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Last login: 7 hours agoLaodan: laodan is a 56 year old guy from Wisconsin, USA.; Likes 1,586 pages, 24 videos, 8 photos • 227 fans • Received 64 reviews; Member since Aug 08, 2005

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Theyre Global Citizens. Theyre Hugely Rich. And They Pull the Strings. - washing…: May 4, 6:48am 0 review politics, globalization
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/02/AR20080502033...

Robert Reichs Blog: Obama vs. McCain, and The Four Stories of American Life: Feb 13, 2:10pm 2 reviews politics, us, change
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2008/02/obama-vs-mccain-and-four-stories-of.html; The Four Stories of American Life by Robert Reich in his Blog Robert Reich is the nation's 22nd Secretary of Labor and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
1. the art of the political narrative. The Triumphant Individual. The Benevolent Community. The Mob at the Gates. The Rot at the Top. 2. A little history 3. Comes George Bush 4. The challenge for progressives The Four Stories of American Life Consider that nations could very well behave, kind of, like individuals and observe how: - the US is like the adolescent among nations - the EU is like the adult among nations - and China is like the grand-mother among nations Fact is that the narrative of adolescents is different from the narrative of adults that is different from the narrative of grand-parents. Robert Reich gives us a masterly description of the adolescent narrative about nations. It is a non-dualist approach that fits the canon of modern theories of change in dynamic environments as well as the logic of the Tao. - "The Triumphant Individual" is the young active polarity (young yang) that ages into "the Benevolent Community" which is the old active polarity (old yang). - The old active polarity then degenerates into "The Mob at the Gates" which is the young passive polarity (young yin) that in turn transforms into the old passive polarity "The Rot at the Top". - The old passive polarity then degenerates into a new young active polarity, thus, engaging a new cycle of change. The mass movement for change behind Obama illustrates the emergence of a new young active polarity possibly signaling the start of a new cycle in American societal life. At the light of this narrative of change in the American adolescent nation the present electoral cycle takes an interesting intellectual twist.

Year of the Rat Spirit Prevails As China Overcomes Its Weather | China Briefin…: Feb 8, 4:10pm 1 review economics, politics, china
http://www.china-briefing.com/blog/2008/02/08/year-of-the-rat-spirit-prevails...; "Capitalism with Chinese characteristics" overcomes the Weather via China Law Blog; in "China Briefing" by Dezan Shira & Associates China's largest independent business advisory
China's long ten days of extreme snowy conditions finally relented as a massive coordinated effort by the national and regional Governments together with the military enabled the nation to enjoy a peaceful new year. Snow was cleared, trains although delayed, arrived, and fuel got through to power stations to permit Chinese nationals the luxury of a few days holiday. ... What other government, one has to ask, would commandeer commercial trains and vehicles, to divert them to where power was needed - for the good of the whole, rather than pander to the continuing profits of energy and transportation companies ? Who else would step in and cap the prices of basic foodstuffs, when rampant profiteering had threatened to drive them out of the hands of many of China's poorer people ? "Its not market-driven" scream the detractors. Definitely not, but its a good deal more civilized. ... As the snows in China recede, and as the nation can bask in the joy of a new Chinese Year, the main lesson to be learnt is that the Chinese system of managing their country seems just about right. "Capitalism with Chinese characterstics" works - when the State has the power to step in and correct adversity. Having solved the problem of keeping 1.3 billion people happy during the most important social time of year and under difficult national weather conditions, the Spring Festival of 2008 may well go down in history as when global economists - and donu2019t forget the new World Bank Chief Economist is Chinese - start to apply more of that medicine to curb the rampant selfishness of some capitalist theory and the insane ideology of the worst of communist social control that we see with depressingly now frequent occurance in the West, and in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere in Asia in different guises. The new global economic thinking is now Chinese influenced, and we just saw it in action in China. It was impressive. "Capitalism with Chinese characteristics" overcomes the Weather Here's an interesting approach of China's societal system. Some will reject the ideas in this article. Fact is that no other country in the world could solve so successfully a problem so huge as the last snow storms that immobilized China. The world is starting to acknowledge the successes of China's model and I think its impact is going to be felt ever more powerfully in the years to come. But what is China's model? It's capitalism with Chinese characteristics. But what does that mean? - It's the recognition that the logic of capital is the most effective and transforming societal force in history. - It's the recognition that the logic of capital has to be framed within a more globally encompassing logic, human logic, in order to harmonize the functioning of societal. - It's the application of China's ancestral ideas about morality and the organization of society in its politics - It's the technical knowledge China has gained along more than 2 Milena of management of large bureaucratic structures; knowledge that has been transmitted to the present generations who put it successfully in application. What do you think?

