Experience with multiversal systems generation preferred but not required. Management and coordination of poorly understood direction and leadership in accordance with ill-defined goals and objectives of the organization to safeguard and grow the assets of the organization for future generations or until such time as original systems expire.
The Director of Creation (DC) is invested with broad responsibilities and authority. Portions of these may be occasionally delegated though not the overall responsibility for the sustainability and profitability of the enterprise. Hands-off approach favored by many stakeholders; direct interventionist line by still others. Ability to tread lines between the two a must. Evidence for existence/non-existence must be salutary and mutually self-refuting.
Stakeholders: Time. Space. Matter. Shifting array of personnel with varied attributes including but not limited to cognition, lifespans, opposable digits and other physical capabilities.
Key Competencies: Simultaneous demonstration of passion, enthusiasm and indifference. Imagination, thick skin, flexible construction parameters of embedded design evolution, with the ability to authorize destruction and/or extinction of poorly performing entities. Ability to provide for deprivation means-testing of sample populations based on populations’ abilities to perceive and mimic key competencies of the DC. Maintain a healthy balance between multiple dimensions, obvious solutions within reach and absolute breaches of DC protocol. Direct interaction with personnel definitively prohibited though solicited without cease.
Benefits Package: Poorly defined though perceived to be significant.
New Flagpole column is up (on a snazzy new Flagpole website, btw) wherein I recommit myself and my proclivities for overreach to reading the entrails of early 21st century eco-enlightment before they dry. Our po-po-mo motto (what is the heart, anyway, if not two facing question marks?): “How can it be dead yet if we didn’t kill it?”
One connection to what’s happening to the planet is the shape our self-interest takes in the form of our kids and what they will be dealing with. In the early years of life when we are learning about the world, unafraid to question adults or puzzle over the answers of more than a few of them, there’s an opportunity to bond with the natural environment in a fundamental way that is a heavy indicator of our later predispositions. Here’s a thoughtful Monitor piece about a mom’s concern for her young sons over global warming.
On the other corner (no offense intended unless appropriate) is this wonderful little bit, via TPM, about the coordination of global warming denial by a former Limbaugh producer. The fun never stops, apparently.
It’s profound in its way, the manner in which that ever-so-brief early epoch of life effects so much of what comes later. Relatedly, in a way that I wish I could say was some kind of extreme example of this but which is way more average than we should be comfortable with, a run down of the top 15 searches on Technorati, via the wit and wisdom of Dr. Cole.
And then, just to round things out, the world’s angriest dog.
tracks through the forest of stupid, veering off for extended moments in moronic triviality as we all behave like children for a little while longer. If you want to see the current dynamics of the debate over the financial crisis, gird your loins for this.
It’s amazing. On the one hand you have a couple sober realists, patiently speaking about the absolute necessity to massively de-leverage the insolvent banks… heaping ridicule on central bankers and others who didn’t see this coming but who remain in decision-making positions, insisting that banks must be nationalized. On the other, you have clowns asking for stock tips. There could be no more explicit description of the crisis itself than this display of inanity, which is at least representative if not the norm. When are we going to pull out of this? Like it’s just another slight downturn and not the collapse of the house of the mother of all pyramid schemes.
It’s a deep structural crisis. When Taleb tries to explain how executive compensation is tied to incentives that led to this mess in the first place, he’s met with demands to instead answer questions that are so far removed from the situation, they might as well be about the rock star status of Roubini and Taleb at the recent Davos summit.
One of the difficult things about any transition to a different model, whether in realms economic, social, political and especially one that overlaps all of these, is the extent to which assumptions based on business-as-usual are allowed travel in tact. We continue to hold fast to many assumptions, all the while slapping on all sorts of various goals for decreasing carbon footprints and lower emissions. It’s quite insane, by a traditional definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
This article about partnering industrial polluters with large landowners holds a few barely-opened pistachios about this transition and the kinds of changes in thinking that are required to begin living toward different ends.
The idea is to nurture food- and fiber-producing activities that are more climate-friendly. Over time, Collins says by phone from Washington, “Where we go from here will alter the discussion of how the country thinks about natural resources.”
The program will be similar to payments farmers currently receive to rest their land in order to preserve the soil, restoration of wetlands along rivers by municipalities to promote water quality and flood control, and “biodiversity banks” in which landholders that affect habitat for endangered species are required to provide equal or greater amount of habitat elsewhere.
Bringing in a large, extraordinarily-tentacled and therefore quite sluggish bureaucracy like USDA alters the implications for how the policy will evolve. Once agriculture departments at colleges and universities begin to alter the way they think and teach on conservation and allocation of natural resources, especially with an abstract concept (ecology) becoming hopefully less abstracted as it gets integrated into curricula and policy outlooks, forecasts and long term models, then the beginning of the transition will be in sight. You factor out the ideology by attaching valuation on an objective plane, as seeing natural resources and related commodities as having greater value when considered as part of a larger whole. Sustainable then becomes a requirement instead of merely a goal.
Lest we forget, this is all in the service of not waking to that day when, as best summed up by the lyrics of a fourteenth-generation Indian killer, ” you can’t find an answer so you pray for a reason.”
It’s hard not see this article about the American Dream in reverse as a blown-up close up of the coastline of our general, if hearty, methods of D/B/A, physically, morally, socially, practically in every respect. Just look at the pictures, or read the article, or chance it and do both. In the blighted-at-birth and now abandoned settlements somehow referred to perhaps without irony (is that still possible?) as ‘once-middle-class-exurbs’, it’s hard not to have your head pinned back by the force of the pan-out to the wider angle on our culture of ambitious slackening. It’s the art of being left bag-holding on which legends have been forged. Is there any doubt this is what these myths (dreams, American and otherwise) stand for?
