The oligarchs have taken down two governments in the past two weeks – Italy and Greece. The idea that the Mario Monti, the new PM of Italy, is something wonderful, is deranged. Note that once again, neither an election nor a referendum was allowed.
The law in the US is, and has been for years, a tool which is used as a weapon. Some people are given a pass, others are hit with the full force of the law. That is to say, there is no rule of law in the US, it is a nation of people, not laws. This is well known in certain circles, but needed to be shown to others at the end of a nightstick.
As a rule I think people who pull the Nazi card lack real arguments, Dorli Rainey, by virtue of her first-person experience, gets a pass.
I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the difference between reading widely and reading deeply. In education there is a metaphor that compares education to icebergs, that suggests that too much education involves a survey of a wide range of subjects, the tips of the icebergs, and that students seldom are afforded the opportunity to dive beneath the surface and experience the vastness that awaits there.
I want to select a book into which I can dive deeply, a book that I can read, re-read and read again over the next year; I want to devote 365 hours, one hour a day for the next year, to one single book, and I want you to help me decide what book that ought to be.
My friends are familiar with my Eighteen Books That Have Shaped My World list. I now want my friends (I do consider my readers to be my friends) to help me discover Book No. 19. My criteria are simple:
First, the book must be one that you have read cover-to-cover and consider to be worthy of your further time and effort in contemplation beyond pure enjoyment, and
Second, the book must be a single work by a single author, no collections or complete-works volumes (I will make an exception for poetry, but not short stories unless you can make a really stunning case that they are of a piece).
Beyond these two criteria, I make no other demands. I’m up for fiction or non-fiction, poetry and plays.
If you’re reading this on Facebook, please follow the link to Have Coffee Will Write to make your suggestion.
I’ve long been a fan of Jeremy Rifkin. I first discovered him in 1987 when I read his 10th book: Time Wars. I got to meet Rifkin at a Toronto environmental conference in 1995 when he was promoting his book: The End Of Work.
This week I’m reading his most recent book: The the Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. About a third of the way through the book I came across a passage that made me think of our local effort at communication: The Civic Commons.
Rifkin writes:
[T]he province of Utrecht[, the Netherlands]…has begun a conversation with its citizenry, the local business community, university researchers, and even high schools – essentially inviting the entire region into the game. The master plan has gone lateral. It is now a platform for a province-wide discussion on how to achieve a transition into a Third Industrial Revolution economy.
People are critiquing parts of the master plan platform, offering their own ideas, and even voting on their favorite projects. In the process, the new players are connecting up to share their expertise, pooling their mutual interests, and creating networks within and across the five-pillar [1. shifting to renewable energy; 2. transforming the building stock of every continent into micro-power plants to collect renewable energies on site; 3. deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies; 4. using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy-sharing intergrid that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of energy locally, on site, they can sell surplus back to the gird and share electricity with their continental neighbors); and 5. transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental interactive power grid] skeleton vision. The TIR has become a community exercise, the Dutch version of the old American barn raising, where the whole community comes together to build the structure. This is democratization of energy, and what distributed capitalism is really all about.
And it’s working. The population of the province is becoming intimately engaged in its own economic future. “Not in my backyard” is being replaced by a collaborative effort to steward the neighborhood biosphere.
If there is a single lesson to take away from the experience we’ve garnered in engaging master plans, it is that the process itself is a community exercise. That is, it requires participation of all three sectors – government, the business community, and neighborhood civil society organization. p. 103
This week marks the first anniversary of The Civic Commons and I’ve taken some time to look back at the online conversations. I’m not impressed. What has impressed me has been the conversations at two Civic Commons gatherings I’ve attended where people sat face to face and listened to each other. Listening is optional in cyberspace.
At both of the Civic Commons events I took part in at their offices — It’s the Sprawl, Stupid: The Budget Buster No One’s Talking About and the National Day of Conversation 2011 — I was wowed by the diversity and expertise of those who came to engage in the conversation. The only aspect that I found lacking, and I’m as much to blame for this as anyone, was that when the conversation ended, it was over; there hasn’t been, at least for me, a continuing conversation on what I thought where important discussions.
Cleveland, or perhaps more appropriately, North East Ohio, is not Utrecht, but I have to wonder what the factors are that generated this conversation in a province of The Netherlands that we’re not getting here.
Why are the Dutch embracing the 21st century and the Third Industrial Revolution while Cleveland is mired in the 20th century and the death throes of the Second Industrial Revolution?
Start from this moment, just start over again. Start being who you want to be, who you should have been, doesn’t matter where you’ve been, now you’re clean. Throw away the emptiness, don’t stay in bed all day, get up get out and start to live, give yourself a chance at life, believe it wont always be full of strife.
See colours and hope, untie the rope, start climbing up it. Keep climbing higher, even when you are tired..just have a break and come back re-wired. Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.
