Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing
US democrats are trying to take out John McCain by suggesting that, underneath all the Republican bluster, he’s really one of them…
The resilient community
John Robb’s thinking about resilient communities over at Global Guerrillas:
It should be clear, as we watch the gyrations and excesses of global markets, that no organization/state/group has any meaningful control over its direction. The same is true for almost every other aspect of globalization, from the environment to transnational crime to energy flows. In short, we’ve lost control and our collective future is in the hands of a morally neutral system that is operating in ways that we don’t fully understand (nor will we).
The best defense against this emerging situation is not to call for new Manhattan projects or global treaties or Marshall plans, which won’t work since we can neither marshal the resources necessary nor collectively agree on anything other than the most basic rules of connectivity, it is to slowly introduce organic stability into out global system. The concept I’ve latched onto as a solution is what I call the resilient community.
This conceptual model creates a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses. These services are configured to provide the ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid in the following areas (an incomplete list): energy, food, security (both active and passive), communications and transportation.
C.f. my recent post here on top-down versus bottom-up resilience.
EU: bring ’em on!
I’ll have more to say on this soon, but the fact that the French EU deployment in Chad seems to be coinciding with, maybe even stimulating, an increase in violence there raises some interesting possibilities. Like the EU having a war on.
22,419
That is the number of people who voted for Fred Thompson in the Florida primary, in spite of the slightly inconvenient facts that (i) he had pulled out of the race a week beforehand, and (ii) he is widely considered to have been one of the least compelling candidates in modern times. I am dazzled: there are 22,419 people out there who know deep down, come what may, this is the man to lead their nation. Obviously there are vast disparities of scale here, but that is roughly the number of people who vote directly for David Cameron and/or Gordon Brown at the average general election. I want to meet these people, or at least a representative sample. They believe.