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All about the standing-upright chimps that really love to talk about themselves.

Resiliency vs Interdependence

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Long ago, most Americans lived as Laura Ingalls Wilder chronicled in the “Little House” series.  Pa Ingalls and family were out in the wilderness, living with the rhythm of the land and putting away what they could to survive long winters and perhaps beyond.  The family’s net worth was what they had around them.

That life has been replaced with interdependence based on a dollar value assigned to absolutely everything.  We all get by with any extra scratch, should there be some, not stored up to get through the winter but properly invested in convertible assets.  This means everyone is subject to  the “free market”, which determines the value of all assets including experience, talent, and work.

That interdependence has changed our world to one with much less hard work or struggles against nature, and yet to many it has become as hostile as any winter on the Great Plains.
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Poverty Persists

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How good are things getting?  It depends a lot on where you are in the economy.  At the top end life is definitely improving – but at the bottom end it’s just endless misery. That’s the only conclusion that can be reached after two reports released this week.

The first was an analysis by the Associated Press that showed that underemployment is much worse for those at the low end of the economic scale, which in technical terms is hardly surprising.  But what they found is that 20% of those at jobs worth $20k per year don’t have enough hours, versus 7.2% of those who would normally qualify for jobs over $150k.  The second piece release was by the Census Bureau showing that 15% of Americans, 46.5M people, are stuck in poverty as they have been for 4 years.

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Containerized Cargo

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Stop for a moment and look around you.  In front of your nose might be the aroma of coffee from Sumatra steaming inside a mug made in China.  The table  you are sitting at may be from South America or Canada.  Your clothes could be made of Egyptian cotton.  What do all of these things have in common, other than your life?  Nearly all of them spent some time in a metal box, 20 feet by 8 feet by 9 and a half feet tall – a Twenty foot Equivalent Unit (TEU).

Containerized cargo has changed the world more than any other technology over the last 30 years, maybe or maybe not excluding the internet.  Yet few people stop to consider this phenom and what it means

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Realistic Generation

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This piece has been updated from when it first ran 2 years ago.

The bundles of anxiety that used to be our kids bubbled through the high school parking lot towards parents long used to waiting.  A normal day would never end with something as uncool as a ride from Dad – that’s what Metro Transit buses are for.  But this day they were coming back from a camping trip and had bundles of stuff under tired arms.  The milling crowd was my chance to meet some of my daughter’s friends.

The joys of high school – so much to worry about, so few cares in the world.

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Sovereignty

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The year was 1648.  After 30 years of Lutherans slaughtering Catholics and Catholics slaughtering Lutherans, Europe had become tired of war. The heart of western Germany, the Palatine, was utterly destroyed.  A treaty was concluded at Westphalia, near the heart of the conflict, which crafted peace through a new concept – sovereignty.  The warring monarchs agreed that each side had territorial integrity and that neither would interfere in the internal affairs of the others.

The entire world was eventually divided up into “sovereign nations” based on this principle.

The year was 2011.  Protesters igniting the “Arab Spring” in Syria were slaughtered by their sovereign national army, and eventually formed something like an armed rebellion in what is now known as a civil war.  The world watched in horror as at least 100,000 people were killed, about half civilians, for more than two years.  Sovereignty means that no one is supposed to intervene, at least not directly.  That has held until repeated attacks by chemical weapons occurred, crossing an apparent “red line” that denotes the limits of sovereignty.  The world wants to act to stop it.

Why this line?  Why now?  What is the real limit of “sovereignty” and what does it mean to be a nation-state today?

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