Oil Change International - Follow the Oil Money - Presidential Races: Jan 31, 10:36am 14 reviews petroleum, politics, visualization, free-tools
http://oilmoney.priceofoil.org/federalRaceGraph.php; Follow the Oil Money in the next US elections via Information aesthetics in http://oilmoney.priceofoil.org
Presidential Races 1. Choose what race you want to see by selecting the election year to the left. 2. Adjust the 'Filters' to change the number of candiates and relations shown. [?] 3. Click 'Find the Oil Money!' Follow the Oil Money in the next US elections Visualization of the political blogosphere Great free tool by the Center for Responsive Politics. Who receives the most money from the Oil Industry, what companies and what individuals representing them...

Countdown to a Meltdown: Jan 26, 10:48am 4 reviews economics, politics, globalization, postmodernity, modernity
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200507/fallows; Countdown to a Meltdown in The Atlantic by James Fallows
The hopes of our nation are bleeding away along with our few remaining economic resources. Here is the challenge: - Our country no longer controls its economic fundamentals. - Compared with the America of the past, it has become stagnant, classbound, and brutally unfair. - Compared with the rest of the world, it is on the way down. We think we are a great power - and our military is still ahead of China's. Everyone else thinks that over the past twenty years we finally pushed our luck too far. To deal with these problems once in office, we must point out basic truths in the campaign. ... But remember that the reality of the story reaches backward, and that is why I have concentrated on the missed opportunities, the spendthrift recklessness, the warnings America heard but tuned out. To tell it that way in public would of course only make things worse, and we can't afford the recriminations or the further waste of time. The only chance for a new beginning is to make people believe there actually is a chance. Countdown to a Meltdown January 20, 2016, Master Strategy Memo. Subject: The Coming Year - and Beyond READ THIS ARTICLE but be aware only to read it if you are not enslaved to our "infotainment-drunk society". It is a fiction, supposedly written in 2016, but its real subject is about the strategic economic blunders of the West between 1990 and 2008 that are now starting to explode in our faces. This is a real eye-opener on the stakes that are at play in the 2008 election. It makes no doubt that we are at a turning point in the economic and political history of modernity. But the subject of James Fallow's article has to be placed into perspective. What it describes is the short-term history of the US. Hereafter is a trial-sketch of the long history of the world in which this short term enfolds. More particularly an accelerating double process is at work that spans between the boundaries of two epochal periods on the ladder of the long haul history: 1. We are in the last phase of modernity (destructive late-modernity). What I mean to say is that the logic of capital and its ideology of rationalism have spread to the four corners of the earth. Capitalism is now putting in competition the citizens of the earth for the limited salaried jobs it makes available thus unleashing a process that acts like a great income equalizer: reducing incomes in the West and increasing incomes in the East and the South. This equalization on a global scale happens in an institutional vacuum. National states are no match indeed for what is going on, at best, they compete with one another to attract the localization of big capital's investments within their shores. A backlash against globalization is reaching its sketching phase in the West. How it will turn out is anybody's guess (protectionism, war?) but its consequences will be felt by all. In parallel to this more classic economic and political rebalancing goes a far deeper non-classic movement that will largely subdue the conflictual relationship wrought upon nations by the initial classic rebalancing. (side effects of modernity, peak resources, societal atomization) 2. We are in the early phase of postmodernity (constructive early postmodernity): Some trends are slowly emerging that reject the premises of modernity: 1. the logic of capital is incompatible with the principle of life. It has thus to be subdued by a set of rules, 2. reality is too vast to be accessible in its entirety by science, 3. science has to encompass itself within the value system of a postmodern foundational story, 4. humans feel a dire need to believe in a credible global worldview, 5. humanity's polarities have to be rebalanced (societies / individuals), and so on.

