pausch

I was one of the millions who watched Randy Pausch's Last Lecture on YouTube, given after being diagnosed with malignant cancer. Pausch took a most unpropitious situation and made unbelievable light of it; he seized his own demise as a chance to illuminate importance to others. Pausch died yesterday at the age of 47. Here are some snippets from his Last Lecture.



Don't complain. Just work harder.

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough.

End of an Empire Sale

While hilarious in his comic delivery, Lewis Black is only half joking in his "End of an Empire Sale" bit. It was uncomfortably comedic viewing; for many in this country, recent events have marked an intractable turning point and shift in the balances of world power. And while power cycles are cyclical, as are economic downturns (think, 1970's, post-Vietnam, Carter era), for most, this time just feels different.
And, as Black says, "Everything must go!"

pitiful shame

I truly hope that, if elected, Barack Obama will live up to his promise to this country; a promise to change the way that things are being done. Plain and simple. Enough is enough. After 7 years of a pitiful shame of an administration, Bush now has the chance to seal at least a partially redeemed Presidential legacy by taking the high road, by proposing real changes with our sham of an energy policy; yet, even with nothing more politically to lose, he only panders to the sound bites, and does nothing for the future of this country other than continuing to enrich his clique of cronies, sitting fat in the Texas heartland, engorged cowboys sucking this nation dry to the last drop. When has there been a more self-serving and short sighted man steering this country in our history; when have the ramifications been felt so deeply.


When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction.

Ditto for us. Our cure is not cheaper gasoline, but a clean energy system. And the key to building that is to keep the price of gasoline and coal — our crack — higher, not lower, so consumers are moved to break their addiction to these dirty fuels and inventors are moved to create clean alternatives.

If you want to know what an alternative strategy might look like, read the speech that Al Gore delivered on Thursday to the bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection. Gore, the alliance’s chairman, called for a 10-year plan — the same amount of time John F. Kennedy set for getting us to the moon — to shift the entire country to “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” to power our homes, factories and even transportation.

Mr. Gore proposed dramatically improving our national electricity grid and energy efficiency, while investing massively in clean solar, wind, geothermal and carbon-sequestered coal technologies that we know can work but just need to scale. To make the shift, he called for taxing carbon and offsetting that by reducing payroll taxes: Let’s “tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said.

-Thomas Friedman


Gore is calling for 100% carbon-free electricity production in the country in ten years; this, my friends, is the definition of a BHAG (that’s the Big Hairy Audacious Goal) that drives to much of business innovation. We need to think big, and this is exactly what Mr. Gore is doing; some might call it alarmist and unreasonable; others call it the bare minimum; we must, however, reach a moral and societal consensus on this most pivotal of matters. Our time is dwindling.

the assault continues

Always remember: we have no one to answer to but ourselves. Make no excuses for doing anything that you want to do, no matter who foolish it might sound to others; if it sounds and feels right to you, the only thing you will have is regret if the path is not followed.


It is difficult to sum, conclude, or draw upon the words of a master thinker. Expounding in any meaningful way will introduce redundancy. Heres Al Gore on the challenge of the future, from The Assault on Reason. Gore is a profound human being.

In order to conquer our fear and walk boldly forward on the path that lies before us, we have to insist on a higher level of honesty in America’s political dialogue. When we make big mistakes in America, it is usually because the people have not been given an honest accounting of the choices before us. It is also usually because too many leaders in both parties who knew better did not have the courage to do better.
Our children have the right to hold us to a higher standard when their future-indeed, the future of all human civilization-is hanging in the balance. They deserve better than politicians who sit on their hands and do nothing to confront the greatest challenge that humankind has ever confronted-even as the danger bears down on us.-


and more Gore on the Climate Crisis:
The opportunity presented by the climate crisis is not only the opportunity for new and better jobs, new technologies, new opportunities for profit, and a higher quality of life. It gives us an opportunity to experience something that few generations ever have the provledge of knowing: a common moral purpose compelling enough to lift us above our limitations and movivate us to set aside some of the bickering to which we as human beings are naturally vulnerable….
We must disenthrall ourselves from the latest sequential obsession with celebrity trials or whatever relative trivality dominates the conversation of democracy instead of making room for us as free American citizens to talk with one another about our true situation-and then save our country.

