If you notice that this blog uses less buzz-words these days, it’s because the Holignet.org site has used them all up. All of them. Every single one. And in the end, I don’t think even they know what they’re intending to say.
asides are the non-commited make-outs of blogging
If you notice that this blog uses less buzz-words these days, it’s because the Holignet.org site has used them all up. All of them. Every single one. And in the end, I don’t think even they know what they’re intending to say.
Mike, you posted that at 11:30 pm. I thought you had kids, a job(s), the need for sleep. How do you find these really, really obscure websites. What other superpowers do you have hidden? :0
-PC
ps. I’m bridging some cub scouts under my care over to Troop 257 this weekend. I’ll tell Mr. K you said hello.
It is so easy to write bad copy. I know this from way, way too much personal experience.
True story: Last weekend I had a freelance assignment to write catalog copy for 10 book titles. I’d been at it for about 6 hours straight when I got to title no. 8 - a little book about spiritual themes in the Spider-Man films. My headline? “Spiritual truth spun by the Webslinger himself!” The kicker? I didn’t change it.
PC, I’ve shared my secret before, but I’ll do it again here:
The secret to getting many, many things done in life is to do a really half-assed job at all of them.
Aly, I think that means you’re now officially part of “The Problem” instead of the solution.
Nah, she’s just embracing the crazy. I affirm your choice, O’Malley.
To be honest, I didn’t get past the flow chart on that site. I loved the arrow pointing straight from cars down to The Dark Side. I mean, the Dark Scenario. It’s the little things that delight and sustain me.
The section where they talk about phasing out money, and instead using Community Bucks, which you can earn by doing certain essential tasks for the community, reminded me so much of the South Park episode “Die, Hippie, Die.”
Stan is talking to a College Hippie, and the Hippie is trying to explain to him how they don’t need “The Corporations” or capitalism.
COLLEGE HIPPIE 1: Right now we’re proving we don’t need corporations. We don’t need money. This can become a commune where everyone just helps each other.
COLLEGE HIPPIE 2: Yeah, we’ll have one guy who like, who like, makes bread. And one guy who like, looks out for other people’s safety.
STAN: You mean like a baker and a cop?
COLLEGE HIPPIE 2: No no, can’t you imagine a place where people live together and like, provide services for each other in exchange for their services?
KYLE: Yeah, it’s called a town.
COLLEGE HIPPIE 1: You kids just haven’t been to college yet.
Oh man, I can HEAR Kyle’s voice. Beauty.
That’s so visually unappealing…which makes me run away fast. (And yes, I know that says more about me than it.) It looks like the “before” example for a graphic design assignment.
Slightly related: when we lived in LA, I had my heart set on a refurbished vintage range. (Think 50’s hot rod in your kitchen.) I found a few places that offered such pieces and contacted one of them only to be told that as a part of their effort to reform America, they received payment exclusively in gold.
How many did you order?
Umm, so is it just me or did Addison Rd do a weird change and then change back today. Mike? bored baby?
Mike did a stupid thing and deleted a key piece of code in the sidebar, then had to spend his lunch hour trying to figure out what it was.
oh. sorry.
Yes, we were all confused…not least by the scary, glowing, purply Mike. We’re all loving this new, spiffy, arty, slightly smirky Mike against that fetching field of green, yes?
why yes June, yes we are. Does that field of green feel vaguely familiar to you by any chance?
Bring back glowy purple Mike. It looked so nice against the orange-yellow Author’s Halo.
Cerise darling, you’ve been in Seattle too long. You need happy sunshine greeness in your life!
Here is the real article, name and all. Have fun.
Humanity in Transition and how
You Can Be Part of the Solution
by A Nicholas Frank
It is too late now to play around by labeling people as “pessimists” or “optimists” and politics has nothing to do with this. Our situation demands us to consider what actions each of us must take in order to help humanity survive and even thrive on our endangered planet. Species have vanished before, yet they did not suffer the pain of being fully conscious of their fate nor the guilt of having to face their young and their own consciences knowing that they could have done the right thing and created a brighter future, but failed to act. Scientific data is coming in now at an inconvenient rate, faster than we are willing to acknowledge just how endangered we are.