Jeff Vail: Energy Intelligence: Dec 31, 2007 11:55am 0 review politics, society, change
http://www.jeffvail.net/2007/12/2008-pause.html

Dissent Magazine: Dec 23, 2007 1:38pm 1 review culture, politics, china
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article?article=767; China: meritocracy versus democracy in Dissent Magazine by Daniel A. Bell
There may be the worry that the strong meritocratic system becomes entrenched - fossilized, like the American constitutional system - and hard to change once it's in place. But what if it works well? ... In the sobering documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore notes that he has been hammering away about the dangers of global warming for decades, and he expresses frustration at the lack of interest among democratically-elected decision makers in the United States. ... The question is, who is more likely to enact laws that limit greenhouse gases in China: political leaders chosen by poor farmers who understandably worry first and foremost about their short-term economic interests or deputies in the meritocratically chosen legislature? And what if the large majority of Chinese seem satisfied with strong meritocracy? Should we complain just because the system doesn't satisfy our ideas about democratic rule or should we allow for the possibility that there are morally legitimate, if not superior, alternatives to Western-style liberal democracy? From Marx to Confucius: Changing Discourses on China's Political Future Democracy is the outcome of a process characterized by fight and negotiation between the clergy, the aristocracy and the merchants, that took place in Western Europe, along the centuries between the late Middle-Ages and the 20th century. No other country on earth has this kind of societal landscape. It is thus difficult to imagine how the historical process that led to the emergence of democracy could ever be repeated. And the exercise to impose democracy in Iraq has definitely bankrupted the idea that democracy could ever be imposed from the outside. Impossible as an inside process of maturation and impossible through outside imposition democracy appears more and more as what it is - a Western European exception that also rooted in its geographic extensions. How could we then reject the idea of other countries (90% of the world population) trying to find their own ways in managing the public institutions of their industrializing societies? I don't think that we Westerners are in any moral high ground to give lessons to others (our history and our present actions!). Nor do we necessarily have the most efficacious institutional model to propose. China has over 2000 years of practice in managing a huge state bureaucracy. Their model was based on: - the teaching of the Confucian classics that instilled the values of righteousness - exams for the scholars concluding for the successful ones in their access to the decision making process. In light of all this it is not surprising to witness a Chinese revival of a system that after all has served them quite well along their history. Who are we to even dare questioning their experimentations?

The Archdruid Report: The Age of Salvage Societies: Oct 25, 2007 11:47am 2 reviews economics, politics
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/10/age-of-salvage-societies.html; The Age of Salvage Societies from Archdruid by John Michael Greer
The industrial economy currently lurching toward historyu2019s compost bin, after all, did not rise to global dominance because the people of the world agreed to make that happen. Nor did the worldu2019s elites, if the political classes of the worldu2019s various societies deserve that name, make that decision; of course there were cabals of industrialists who did their level best to further its spread, but there were plenty of leadership groups in other, competing societies who staked everything they had on resisting it, and failed. Industrial civilization had its day in the sun because, in a world where plenty of cheap abundant fossil fuel could be had for the digging or drilling, the industrial mode of production was more efficient than its rivals, and enabled the communities that embraced it to prosper at the expense of those that did not. In turn, as the industrial system undercuts the environmental conditions that allow it to thrive, new forms better adapted to the new reality will elbow todayu2019s industrialism aside and take its place. The Age of Salvage Societies John Michael Greer's analysis of the present derives from his understanding of the "long haul history". Modernity treated the citizens of tribes as "savages" and now in late-modernity are emerging the roots of our future "savage societies". The core of Greer's argument is that we are entering an area of "resource nationalism". Peak resources is preparing us "a mode of industrial economy u2013 scarcity industrialism u2013 that pursues resource nationalism rather than the mirage of a global economy, and shifts the allocation of energy and other scarce resources from the market to the political sphere". The present geopolitical maneuverings are essentially early signs of "resource nationalism" as the Western answer to "peak oil" that foreshadows a coming "scarcity industrialism". As Alan Greenspan noted Iraq is all about the oil... as is the posturing towards Iran. I tend to agree that peak resources shall foster a scarcity industrialism where the market is going to be superseded by central planning. Seen in this light the retrenchment of individual freedoms that we observe presently all around the Western world starts to make sense. This retrenchment of individual freedoms should be understood as early signs of a process of strengthening of the political institutions. But for this to work it should be accompanied by the strengthening of a culture of obedience in a common worldview. Strong public institutions have always taken the substance of their power over their citizens from the gluing of those citizens behind a common vision of the whole of reality what is otherwise called a common worldview. Animism was the holistic worldview of pre-agricultural tribal societies, religions served to assure the power of kingdoms and empires that grew out of the population growth that followed agriculture, individualism fostered the justification for the spread of the logic of capital that is basically responsible for peak resources and all the side-effects of modernity. Scarcity industrialism and salvage economies will act like a transitioning from modernity to what comes after, what Greer calls, ecotechnic societies. Such ecotechnic societies (postmodern societies) will answer the necessity to assure their reproduction and, in all likelihood, will foster a postmodern worldview (shared on a worldwide scale) combining elements of animism with elements of technicity.

