Year: 2012

Values and the next generation

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…perhaps the next generation will work to coordinate and jointly design interventions, communications, and campaigns that discourage values such as money, image, and status and that instead provide many opportunities to pursue values such as personal growth, close connections to other people, and contributions to the larger world.

“Inside Job” Director Charles Ferguson: Wall Street has turned the U.S. into a “Predatory Nation”

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Two years after directing the Academy Award-winning documentary, “Inside Job,” filmmaker Charles Ferguson returns with a new book, “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.” Ferguson explores why no top financial executives have been jailed for their role in the nation’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We also discuss Larry Summers and the revolving door between academia and Wall Street, as well as the key role Democrats have played in deregulating the financial industry. According to Ferguson, a “predatory elite” has “taken over significant portions of economic policy and of the political system, and also, unfortunately, major portions of the economics discipline.”

Citywatch: Japan’s Earthquake

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Lessons from a tsunami are a terrible thing to waste, so last week, the Food Policy Research Initiative based at University of Toronto and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health hosted a symposium of Japanese food and agricultural experts and Toronto public health leaders to survey what others can learn from Japan’s response to the crisis.

Quebec’s student revolt goes viral

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In a move indicative of a leadership grasping for control, the provincial government passed Law 78 in mid-May. Attempting to end the strikes and force the reopening of the universities, the law in no uncertain terms makes protest illegal. Groups planning demonstrations with more than 50 expected participants, according to Law 78, must inform the police in writing at least eight hours in advance of the protest with details of time, location, size and duration. More perturbing still, expressing support for demonstrations and strikes deemed unpermitted under Law 78 renders one guilty of that offense and liable to face the same steep fines.

What is the secret of parsnips?

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Whenever I go to a big supermarket that carries fresh food, I always find these long, wrinkled, ugly, rooty-looking things called parsnips on display. Someone must like them or they wouldn’t be there, but I can’t find anyone who admits to eating them, or anyone who knows what the attraction might be. It certainly isn’t phallic, as carrots sometimes get portrayed. What is the allure of parsnips?

Information storms and the limits to information

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Odum often drew an analogy between the way meteorological storms such as hurricanes disperse heat and the way that other systems do, including information systems. After Tom Abel’s excellent post last week on trends in education in a world in transition, it is a good time to share Odum’s analogy linking storms of information and weather storms. But to make that analogy, we first need a meteorology lesson, starting with the second law of thermodynamics.

Irrefragable Justice

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The concept of “odious debt” has been related to debt acquired by regimes that have been regarded as illegitimate in international law either because they were oppressive, or undemocratic, or because a change in state regime rather than just government had taken place, in the case of Cuba and Iraq due to external invasion. But might we extend this concept to stable western democracies, whose citizens are now struggling with oppressive debts? Recalling Sack’s two conditions–that the debt was incurred without the consent of the people and was not for their benefit–can we apply these conditions to our own situation in the UK?

Real Homes: Small, frugal, and green

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It’s a perfect time to take a look at what it means to own a home, to make a home, to rent a home. This is an opportunity to take the best from the old ways of doing things, and from the new, and to define “home” in a way that doesn’t place unsustainable burdens on resources, both natural and fiscal.