressures we've never faced before, a process that is being facilitated by technologies that are equally unprecedented. Population pressure has forced us into uncomfortably close proximity - culturally, socially, nationally - and into increasing competition for increasingly scarce resources. To contend with this we are organizing collectively on an unprecedented scale, a scale that includes the whole of humankind.

I am not saying we should do this, only that we are. Even people that would rather have nothing to do with each other are being forced to come to the table. Globalization is a reality. The market has made us interdependent, while transportation and communication technologies have made our societies increasingly interpenetrating. These technologies are also serving to facilitate our collective organization.

With this convergence of pressure and means, we may yet be able to avoid final catastrophe. What we are in the midst of is a massive reorganization of our social realms toward a body capable of working as one in the face of certain necessities. I do not think there is any avoiding this. Things will be lost, cultures will be partially absorbed, but dominance will also be forever compromised. In order to organize collectively, we will NEED to respect difference while identifying the real non-negotiables and achieving real solutions. This is a promising predicament. As promising as it is frightening.

At Burning Man I was once at the center of 30,000 people converging around a quarter-acre bonfire. We in the innermost circle were so close to the fire that each one of us could be exposed for only a couple seconds before needing to weave back into the whirling mass or be burned. Despite the inward pressure of 30,000 people, none of whom could know how close we at the center were to imminent doom, we weren't driven into the fire. I believe it was the seriousness of our predicament that resulted in pushback sufficient to keep the crowd from pushing us in. Between pressure and pushback, an equilibrium was established. This was not engineered. It happened spontaneously in response to real pressures.

But it didn't happen until it had to. It held right there at the cusp, at the very limit of feasability before the people at the center burned.

Anti-colonialist architecture?

Collaborative Architecture in India

Are Biofuels a Social Work Issue?

"The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world's 2 billion poorest people. The risk is that millions of those on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder will start falling off as rising food prices drop their consumption below the survival level."

From Lester Brown's report to the U.S. Congress on ethanol, in which the agricultural economist and founder of the Earth Policy Institute as well as the Worldwatch Institute warns of an impending famine as competition stiffens for food and fuel.

Sustainability is complicated.