Bad days will come, just let them pass you by. Start again another day and slowly the pain will wash away, start today. Don’t be afraid. When the whole world seems to be crashing down, remember there is always someone who might want you around. Turn around, start again. Make some friends.
Do things you find difficult with the aim of moving forward. Don’t take good feelings for granted, treasure every moment, hold onto it and breathe it in and lock it somewhere deep within. Start to smile, let it become a grin, don’t worry about being too fat or too thin, just go for it. Believe you could win. Take things on the chin and come back fighting stronger, start writing, keep typing, not so many tears to be wiping.
How will I start again today? How will you?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about solid waste, reading about solid waste, talking about solid waste and writing about solid waste. Most people don’t. They learned about recycling in grade school and they recognize the chasing arrows symbol, but they haven’t learned about the first and second sides of the symbol’s message because they’re not good for our consumer frenzy based concept of business. Can you name them?
First reduce, don’t buy products you really don’t need and when you must buy a product, look for the product that has the least amount of packaging that after you get the box/bag/plastic wrap open you’ll then have to either reuse or recycle.
Second, reuse, instead of throwing away all those plastic water bottles, refill them from the tap or, if chlorine, etc., really bothers you, from your filtered-water carafe. Buy in stores that let you fill your own containers. I think I used the same peanut butter jar for about 6 years, refilling it every couple of months at the local food co-op. Get creative. Only as a very last resort for those products or packaging for products that you can’t either not buy in the first place or reuse, can you look for how to keep your solid waste out of the trash.
Third, recycle. Be glad you don’t have the challenge these people do.
From the Occupy Cleveland Community Action Outreach Group:
The Banks Occupy Cleveland. It’s time to Occupy back!
The Occupy Cleveland movement is coming back to Public Square in a big way this Saturday, November 12th! Be at the Tom Johnson statue (northwest, near the “55” building) at noon to enjoy performances, crafts, a potluck lunch, great labor and liberation speakers, and a big spirited march through downtown at 3:00. And at 4:00, join in a nonviolent and FUN direct action to Occupy the Banks that have been occupying Cleveland!
Our theme for the day is rebuilding our foreclosed communities. People who want to work hard and play by the rules can’t get jobs, can’t pay their mortgages, and can’t catch a break. That’s because the economic system is rigged Continue Reading »
Men and women communicate quite differently; we use language differently;True?
by Cavana Faithwalker on Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 7:07am“For example, women use language as primarily a way of establishing connections, interdependence, and negotiating relationship. Conflict is a real threat to connection and therefore to be avoided at all costs. Women typically shun confrontations.
For men, language is primarily a means to preserve independence and negotiate status. Conflict is the necessary means by which independence and status are negotiated, so it is accepted.
Men are able to confront, disagree, and argue, even in a contentious manner, but when it’s all over, they’re fine. It usually doesn’t affect their Continue Reading »
I’ve been taking part in Cleveland’s Socrates Café since we began back in October 2002. With one single exception I have always walked away from the conversation with at least one new perspective. The ability to alter understanding based on evidence and reasoned argument is, I believe, the hallmark of Intelligence. Digging in your heels, putting your fingers in you ears and screaming lalalalalal as loud as you can to avoid information that makes you uncomfortable is not.
Even the most principled position must be subject to change when presented with data that puts the position in question.
That’s why I’m happy that Dan Moulthrop decided to publicly discuss his own flip-flop on the #Occupy movement. (No, I’m not surprised that Dan changed his mind, nor that he decided to make his new thinking public, that’s the kind of intelligent person he is.)
But, as the OWS movement has grown and matured, my opinion is shifting. Last week, I stumbled across this by UT Austin journalism professor Robert Jensen on al-Jazeera English.
The demand for demands is an attempt to shoehorn the Occupy gatherings into conventional politics, to force the energy of these gatherings into a form that people in power recognise, so that they can roll out strategies to divert, co-opt, buy off, or – if those tactics fail – squash any challenge to business as usual.
Rather than listing demands, we critics of concentrated wealth and power in the US can dig in and deepen our analysis of the systems that produce that unjust distribution of wealth and power. This is a time for action, but there also is a need for analysis.
Rallying around a common concern about economic injustice is a beginning; understanding the structures and institutions of illegitimate authority is the next step.
We need to recognise that the crises we face are not simply the result of greedy corporate executives or corrupt politicians, but rather of failed systems. The problem is not the specific people who control most of the wealth of the country, or those in government who serve them, but the systems that create those roles.
It’s an important point, I think, and reminded me of how many times since helping to start the Civic Commons, I’ve said that conversation is important, because that’s where ideas are shared and change begins. While I was frustrated by OWS for not, say, supporting Obama’s jobs bill or offering a tax policy proposal or just jumping into the conversation about how to turn the economy around, OWS demonstrators have been discussing, analyzing and forming a critique of the much broader and deeper system.
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