Saturday Links for the Week – February 10, 2007

Now What’s Going On Out There?:

1. A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest: That line is from a Paul Simon song, but it summarizes what Lakoff describes in his books about our inability to appreciate views and ideas inconsistent with our established worldviews. How else could you explain how 87% of elected Republicans in Congress believe that man-made global warming is a myth, and that number is rising? Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.
2. When will we understand that technology will not get us out of this?: James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, explains that most Americans still think of modern problems like global warming as a problem that technology needs to fix to allow the economy to continue just the way it is today. That thinking is fatal. “We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.” A brilliant and short synopsis of what ails us. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.
3. The people find another workaround for corporatist gouging: When the music publishing oligopoly started gouging people by fixing CD prices, the market found a workaround for the distortion: file-sharing. The industry howled, but they have only themselves to blame. Now the Monsanto biotech oligopoly is howling because Indian farmers are bootlegging (and enhancing) their GM seeds, paying the oligopoly nothing. Another workaround for a market distortion. Alas, this one is scary, because the Frankenseeds threaten the entire Indian ecosystem.
4. When money loses its value, it’s the poor & middle class who suffer: Now that the US system of remuneration of executives is utterly out of control, with ‘average’ CEO salaries of $18 million per year and fired execs getting quarter billion dollar severances, the fallout is that, to this obscenely overpaid minority, money has no value, so they think nothing of buying $2000/pound valentine chocolates. This is runaway inflation for anything of quality: While a tiny minority bids up the price for a few quality goods to insane levels, the rest of us are left with Chinese crap. Of course, the inflation data published by the administration will never report this: what used to be expected durability and quality is now ‘luxury’, not part of the official numbers and out of reach to all but those who don’t appreciate it.
5. When something gets too big to manage, there are two options: There are natural limits to communities in nature, and creatures other than humans ‘know’ to rein in their numbers to keep themselves self-manageable. Our species has forgotten this, and the result is organizations and states that are huge, unwieldy and unmanageable. Gar Alperovitz, noting that US population could exceed one billion people by the end of this century, says there are two alternatives: break up or decentralize power. Ideally, he’s right, except that breaking a megalith into a dozen or a hundred slightly-less-massive entities merely creates that many more unmanageable units. The break-up has to be radical, right down to the community level, to the natural limits of self-organization. To that extent, Alerovitz’ two options are really one: we need to break large organizations and states down into community-sized units (150-1000people) and decentralize power to those units.

Cartoon by Wiley Miller from the strip Non-Sequitur.