Are we truly approaching our own extinction? Probabilities pointing towards extinction are high and are rising rapidly! Although a full discussion is too long to delve into here, we can provide a flash picture of our planet’s crises. Global temperatures are rising and the permafrost has already begun melting. As the permafrost melts, it releases large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere that help to accelerate the pace of global warming. The rising temperature will soon release the trapped methane in the thawing permafrost.
Methane is a greenhouse gas twenty times more powerful than CO2. As a result, oceans will warm and go dead with a massive burp, adding to the hot-mix that will further warm and poison the atmosphere. There are theories that something like this happened 250 million years ago in the Great Permian Extinction that killed off 95% of all living things. But take no comfort in the prospect of a quick and painless exit. The extinction we stand to face will not be fast or painless. It could take centuries of unimaginable hell on Earth.
We are all on a runaway train speeding toward a dark destination. There is very little time left to throw the switch and transition our train over to the high track that could lead us to a brighter future. If we act right now, we can still be part of the solution. But first we need to understand why we are so lost, how we dug ourselves so deep into this hole, and just how swiftly and cleverly we must act in order to save ourselves.
The Roots of Our Problem
Our human condition, like a beautiful old oak tree, has deep roots. Though obscured by layers of time and other factors, our roots are broad and complex. They trace back to our biological evolution and to the sources and formation of human belief systems. For the sake of brevity, we will only take a quick look at the early development of the human thought processes that are largely responsible for our present condition.
We can gain a reasonable understanding of how we got where we are by going back more than two millennia and listening to the conversations that took place in ancient Athens among the leading thinkers of the time. Among the many discussions that probed the depth of human nature and the cosmos, a pivotal argument took place between two opposing groups of thought. Democretus was the leading thinker within the group that believed that the nature of matter and the universe could be understood only once things were reduced and studied at the level of their smallest indivisible parts, their atoms. Opposing the atomists were the holists. Aristotle, the leading thinker of the holistic philosophy, proposed that the universe must be studied as an undivided whole in order to preserve its unique properties and to fully understand its nature.
Through the centuries that passed, the atomistic concept gained recognition over the holistic and formed the basis of reductionist science, which in turn influenced the development of modern European/Western culture. Reductionism ultimately did what the holists predicted in principle. It created highly specialized human systems and a culture that is deeply fragmented and suffers from an immeasurable loss in quality. While reductionism is an essential tool of scientific investigation, society can only be sustained when functions as a whole system free of the incoherence caused by fragmentation.
A living body is an example: the heart not only beats to sustain itself but to sustain all other organs as well. Likewise the lungs breathe for the lungs and for all other organs, and so on. Such fully reciprocating relationships are required in order to maintain viable systems. When closely examined, fully reciprocating relationships are also found in the nuclear world among the protons and electrons that make up atoms, and within the electron exchange between the various atoms that make up the molecules of all the matter we know.
We find that each part and particle of nature has “known”, from the beginning of time, that it inherently possesses an atomistic structure and emergent holistic quality. These two attributes are inseparable in nature. A simple example is the systemic relationship between two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, which together form a water molecule. Water cannot be found in any of the constituent parts but only as an emergent property with an atomistic structure and holistic quality.
However, the holistic perspective eluded the modern thought process, which has descended from atomist and reductionist philosophies. The specialized, but fragmented social, economic, political and governing practices that are in place today are products of reductionism that lack the indispensable holistic component necessary for the establishment of truly viable and sustainable human societies.
Our Unsustainable Economy
Most of today’s nations and societies are dysfunctional to varying degrees. They are nothing more than social, economic and political fragments waiting to be reassembled into viable and sustainable systems. Among the many dysfunctional aspects of 21st century global culture, the economy is most at risk. Whether we refer to it as capitalism, consumerist capitalism, or capitalist consumerism, we know that we are all participants in what has, in recent decades, become a vulnerable global economic monoculture. Our economy is endangered because monocultures, which lack variety and choice, cannot adapt or evolve. It also suffers because it is disconnected from a systemic consideration of the resource availability and the natural life support capacity.
