pushed beyond safe limits only the natural systems of the planet breakdown and not the human systems? The current economic-financial-industrial system pushes the planet’s ecologies beyond humanly favorable thermal balances. But this system has its own limits, beyond which it cannot function. There are multiple such limits, economic, social, political, even cultural, and many of them are close to critical thresholds.
The operational limits of the global financial system may be the most critical.
The global financial system rests on self-created quicksand. When banks lend to other banks or financial institutions, those funds are used as a basis for further lending, and each transaction is larger than the one before. Interest has its own interest, and money breeds money. The greater the amounts and quicker the transactions, the more money is created. The amount of money in the system has grown exponentially. Computers decide in milliseconds the buying and selling of millions and billions of dollars worth of financial instruments. With so much money available, and with the ease and speed of global transactions, trade in derivates and other forms of financial gambling has progressively detached the financial system from economic and social reality.Ervin Laszlo
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Added by Michael Grove at 22:42 on September 3, 2012
s most modern tanks as both sides dig in for the long haul. The U.S. has been reluctant to fulfill the request - citing fuel consumption, training and maintenance - and supplying powerful direct offensive weapons in the conflict appeared to be a red line... until now. Meet the M1 Abrams: Looking to break a diplomatic logjam with Germany, the Biden administration is set to provide several dozen of its main battle tanks to Ukraine in a major policy reversal. Berlin had said it would only send their domestically made Leopard 2 tanks if the U.S. sent the Abrams first, while the U.K. and Poland piled on the pressure by announcing plans for their own tank deliveries. While the latest decision will heal the divisions, getting the tanks over to Ukraine could still take months, or even a year. Officials have said the tanks would be supplied under an upcoming Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, meaning the package wouldn't result in another drawdown of U.S. stock, but would rather come from a new contract or a refurbishment of Abrams tanks from another country. See all the U.S. equipment committed to Ukraine and their replacement contract status.…
ra as the world rapidly replaces coal, oil and gas with clean energy sources."... and here ME/WE are 6 years further on, having
just finished COP26, without further coordinated
action in sight, as the daily proofs of the planet
getting warmer are increasingly apparent, whilst
the great and good continue to fly everywhere byprivate jet, seemingly unaffected by ALL that's
happening around them !!!???
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ome. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.
Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible. I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead.
The Coronation – an essay by Charles Eisenstein
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ller in the HISTORY of ART from his home city of Nuremberg he crossed the Alps more than once in trecherous conditions, staying in icy mountain shelters. The ship on which he sailed for six days to see a beached whale in Zeeland was almost lost in a winter storm. He lived in Venice in times of cholera, and possibly picked up malaria on a trip to the Low Countries where he was astounded by Aztec gold in Brussels and the Van Eyck altarpiece in Ghent. And all of these journeys were undertaken during outbreaks of the plague" and so you can only just imagine how disappointed I was also, that as far as the National Gallery's Exhibition in, London was concerned "the strange creatures, saints and distant landscapes depicted by the great German artist were thrown together with the work of lesser painters in a show that veers between wondrous and inexplicable." What an absolute shame therefore that although "His travel journals are full of astonishing sights – soaring comets, conjoined twins, the bones of a giant (which in fact belonged to a whale). He sees, and draws, girls in Dutch costume, Turkish merchants, African women. Boats lie at low tide in the port of Antwerp, fantastical castles rise on pinnacles above the river Rhine. There is a sheet of magnificent sketches of dozing lionesses, a blue baboon and even an alarmingly sharp-eared lynx in the new zoos of the Low Countries, alas only the last appears in this long-anticipated exhibition devoted to Dürer’s travels. To say that the experience in the Sainsbury Wing is baffling would be an understatement. Veering between wondrous, meandering and occasionally inexplicable, this is a show without a map."
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Added by Michael Grove at 11:42 on November 26, 2021
ndparents, however, ensured that I didn't even realise that I was dyslexic, until my meeting with the female dyslexic designer of the first Silicon Graphics desk-top 3D cad-cam system in the USA. [IT] was she who told me about the dyslexic Thomas West and his book In the Mind's Eye, which resulted in my involvement with an exhibition of the works of dyslexic artists at the Mall Galleries.
The birth of Leonardo coincided with that of the printing press, and [IT] was of course Oxford University Press [OUP], who established their own, and published their very first book in 1478, just two years after Caxton set up the first printing press in England. Track forward several centuries, and following an invite by Nuneham Ladies College in Cambridge to demonstrate my first BBC Micro based Interactive Multimedia system, two senior members of OUP invited me to come and work as a consultant to Rex Beddis, who was the author of the Sense of Place Series three-book course for lower secondary school.
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