Lehigh Acres, like much of Florida and many suburbs nationwide, was born with speculation in its DNA.
The area got its start in the 1950s when a Chicago pest control baron, Lee Ratner, and several partners bought thousands of acres of farmland and plotted about 100,000 lots. With Fort Myers, 15 miles to the west, developers left little room for schools, parks or even businesses.
What they sold was sun and quiet living.
The engine we are running on is powered by the engine we’re running on. It produces what it was designed to produce.
Key players in the Obama economic team beyond Geithner are also tied to Rubin or Citigroup or both, from Larry Summers, the administration’s top economic adviser, to Gary Gensler, the newly named nominee to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and a Treasury undersecretary in the Clinton administration. Back then, Summers and Gensler joined hands with Phil Gramm to ward off regulation of the derivative markets that have since brought the banking system to ruin. We must take it on faith that they have subsequently had judgment transplants.
Mr. Rich is being a serious joker here, yanking on our chains, such as they have not yet been repo’d. The faith in judgment transplants is as near perfect as the belief that such a local market as cited above can/will bounce back in some resemblance to its former self. It’s part of the defense mechanism to believe in the right to self-exploitation that informs the notion that such manifestations are or were a part of some dream that itself was in a some way righteous or desirable. I’ll demure to this digression on Gresham’s Law from Miller’s essay Money and How It Gets That Way from Stand Still Like a Hummingbird. Gresham’s Law roughly states that “bad money drives out good.” Miller’s context was our country’s departure from the gold standard.
For the sake of creating work, on the other hand, no such hard and fast rules were stipulated by the early nineteenth-century economists. Work and trade were kept apart in watertight compartments, although it was obvious even then, to those who made the subject a profound study, that twist it how you will, the inevitable liaison is always there, namely debt. That is one of the reasons why, under the sway of Marxian diuretic, debt is no longer regarded as a permanent element in the economic disorder, but rather as a solvent, so to speak, in the conversion of capital to labor. Countries like Germany and Italy, in as much as they refuse to adopt the Marxian diuretic, tend to increase the circuit velocity of money, in order that, as an eminent Dutch economist points out, “their currencies may drag themselves by the hair out of the quicksands of worthlessness.” However salutary these tactics may be with regard to the evaporation of the national debt in the countries just mentioned, the fact is nevertheless incontestable that the gold mentality of the world remains unaffected. With money becoming ever cheaper the price of bullion naturally rises to implement the costive condition of the call market. This the real explanation of the fact that, in Pomerania, shortly after Hilter’s advent to power, the turnip and swede crop fell off so markedly. For though it is undeniable that dry years have always had a definite adverse influence upon the price level, yet during the year in question the average rainfall was higher than that of the five years preceding Hitler’s advent. Had this not been so we should be at a loss to account or the fact that during those five preceding years brewery shares were a feature of remarkable strength and integrity.
Lots of discussions this week about art (imagine that), so I thought it might be a good time to share this site, built by a friend of mine. She’s showing some of the green things you can do in your own life, home and work, and it’s all pretty nifty. In fact, LK’s pretty nifty herself.
She’s adamant about referring to herself as a graphic artist, as though the term artist held some other, reserved connotations (imagine that). She’s a painter, who works by hand – politely sidestepping the term artist while elevating your/her experience. It brings to mind how people throw things around, including that word, so carelessly. But judge for yourself. What she calls graphic design blurs into fine art so seamlessly, you wouldn’t think there is even a difference. No gimmicks necessary. It’s the opposite of the decorations many people attempt to pass off, that hold all the wonder of road signs to blah.
Her Citizen Green antics are only an extension of this, like everything else in her life. Enjoy.
Businesses with vested interests tell us what we want. SUVs with abstract names, extra large lattes, suburban barracks with manicured lawns, sugary donuts instead of good bread… whatever it is, beneath the illusions of freedom and choice we labor under the tyrannical hand of focus groups and placebo-addicted control platoons calibrated to adjust even for random reactions to an array of product possibilities. The feedback provides direction; but we should remember, the tests are rigged.
This is not to darken your Wednesday, only to point out that a good deal of reality is circumscribed by conflicted interests, i.e., being made up anyway, only to the advantage of certain parties. What’s keeping you from making it up based on your own set of priorities? Only the minor discomfort of swimming against the tide for a little while. But you’ll get used to this as it makes you stronger, carving your own opinions and putting them into practice. You’ll even lose a few friends. Much of this is quite dangerous, as it puts an enormous responsibility on you to know what you’re doing/buying/eating/reading/taking/saying/believing and otherwise allowing some space inside that head of yours. But look at it this way – Simon says you have that responsibility anyway.
Green means calm in the face of cowardice, turning the good faith paradigm on its head; be skeptical, get critical. Before we internalize truths, be open to lies. Refuse to be mocked; admit when you’re wrong; keep digging when you’re right.
Not competition, so no wagering. As mentioned early, I interviewed some of the participants at the Green Life Expo last week. Here is part one of the video extravaganza version
Dost our eco-imaginations know no limits? Ladies and germs… the RITI Coffee Printer
In addition to ridding the printing process of the ink cartridge (its most environmentally un-friendly throw-out), the RITI printer also requires a bit of human action to get things going, which eliminates the need for any really significant power source. This last part of the idea seems a bit impractical, but after all that coffee you are drinking, maybe you need some exercise to burn off your excess energy!? Not a coffee drinker? No worries, it works just as well with tea.
