 - Last login: 5 hours agoLaodan
- laodan is a 56 year old guy from Wisconsin, USA.
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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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"The Bubble Bursts" by Scott Horton (Harpers Magazine)
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Feb 4, 9:11am
3 reviews
•http://harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hb...
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Serial Bubbles?
via Clusterfuck Nation / Jim Kunstler, in the February Edition of Harper's Magazine by Eric Janszenventure capitalist Janszen founded and owns iTulip.com.
Eric Janszen has made a splash in the mainstream media with his Harper's Magazine cover story on the "The Next Bubble." His thesis is that a new tidal wave of investment will shortly roll toward "infrastructure and alternative energy." By this Janszen means a revived nuclear power push, refurbishing highways, bridges, and tunnels, "high-speed rail," solar and wind power, and alternative liquid fuels. This coming boom, he says, would be driven by political fear about energy security.
 The Bubble Bursts summary of Janszen's article in Harper's
Peak Cheap Oil, Peak Dollar, but no Peak Gold iTulip's summary editorial position.
Google search for Eric Janszen's The Next Bubble. 398 results as of 2008-02-04 !!
Serial Bubbles? Jim Kunstler
Eric Janszen's is a financier and in his view:
1. There will and must be many more booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.
2. There is a familiar cycle to this process in the United States, and Janszen calls it part of our new faith-based financial world.
This financialization of reality is a simpleton. How can reality be reduced to such a narrow narrative? Well simply because finance is a specialization, the pushing always further of a narrow narrative about reality. The result of such specialization is a total disconnection from reality. What we are experiencing is indeed something a lot bigger then finance.
Our historical area of late-modernity is characterized by:
1. globalization of the logic of capital
- the logic of capital is expanding globally and superseding any traditional form of thinking
- this leads to a rebalancing of economic power among nations and blocs (US, EU, China, India...)
- this rebalancing of economic power foments the emergence of a "worldwide postmodern worldview"
2. growing impact of the side-effects of modernity
- climate Change
- loss of bio-diversity
- poisoning of land, water and air,
3. over-exploitation of mother-earth and resource collapse
- oil and energy in general
- drinking and irrigation water
- erosion of topsoil and reducing arable land.
- dwindling fisheries.
- freeing of the genie of "gene modified organisms" and loss of seeds variety.
- dwindling minerals.
- breeding of a food crisis
4. societal atomization
- reinforcement of the cult of individualism
- atomization; individual atoms are jumping out of their constitutive societal bodies
- weakened societal bounds
- fragmentation of societies
Jim Kunstler concludes that "... an investment campaign aimed at sustaining the unsustainable by other means would end in tears. "
Oubss... I'm inclined towards a more pro-active view along the lines of an economic rebalancing between private and public:
- public-private investment in energy R&D targeting a national energetic autonomy that would re-balance national foreign accounts
- public investment in infrastructure (long haul and urban public transportation complementing a decentralized system of rural local roads)
- subsidized higher education in exchange of a societal service to advance the education of all as well as the advancement of culture and arts.
- finance is what powers the formation of capital and should thus be guided and regulated to serve the national well-being in order to avoid bubbles of greed.
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