Obama's speech in Moscow

Obama's speech in Cairo

Equilibrium potential

How is this 'financial crisis' not simply the emergence of real globalization? The West, particularly the US, has over the last few centuries amassed and generated most of the world's capital and information, but constitute only a small portion of its total population. With the emergence of the internet over the last ten years however, capital and information has started flowing freely between countries. Will this wealth not naturally, inevitably redistribute toward an equilibrium that more accurately reflects the geographical distribution of the world's population? BRIC growth may have slowed during the 'crisis' but it has certainly not stopped. China continues to fund US national debt. I understand that it's a sensitive question but is the West, particularly the US, about to be severely humbled, or is there something in Western culture that entitles its members to a life-style that, were it enjoyed by every person in the world, would require five planets? The West, after all, produced the scientific revolution that underpins its ever-rising living standards. The West also embraces an openness that continues to attract and innovate.

Some notes

By the time Obama leaves office (2016) a lot of conservative baby boomers will have died, and the US electorate will be more ethnically and culturally mixed. Unless the Obama administration screws up in some major way (e.g. the relations they form or fail to form with Russia, China and South America) it is hard to see how republicans could recover their previous dominance. Maybe the next turning point will be bioethics - at what point in the development of new biotechnologies do people decide that the liberal slope is getting too slippery; at what point do we start hearing unanimous calls to ban transhumanism; at what point does biotechnology become the new abortion/gay marriage? Maybe it never gets to that point, but i sure wonder what Obama's bioethics council will look like..

In other Obama related news: the roundtable on today's Democracy Now is soberingly critical of his foreign policy, particularly regarding Israel and Afghanistan.

In the news this morning

US congress rejects the Bush bailout plan. I'm shocked and pleased.

Now unemployed, Ehud Olmert finally talks some sense: suggests full Israeli withdrawal from West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Palin is starting to smell too much like moron even for Republicans. Looking forward to seeing her in tomorrow's debate with Joe Biden.

Kosovo 2.0?

Not bad, not great

Chomsky on himself and his political mindset (59 min, YouTube).

William Overholt on Asia and Asia-US relations (1h6min, FORA.tv).

Stanford Computer Science Department Faculty: Future Challenges in CS (1h31min, iTunes).

Finally, the flying spagetti deity gets a statue:

Piglet approaches

John Micklethwait 'The View From Abroad: Is America Broken?' (iTunes U, 1hr22min). A very interesting UC Berkeley interview with the still quite new editor of The Economist, John Micklethwait. A must for those who read the magazine. Towards the end of the talk John says that even though China's behavior in places like Sudan is outright criminal, it's important to keep in mind that they are building infrastructure (roads etc) at a time when Western countries are still only talking about doing so. The coming China-US/Europe standoff looks more and more like one of ruthless productivity versus ineffective humanism. Bring it on.

Margret Anderson 'The Re-Discovery of the Irrational- Fin de Siecle Pessimism and the Birth of Psychoanalysis' (iTunes U, 1h17min). An excellent lecture on Fin de Siecle mentality that took me further towards understanding my own hangup on this period. The mentality wasn't an extension of the Enlightenment faith in reason and freedom, it was a rejection of it, but one that, although rejecting of the idea that reason overcomes instinct, nevertheless applied that reason, dare I say ruthlessly (Schopenhauer's eastern influences come to mind), in its epic anti-Cartesian de-throning of humanity, which, through the fundamental realization that unconscious forces are responsible for most of what we do, culminated in psychoanalysis. "Suspect the reasons that people offer for their conduct". (But what about the wars, were they unavoidable, will this mentality always end in hubris?)

Margret starts by exemplifying with art from the time (e.g. Munch's Madonna) focusing on the antagonism between the sexes but also on the early liberation of women through Victorian puritanism. Then goes on to discuss Freud and his predecessors (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) at somewhat excessive but still interesting lenght.

In other news, power-generating knee and Google, Microsoft, IBM et al have all joined the OpenID initiative that started in June and aims to eliminate the need for separate logins on different webpages. Good good.

Finally, McCain is winning the republican primaries in the US. Here's a less than brilliant but informative debate on him and his politics (FORA.tv, 1h8min).

The Bush administration in American media

There's a very good lecture on iTunes U ['War, Geopolitics, and History'] by Robert Fisk (introduced by Chomsky!) on Iraq, American/Western politics and the flawed media apparat. I'm ashamed to say I didn't know who he was, but he's very good. Weird how he refuses to use the internet though. - As a sobering comparison, watch this very recent Authors@Google interview with investigative reporter legend Bob Woodward, also on the Bush administration.