Saturday Links for the Week — January 13, 2007

Fred First Forest Shadows 2
Preparing for Civilization’s End

Rob Paterson Creates a Trusted Space to Save the World: “My intent is to Host a space where you can read about the stories of people who are making progress in the Great Work that has to be done if we are to have a chance of getting though this century.” Photo above is from Rob’s collaborator, Fred First.

Being What We Dare: Great article by Jeremy Heigh on enabling and encouraging greatness. Excerpt: “Maybe my purpose will be to grab the bullhorn and find the soapbox – I donít know. Maybe my life will be spent finding those few people who miraculously made it through with the ability to walk through walls. If I canít play, at least I could protect those that can.”

A Real Natural Enterprise: An amazing, inspiring story from the CBC about a bakery in my former home town of Winnipeg reveals how Natural Enterprises emerge to meet urgent human needs. This is the model we need to follow. Thanks to Evelyn at Linsomniac for the link.

How the World Really Works

A Nation of Children: Incisive ranter Joe Bageant tells us who we really are. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link. Excerpt:

Here in China’s global landfill, tens of millions of Americans are prisoners — including me. And that is not counting the quarter of the world’s incarcerated population who are America citizens physically held in US prison system. The rest of us serve a life sentence, released on personal recognizance to pull our time in our own homes, processing goods for the Great Asian Goods Landfill Culture, here at the end of their new globalized Silk Route of Confucian capitalism. At this end of the electronics Silk Road we are prisoners of consumption, rather like those caged French geese that are force fed corn so as to produce fatty livers for pate. But in a marvelous marriage of psychology, psychometric marketing and the gulag, our system imprisons its people from the inside out. We even punish ourselves without supervision — to doubt the system is its own punishment, purely for the social and personal anxiety it causes. Given enough insight, a thoughtful person can nearly question himself or herself to death… On the whole though, our infantilized citizenry is having too much fun to question itself. In the drive for a harder hard-on, faster everything, and round the clock stimulation, we have created an artificial and frivolous citizenry, one that is incapable of serious thought or deeper humor — a nation of children completely happy to stay that way. America’s childish material gratification is so grotesquely satisfying that it smothers the most basic sort of reason, much less philosophical thinking. Fuck it all. Nietzsche and Rimbaud are too goddamned hard to read anyway.

Calling Greens Together: Grist’s David Roberts says it’s now or never for Greens to get political traction in the US, and to do that we need to get our act and message together. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link. Excerpt:

Each nuke plant is fantastically expensive, uninsurable, subsidized out the wazoo, vulnerable to terrorist attack or accident, and constantly generating waste that we still don’t know what to do with. Nuclear is a market Frankenstein, kept alive with jolts of taxpayer cash and bully-pulpit support from political, military and business elites… The same focus is behind the perpetual push to drill and mine more places (offshore, ANWR, Rocky Mountains, Appalachian Mountains). It’s behind the implacable opposition to carbon emissions limits. It goes to the very animating spirit of U.S. power elites. The green agenda threatens all that. The decentralization and democratization of energy production and the development of a more conscious, thoughtful consumer lifestyle will yield an economy powered by less cheap oil and more valuable human laboróalong with a foreign policy conducted from a position of security and independence. Justifications for imperial adventures will be harder to come by. If greens hope to make any progress, they must use this time of immense possibility to join together and push in the same direction.

Help Protect the Polar Bear: Another petition, and only for Americans, alas, but for an important cause.

Working Smarter

First, Does It Fill a Need?: Kathy Sierra explains the seven levels in the hierarchy of customer needs. Enchantment is the seventh, but first a product or service needs to meet the first six: Fills a need, Does it effectively, East to learn,Efficient, User-friendly, and Intuitive.

More Great Info on How to Make Open Space Work: From Peggy Holman’s Open Circle Company.

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1 Response to Saturday Links for the Week — January 13, 2007

  1. jessica says:

    Hey I found this great video about a group who raised money for Kham Aid traveling on the Silk Road. Check it out: http://www.travelistic.com/video/show/1982

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