Alternate Vision

No one in Asia, it appears, knows how to make money when American import demand shrinks, and when Asian growth falls, raw materials prices collapse. No one in Latin America, for that matter, seems to know how to make money when raw materials prices collapse. For all the preening and posing of the emerging world's nouveau riche, it turns out that the American consumer was the center of the world economy, and without the American consumer, all that is left are busted stock markets and bad credit.
Most embarrassing for the flat-worlders is the observation that the emerging markets crashed when the world concluded that Washington would not be able to reverse the financial crisis. The economic bomb that detonated in America caused more collateral damage in the emerging markets than casualties at home. - Spengler

"No one has a monopoly on innovation." said Khosla, in an interview with ABC 7 who recently put out a series of videos on 'Energy Innovation' which is highly recommended. The focus is primarily on the potential for clean-tech R&D in the silicon valley to ignite the next big 'clean-tech' revolution, credit crisis and flailing mortgage markets aside. Though, Tom Friedman might argue the need for a 'green bail out' - "Our No. 1 resource is our people. Let’s put people back to work — retrofitting and repowering America. ... You can’t base a national economy on credit cards. But you can base it on solar panels, wind turbines, smart biofuels and a massive program to weatherize every building and home in America.”

Are we ready for such a revolution? I think so. But we do have a ways to go, and part of that journey involves 'rethinking' - rethinking our priorities, our lifestyles, our infrastructure, our interaction with the world at large, all of which stems from a dire need, in the words of Brad Allenby, "to rethink cognition."

"To accept our responsibilities -- indeed, to even recognize them -- we need far more sophisticated ways of perceiving, understanding, and interacting with emergent properties of complex regional and global systems in real time. The radical contingency and complexity of our world undercuts our existing cognitive mechanisms, such as ideology, because the rigidity inherent in such mechanisms becomes increasingly dysfunctional when flexibility in institutional and personal cognition is required. Facing the anthropogenic Earth, we realize we need, among other things, to rethink cognition."

This, I believe is a fundamental tenet of change, one that Obama gets but McCain doesn't - the need to rethink.

Labels: subliminal messages