1%

I have recently finished Yvon Chouinard's business and philosophy memoir, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. Chouinard represents all that is right with corporate America; he is a true role model for CEO's around the world...his 1% for the Planet is doing some great stuff for grassroots environmental causes around the country...he is a pioneer in every sense of the word.

I have also visited some of these "wild places." I have stood in awe of the silence they afforded, such a luxury in today's hyperwired world; the silence which rippled through my bones, permeated my skeleton, calmed my mind, therapy on the cheap. These wild places are disappearing; when they are gone, they are lost forever; and when they are gone, a large part of us, latent or obvious, knowing or oblivious, will be gone as well. There is no renegging on development; new growth does not parallel old growth. Keep our wild places wild.



The original definition of consumer is” “One who destroys, or expends by use; devours, spends wastefully.” It would take seven earths for the rest of the world to consume at the same rate that we Americans do. Ninety percent of what we buy in a mall ends up in the dump within sixty to ninety days. It’s not wonder we are no longer called citizens but consumers. A consumer is a good name for us, and our politicians and corporate leaders are reflections of who we have become. With the average American reading at only an eighth- grade level and nearly 50 percent of Americans not believing in education, we have the government that we deserve.


The place in the lower 48 states that is the farthest away from a road or habitation is at the headwaters of the Snake River in Wyoming, and its still only 25 miles. So if you define wilderness as a place that is more than a day’s walk from civilization, there is no true wilderness left in North America, except in parts of Alaska and Canada.
-Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

Full Circle

Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power.

I am neither a Russia-basher nor a China-basher. But there was something truly filthy about Russia’s and China’s vetoes of the American-led U.N. Security Council effort to impose targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s ruling clique in Zimbabwe.

-Thomas Friedman

And so it goes, so the world turns, so another blind eye averts its attention to a festering wound on the world's collective conscience. Mugabe and his cronies are holed up in their tower of babel, blaming all the ills on colonialism, brutally repressing its people, and not a damn thing is going to be done about it. Who do we have to blame for this?

The Chinese? The Russians? The South Africans? How about ourselves, and our own selfish misguided historical actions that have shaped the world into what we find ourselves enmeshed in today.

In related news:

Zimbabwe's annual rate of inflation has surged to 2,200,000%, official figures have shown.
In May, the central bank issued a 500m Zimbabwe dollar banknote, worth US$2 at the time of issue, to try to ease cash shortages amid the world's highest rate of inflation.
This is in stark contrast with the situation at independence in 1980 when one Zimbabwe dollar was worth more than US$1.
-BBC News

another reason why bush is going to beijing

not only do we deal with the same human rights abusing regimes as Beijing, but now we have the honored distinction of being amongst their elite ranks. What a legacy this administration is leaving behind. A hollowed out America both at home and abroad.



Nicholas Kristoff:
It’s a national disgrace that more than 100 inmates have died in American custody in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo. After two Afghan inmates were beaten to death by American soldiers, the American military investigator found that one of the men’s legs had been “pulpified...
As for what to do with Guantánamo itself, the best suggestion comes from an obscure medical journal, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. It suggests that the prison camp would be an ideal research facility for tropical diseases that afflict so many of the world’s people. An excellent suggestion: the U.S. should close the prison and turn it into a research base to fight the diseases of global poverty, and maybe then we could eventually say the word “Guantánamo” without pangs of shame."

fire under the snow

Why Bush Will Attend the Opening Ceremony

It's always easy to point fingers at China for their dealings with the worst governments on the planet; however, its also rather facile to take a long hard look at our own government, and our obsequious dealings with the worst of the worst, in the name of securing mineral rights and sustaining our addiction to oil. Or when we find ourselves in an idealogical war with an arch nemesis. Here's a fitting example; the tiny oil rich country of Equatorial Guinea, and our good buddy Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Do human rights matter less in Equatorial Guinea than in Darfur or Myanmyar? Are we any less complicit than the Chinese in perpetrating crimes against humanity by propping up these malevolent dictators to secure that sweet sweet crude beneath their Gucci-loafered feet? Isn't hypocrisy great!

Fast Company had an extensive special report last month on China's resource quest in Africa..here's a little bit on E. Guinea, my favorite resource-rich African backwater.

