This is to be a story about the politics of food, and about food as a place to begin the revolution.

I’ve been puzzling for a long time over my intentions for this weblog. I’ve also lately been browsing through various popular online discourses, across the political spectrum, about our future as a species.

There’s a lot of millenial end-times thinking and speech, swirling about these days. Of course, we’ve just come through the turn of the millenium, and so that should surprise no-one. Prognostications of doom are mostly just ceremony; they have little predictive power. Really good futurists are rare (I’d count Arthur C. Clarke as one, and John Brunner as another). However, in the range of futures we can imagine for ourselves, we can at least map out the possibilities.

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Rachel Maddow had a great show tonight, including an interview with the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and a clip from a recent address by President Obama, that frankly made me cheer out loud. Watch

the Rachel Maddow Show, 2011 Nov 21

Americans at their best. The filmmakers have created a “day in the life” snapshot of the global human world and of the Internet. I’m actually just sitting down to watch it, and can only bear witness to the first few minutes; but it’s immediately riveting and beautiful.

Meet Herman Cain, if you haven’t already. I’ve been reading and hearing about this man for some time, and until now I’ve been a little mystified by his popularity. Having seen this video, I think I understand the man’s appeal.

As I write, Herman Cain has been gaining steadily in the polls, moving now to the front of the pack in the Republican presidential primaries. In other words, he might well be going up against Obama for POTUS in 2012.

Meet a guy within spitting distance of being President of the US of A, who quotes Pokemon, as a way of inspiring the crowd before him. Did you catch that? I learned about it from Rachel Maddow.

See also

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar

John Brunner, as a futurist, you rock.

Here is an article from Mother Jones about simple land use conflicts arising between Occupy Wall Street protesters and the people living around the original protest site of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. I am going to go and look for video of this event, it sounds like it must have been an interesting encounter; and the author of the piece ends on a lovely hopeful note:

Occupy Wall Street Drummers
Driving Neighbors Batty

We make government, as these people are doing, to decide how we will live together. Good manners are the first prerequisite of good government.

Here’s something new to me: a business model for renting out and distributing 2D visual art–you know, stuff you hang on the wall–as streams of electrons.

The business, called FRAME, is a collaboration of two Tokyo designers: Yugo Nakamura, and Yoshihiro Saitoh. Here is what you get with their service: digital representations of various art works are piped into your home, and rendered on a good-sized Samsung flatscreen TVs.

To me this seems brilliant. From what I gather, somebody looked at networked digital picture frames (which I hear, aren’t leaping off the shelves these days). These fellows thought about how we could use them differently, and how the frames themselves might be different, in ways that people would value and pay to obtain.

In an age when 40-inch Hi-Def flatscreens sell for about the same $$$ as a modestly good quality picture frame of that size… somebody puts on their thinking cap, and we get Netflix for Art.

A service such as they describe could be more or less be bolted together with off-the-shelf technologies: like Samsung flatscreen Hi Def TVs, rebranded as digital canvas, able to render static images and video or animation (including Flash, sensibly).

Slick, simple, obvious, fresh, engaging, and a steady revenue stream from content rental once the product is placed.

Think Logan’s Run, picking sex partners–now we’ll do that for art, and if the content is sincerely good, the people who deliver this service can charge a premium. lt’s likely to be quite scalable. And the website is lovely:

http://frm.fm/

I mentioned a while back how much I was enjoying Rachel Maddow’s work. I’ve quite recently discovered two of her shows in which Canadians in general, and Mr. Harper’s government in particular, have drawn her attention.

I’m not the only person to have noticed what she has to say. Here, someone has excerpted her on Youtube. Listen to what she has to say about proroguing parliament (a concept surely new to me and I’m sure new to many Canadians, the first time Mr. Harper invoked it:

Where can I find such lucid reporting and political commentary, from within the borders of my own country? It’s probably here and I just don’t know about it.

Here’s another clip, this one quite recent: Maddow’s reaction to the recent vote in the House of Common that brought down Mr. Harper’s government, in which she contrasts American government with ours:

I’m reminded of what I was taught about the most fundamental conceptual divide between American and Canadian government. They get the sovereign rights of man — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — while we get POGG.

I’ve found a panel discussion about the popular uprising in Egypt, offered by a group of American academics most of whom specialize in Middle Eastern studies, and who have some interesting stories to tell about what’s happening. It’s called Egypt Arising… have a look.

It’s so nice to be reminded that American intellectuals are still out there. I’ve just started watching this, it’s good.

I’ve taken it into my mind to read a book (it’s sometimes called an essay) by Buckminster Fuller. The book/essay is called Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth.

I’m a little surprised to find that my city’s library doesn’t have it in circulation (though they do keep a copy in reference). Oh well; it didn’t take me long to find (via Google Scholar) a PDF made from what appears to be a fax, 44 pages long, transmitted on 2006 July 17, and now available for retrieval from an American site in Minnesota: The Big Brain Radio Show. I don’t know if this is the full text equivalent to the book, but it looks substantial. I believe I’ll print a copy, maybe 2-up, and make my way through it.

The work (so I understand) is built around Fuller’s idea that we can usefully conceive of the Earth as a spaceship, with humans as passengers and/or crew. I think it might be good to know more about what he has to say here; I’ve read very little Buckminster Fuller, and I do think he’s an important mid-century kinda guy. I also have an idea that “Spaceship Earth” might be a handy metaphor for people who have ideological trouble with the Gaia hypothesis or Gaianism.

Thing is, as we start thinking about the Earth as a spaceship (which seems a reasonable thing to do), we find we have access to a system of ideas about spaceships: what they’re like, how they work, what can happen to them, and what they require of us. We know that spaceships can be fragile (think Apollo 13), and certainly that they are finite. It’s easy, if you take the metaphor far enough, to conceive as substantive and real the risk of perturbing our planet’s systems, or exhausting its resources, to a degree that we might end up having to endure an Earth significantly less hospitable to our species (not to mention a great many others, arguably struggling quite a bit already.

So… metaphors may suggest avenues of thought, but they don’t so much predict, and we have to be careful not to see predictions where none are logically implied. Just because spaceships are susceptible to failure doesn’t mean that the ecosystems that sustain our lives on this planet are on track for catastrophe. These are matters, some would say, for science to answer: is the earth (for example) warming up because of what people are doing, and if so, with what consequences?

For most of us there can be no distinction between the answers of science and the answers of faith, not really, because the science is too complex, even questions about the science are too complex. We do not know our fates except as a matter of faith. Fuller has this to say: ”You may very appropriately want to ask me how we are going to resolve the ever-acceleratingly dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and ideological dogmas. I answer, it will be resolved by the computer.”

Just lately, one of my favourite things on TV has been the Rachel Maddow Show. A self-avowed liberal American commentator, Rachel is erudite, charming, witty and scathing in her critiques of the American political scene. I wish we had this kind of political coverage in Canada.