Saturday Links of the Week — February 2, 2008

Art, Science, Literature, Philosophy:

• My essay on Miniature Truths has been published in BoyBedlam Review. Thanks to Cassandra (Elizabeth Adams) for noticing, and for her kind comments on it. This is a great publication, BTW, worth reading in its entirety. 
• Rebecca Solnit, archivist of resistance movements, explains why the Zapatistas have taken the snail as their icon: true revolution is slow, and occurs in unmeasurably small grassroots steps. When I talk about creating small, local models of a better way to live, letting them evolve and spiral outwards (like the spiral of the snail) and be taken up by others nearby, as the only way to bring about change, this is what I’m talking about. Viva el caracol de resistencia!
• Tree Bressen offers a wonderful list of online resources on building consensus.
  
• Amazon’s Kindle ushers in the era of legible hand-held downloadable e-books. Finally a real alternative to dead trees. And maybe, useful voice-recognition software may finally be on the horizon, too.

Preparing for Civilization’s End:

• Zane explains how in corporatist markets our local natural resources are treated as nothing more than exploitable commodities to be bought and sold for quick short-term ROI. 
• The US, Australia and Belgium rank as the most environmentally irresponsible affluent nations. 
• George Monbiot acknowledges how population growth, especially in struggling nations and the swelling ranks of immigrants to affluent nations, threatens our world. But the consumption excesses of the rich threaten the world much more. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link. 
• The head-in-the-sand gang at Davos still don’t understand how immense the environmental threats to our civilization are. Thanks to Lugon at the FluWiki for the link. And the Fortune 500 don’t get it either.
• The Brasilian Amazon rainforest is rapidly disappearing.
• Ironically, the End of Oil will actually increase the corporatist oligopoly’s stranglehold on global agricultural production. So much for dreams of the return to the family farm. Royal Dutch Shell acknowledges Peak Oil and the looming Global Warming crisis.
• Polar ice melt is accelerating at a rate that surprises even climate scientists.

Politics and Economics:

• The Tipping Point is a lie, and mass-marketing advertising is the only reliable way to sell on a big scale, says Yahoo’s Duncan Watts (presumably now soon to be another Microsoft marketer) in Fast Company. Thanks to my colleague Greg Turko for the link. 
• Even the politicians now acknowledge that a serious recession is imminent, and that the reason for it is our reckless, greedy and unsustainable, economic behaviour (at all levels — government, corporate and individual). George Soros says it will be comparable to the Great Depression. Now the payback begins.
• Military spending is bankrupting the US, and much of it is hidden in other expenditure budgets. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.
• “Wall Street, Main Street and Washington collectively brought us to the impasse of 2008, in which a debt crisis is superimposed on a downturn in the economy, which is overlaid on a bear market in real estate, which is conjoined with a persistent and worrying weakness in the overseas value of the dollar.”
• Nicholas Kristof explains that only through grassroots socially-responsible entrepreneurship can we reform the dysfunctional globalized corporatist economy. 
• Toronto Star’s Antonia Zerbisias laments how in Hollywood unwanted teenage pregnancies always have a happy ending — a live birth, a change of heart, and a happy, comfortable life. But in America, where the rate of teenage pregnancies, always much higher than in other affluent nations, is spiking, the likelihood of a Hollywood ending is pretty low. 
• Thanks to corporatist control of the North American media, citizens are not being told of the danger of GM foods, so they don’t know the harm they’re doing to themselves eating them. 
• Because of the 2-party hegemony in the US, and the unwillingness of the cowardly candidates to commit to ending the obscene and ruinous war in Iraq, anti-war groups in the US are giving up their political fight. As I keep saying, the political and economic system cannot be reformed from within. If you don’t believe this, listen to Obama heaping praise on the execrable Ronald Reagan. 
• US citizens strongly distrust big business, and favour much more stringent regulations on their activities, but generally distrust government so much they don’t expect regulations to be enforced anyway. This is how it all begins.