With the Beijing Olympics bearing down fast, everyone from George W. Bush to Mia Farrow seems to be seizing the opportunity to bash China for doing big business in Sudan, where since 2003, government-backed militias have killed more than 400,000 people and displaced an estimated 2.5 million. And it's true that China buys two-thirds of Sudan's oil exports, while selling Khartoum weapons and defending it in the UN Security Council. But you don't hear any complaints in Washington or Hollywood about China's growing role in Equatorial Guinea. Nor will you.

E.G. is less a country than a corrupt, extended-family business that cooked up its own national anthem. And the American oil industry has been singing along for years, cuddling up as much as necessary (and with barely any competition) to Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the 66-year-old despot who has ruled this backwater since 1979. Smaller than El Paso, Texas, E.G. has nevertheless managed to get itself at or near the top of just about every shameful list in the world -- from the most-censored countries (according to the Committee to Protect Journalists) to the most corrupt (Transparency International) to the worst places to do business (the World Bank). Geoffrey Wood, a business professor at the U.K.'s University of Sheffield and coauthor of The Ethical Business, concluded in his own 2004 study of E.G. that the country is a "criminal state" that matches or exceeds the "rapacity and brutality" of the Duvaliers' Haiti, Somoza's Nicaragua, and Batista's Cuba. Despite an economy with the highest average annual growth rate in the world (21%) since 2001, more than half of the population lacks access to potable water and electricity. The UN says E.G. shows the greatest disparity on earth between per capita income ($50,000, surpassed only by Luxembourg) and human welfare (most of E.G.'s citizens live on less than $1 a day).

sergio

A few passages from Samantha Power's Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World...Sergio was a flawed hero, whose pragmatism came, perhaps, too late to make the critical changes that he saw his lifetime companion, the UN, needed, to ensure its survival in a changing world.


"...he knew that the UN, the multinational organization that he believed had to step up to meet transnational security, socioeconomic, environmental, and health concerns, had a knack for "killing the flame"-the flame of idealism that motivated some to strive to combat injustice and that inspired the vulnerable to believe that help would soon come...by the time of his death he was deeply worried that the system he had joined thirty-four years before was not up to the task of dealing with the barbarism and lawlessness of the times...


...When President George W. Bush declared repeatedly in 2001 and 2002, 'Either you are with us or against us,' he was wrong. Hundreds of millions of citizens for the world may not have been with the United States as such, but they were not against America either. Yet, like much of Bush's rhetoric, this description of an imagined dichotomy quickly ensured that those who were treated as enemies of the United States became enemies of the United States...

...as his life seeped slowly out of him, there must have been a moment-hopefully not a long one-when he realized that he was every bit as helpless in his time of need as millions of victims have been before him. He died under the Canal Hotel's rubble-buried beneath the weight of the United Nations itself."




"In the blurry world between humanitarian aid and international law he was as good as it gets, wielding a mixture of ambiguity and decisiveness with the personal and institutional authority to make it all, sometimes, work.
-The Economist on Sergio Vieira de Mello

past forward

"...Clinton announced that he was sending some 1,700 reinforcements, 104 additional armored vehicles, an aircraft carrier, and 3,600 offshore Marines. But as Vieira de Mello adjusted to life under siege in Sarajevo, Clinton changed his mind. On October 19 the president backtracked-again as the Reagan administration had done almost exactly a decade before-announcing that U.S. forces in Somalia would 'stand down.'"
-Samantha Power, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

Fast forward: 2008; Somalia in chaos, anarchy reigns after 17 years of lawlessness and societal breakdown. Complete devastation on the ground, famine looming, destabilizing an already unstable region of the world. If we could rewrite history, what would we change? More importantly, what would those who have made the decisive decisions of the past change? With this newfound knowledge, would the modern world be free from suffering and turmoil?

Would Clinton change his government's policy from one of sheer indifference, after years of creating and propping up the Siad Barre dictatorship, the corrupted leadership which led to the anarchy in Somalia then and now?

From this week's Economist:
"The UN reckons that 2.6m out of 8m Somalis need help to keep fed and sheltered; some 1m have fled from their homes. That figure could rise with the recent failure of crops and the death of animals from drought. Spiralling food costs and the diving value of the Somali shilling have made things worse. Families are dying of hunger in camps for the internally displaced on the main road south of Mogadishu."

NYC

what makes nyc such a cool place to live and work?

its the diversity, stupid! this report reaffirms NYC's preeminence as the multicultural capital of the world. something that will remain a constant as politics and economics shift and change.