Adding up US subsidies for auto travel with and without the costs of war | MetaF…: Oct 2, 2007 9:30am 1 review economics, politics
http://www.metafilter.com/65210/Adding-up-US-subsidies-for-auto-travel-with-a...; subsidies for auto travel in Metafilter by salvia
In the U.S., motorists do not pay their way. The US government spends more on highways and other auto-related expenses than it receives from auto-related taxes, unlike almost every country in Europe. In a recent report [pdf], Mark Delucchi calculates automobile-related costs and revenues in three different ways and concludes the subsidy is around 20-70 cents per gallon or $24-105 billion in 2002. But what are automobile-related costs, you ask? subsidies for auto travel In the U.S., motorists do not pay their way Do motor-vehicle users in the US pay their way? 22 pages PDF by Mark A. Delucchi in ScienceDirect concluding that "The analysis indicates that in the US current tax and fee payments to the government by motor-vehicle users fall short of government expenditures related to motor-vehicle use by approximately 20\u201370 cents per gallon of all motor fuel. (" Social Cost of Transportation Mark A. Delucchi's reports and articles. A gold mine of data for those interested in understanding the impact of the public decision to favor the car industry over public transportation. U.S. MILITARY EXPENDITURES TO PROTECT THE USE OF PERSIAN-GULF OIL FOR MOTOR VEHICLES 65 pages PDF by Mark A. Delucchi and James Murphy. Excellent post by Salvia that opens our horizons to the impact of public policy and the non-neutrality of science and technology. The comments on the post are also well worth a read. In short: 1. Science and technology are not neutral they are results of investments decisions by capital holders and political decisions to smooth the ride of those investments. Thus the political decision to invest in a road network instead of expanding the rail network... 2. Each year, in the US, road transportation kills 40 000+ and seriously injures hundreds of thousands. In China, in 2006, it killed over 120,000... 3. By investing in a road network the state explicitly guaranteed to protect the supply of what powers the network: oil. Foreign relations and defense would thus be engaged in protecting the country's oil supplies. 4. Un-intended consequences are only measured afterwards is it not?. And so late-modernity is plagued with the un-ending chain of side-effects of modernity.

Ovi Magazine : Democracy as the Common Sense of the People: Confronting the Anci…: Sep 20, 2007 9:45am 1 review politics, society
http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/2043; Confronting the Ancient to the Modern View of democracy via 3QD / Morgan Meis, in OVI Magazine by Emanuel L. Paparella
Were we to seriously survey the history of mankind we would soon find out that humanity has had as their leaders precious few philosopher-kings and an abundance of Caesars and Napoleons, people who in general are in love with Machiavellian "power politik" which they practice rationally on the chess-board of life while being completely uninterested in philosophy. At this point one may ask: is Plato's critique still valid today, and if so, what are the practical consequences of ignoring it? Let us try to apply this critique to an overarching problem of modern Western Civilization, namely the principle of sustainable development. ... in a free market there is no normative standard of what constitutes a need and what constitutes a want. The only standard is one's desires, as Madison Avenue well knows and as Plato intimated when he said that poverty is not measured by how little one possesses but by how big are one's desires. ... when one has trust and faith in the innate wisdom of the people, then democracy begins to appear as the only possible solution to the problems of all the people. Confronting the Ancient to the Modern View of democracy What's proposed here is to trust a mechanism that theoretically possibly works on the long haul at the image of the free market. But this mechanism is fraught with ideological assumptions that are far apart from reality. We are confronted today with urgency. Necessity is pouring on us from all quarters and the solutions to those necessities can't wait for the people's "ccommon sense" to realize that there is a real problem out there. This proposition of waiting for that so called "common sense" to realize that there is a problem ignores the necessity and the urgency that lay at the heart of each of modernity's side-effects that are erupting in late-modernity. The thesis of this article is grounded in an abstract logic that ignores the necessity of reality. This is called ideology.