This disconnect has led to various problems. One is capitalism’s infinite appetite for resources – a perpetual hunger for economic growth through production and consumption. Our planet, with its finite resources and limited life support capacity, cannot satisfy that demand. The other problem is related to capitalism’s inherent drive to concentrate wealth. In the global capitalist zero-sum game this has resulted in progressively fewer big winners and growing numbers of losers.
Over time the concentration of wealth will produce irreparable polarization and polarization itself leads to continued fragmentation of the world. For example, the East-West polarization of the Cold War has been replaced by more fragmentary and less predictable global terrorism. Terrorist cells for the most part are produced from the millions of hopeless have-nots of the world.
We know that surgery to any organ would be useless if the organ was disconnected from the rest of the body. Similarly, fixing the economy or any other disconnected part of our society will not yield a viable remedy unless it includes a truly systemic solution that addresses all aspects of the way we live, work, commute, consume and govern our communities.
Transition to Sanity
Humanity has traveled so far down a dead end road that the steps required for correction seem too difficult. Yet just as placing the right pieces in the right places can solve a daunting jigsaw puzzle, the potential solution I propose requires surprisingly simple steps that can help solve the problems of our future. I have worked on this puzzle for the past twenty-five years and I believe I have been able to place many of the pieces. I am asking you now to help find and fit into place the remaining pieces to demonstrate a formula that will help us survive and secure peace and sustainability in communities around our planet.
As the first step in the two-step Transitional/Holigent solution, I propose the building of a Transitional Urban Village on the banks of the soon-to-be revitalized Los Angeles River. While a Transitional Urban Village can be built in many places, Los Angeles has all the necessary parts for the making of a successful demonstration model.
A nonprofit organization is proposed to build and manage the demonstration Transitional Urban Village. Such urban village would function as a mixed-use, human-scale and primarily car-free, pedestrian community with employment in close proximity. It would be served by a high-speed electric rail transport system. The community would provide multiple options for residents to transition from car-dependent to car-free living.
Affordable housing will be provided through earned community credit (C-credit). Residents will be able to earn C-credit by performing community service and apply C-credit towards significant rent reduction. The hours put into community service will be applied to facilitate the community’s physical and social maintenance, security, environmental restoration and community outreach programs, including mentoring at-risk youth.
The Holigent Solution
While the formation of Transitional Urban Villages will solve many urban problems, one big puzzle piece is still missing: economic security. The Holigent Solution will provide for economic security as well as for social harmony – the two ingredients essential to the making of a stable and peaceful society. The essence of the Holigent Solution is a three-way agreement between participating employers, employee-residents, and the nonprofit organization that manages the community.
The three-way agreement will prearrange a flexible balance between pay, time commitments, and rent obligations and will be activated during periods of economic difficulty. In the worst-case scenario, during economic recessions, companies that are at risk will go into a dormant state rather than shut down, and employee-residents will be on unpaid furlough instead of being laid off. Employees will be recalled once work is available again. Furloughed employee-residents will have the option to earn extra community credit through community service in order to pay most or all of their rent with C-credit. This plan will preserve company assets as well as maintain housing and the high quality of life for employee-residents even during recessions of the general economy.
If We Built It Would You Come?
If we built a nonprofit Transitional Urban Village on the banks of the (future) revitalized Los Angeles River, would you come to live and work there? Would you be interested in life-long job security, living in an affordable high-rise home without fear of ever losing it, reducing your rent or purchase price significantly with community credit you can earn through community service, and enjoying a high-quality lifestyle, with car-share rather than car ownership, in a self-organized, safe and sustainable community?
Be Part of the Solution
Learn more at http://www.holigent.org Go to “Be Part of the Solution”