Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In this essay, we approach the world from a whole-system perspective. This means looking at those rules, laws, norms and trends that affect the whole planet, rather than any individual nation, region or issue.
If these were ordinary times, progressives might get away with casual images of our political opponents. Those who disagree “lack information,” or “remain prejudiced,” or are “gripped by an emotion like hate.” Reassured, we can return to informational outreach or protests or confrontations and hope that makes a difference.
Think of the Trump team, then, as a presidency in search of an emergency. Without a suitable crisis, prospects are fairly bleak. But given a financial meltdown, an epic natural disaster, a war, or a spectacular terrorist attack, opportunities open up.
I want to share a story with you today that I’ve not shared before on this blog. I was moved by something I saw on Twitter to the effect that the future will not remember Trump, but the future will remember the remarkable things done by those mobilising to oppose him.
Defeats are supposed to teach people how to do better; in theory. In practice, it often happens that defeats teach people how to become masters in blame-shifting.
To the question, “What is wrong with the economy?” Trump answers: we have made bad deals…
Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space.
Not since the Civil War has an American presidential Inauguration Day been so fraught with fear and dread (on February 23, 1861, Abraham Lincoln traveled to his inauguration under military guard, arriving in Washington, D.C., in disguise). The incoming president is the most unpopular of any to assume office since modern polling began.
It is according to the same sort of cultural changes and thus the change in the social roles of our heroes that we might notice the way we, in American, have replaced the explorer, frontiersman, aviator and astronaut with a new hero—one with a decidedly commercial bent.
So let’s get down to business: is the rise of Donald Trump a millenarian movement? If so, what the hell does that mean?
The magic of fire and hammer is truly transformative and I am marvelled by it every day that I work at the forge. An abandoned railroad spike is reborn as a hori hori and a truck’s leaf spring becomes a heavy duty trowel. This marvellous process has been around for millennia and it still appeals to many
The frequency of Internet searches for the term “peak oil” has waned dramatically in recent years; now even the number of articles announcing the “death” of peak oil has dwindled, so universal is the assumption that the concept is completely debunked. Why bother beating a dead horse? With supreme irony, it could be within the next few years when the maximum-ever rate of world oil production is actually achieved, to be followed by terminal decline.
