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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I like what Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to say, in his first inaugural address: “[L]et me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

I heard something today that reminded me: there are those who profit by fear, who have an interest in encouraging it. I did a quick Google search on that concept, and discovered (of course) that others are taking an interest and writing about this:

www.businesspundit.com/25-people-and-industries-that-profit-from-fear/

One hears so much these days about the anemic American economy — it’s striking to read a different account. Here’s an article on the Daily Beast about a stronger, faster America.

I’m keeping an eye out for articles on 3D printing – here’s a good one at The Economist.

3D printing looks like it’s going to be a really important and disruptive technology: I mean let’s be clear, we’re talking about replicators. Download a template, tweak it, make  your own and sell them; the rest is a matter of feedstocks. They say they’re expensive, but they’re in the range of early inkjet printers. The path is unmistakeable: 3D printers will be cheap, ubiquitous; if you can’t afford one, chances are your village can; and that will be a stupendous political and economic transformation.

As the Internet is to creating and sharing information, 3D printing is to creating objects, and sharing design templates for printing objects. For example: it appears likely that it will become possible to manufacture untraceable and undocumented weapons. I got that story from Rachel Maddow, who wisely offers light commentary, she’s just letting you know about this new thing in the world.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I just found this on Time.com, in one of their lists of coolest inventions… I am ceaselessly amazed by what people are learning to do these days, with computers. File this under improbable tech:

How a Common Sandbox Is Battling Arizona’s Wallow Fire | Techland | TIME.com

Batteries are getting better. Here’s some news from MIT, about emerging technologies to make batteries lighter and quicker to charge.

Such innovations, if they can be made to work at industrial scales, will bring the performance of electric cars (slow to charge, limited in range) closer to that of cars that use gasoline. I’d guess that a lot of money is flowing toward research into better batteries, especially for cars. From stories like the ones above, it sounds like this is starting to pay off.

What with global warming and peak oil, some car manufacturers, notably Toyota, are intent on pursuing a new and greener power source for cars, to replace gasoline. Of course, auto manufacturers probably also intend that the world to come will have even more cars than exist on the planet today.

Here’s the thing: so far, the electric cars treated as a serious alternative in the market closely resemble the cars we’re used to, in their size, speed and comfort.

This reflects a great error or blindspot in much of the discourse about automobiles and what they must become. Cars like the Chevy Volt proclaim: business as usual! No sacrifices demanded, in speed, comfort and range! The Volt is transitional technology; but it sets an expectation: this is more or less what the car of the future will be like. As/when batteries get better, your next next car (the affordable and range-anxiety-free EV that is surely in the pipeline as we speak) will let you kick the gasoline habit and this will be mostly painless. Happy motoring!

Electric cars can be seen as a manifestation of economic continuity, not economic change. The core assumption: manufacturers will keep making cars, and you’ll keep paying for ‘em, ideally every few years. Maybe you’ll pay relatively more for your next car, but won’t it be worth it to save the planet and all?

It’s important to ask, what are the unchallenged economic assumptions about a future when the global market for cars is growing? What else has to persist, so that the automobile industry can endure? Here’s a problem that stays with us: what to do with the cars we don’t want any more?

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.

Though I wish every success to the farmers in this story, I can’t help but be tickled to learn what’s happening in American states like Georgia, where they’ve enacted legislation to drive out or otherwise punish illegal (Mexican) immigrants.

Illegal immigration into the U.S. has become quite a hot button in the Republican party debates, where it’s taken as an article of faith that illegal immigration is to be suppressed, if necessary by shooting or electrocuting people who cross the border inappropriately.

The crowds cheering such policies don’t seem to grasp the subtleties of policy-making, or they just don’t care. The significant economic consequences of anti-migrant legislation are now being felt, and lo, it turns out that Mexicans illegals were doing good and useful work:

Georgia’s farm-labor crisis playing out as planned | Jay Bookman.

Though surely, everyone already knew that?

This video is my first exposure to Elizabeth Warren. She’s a dry academic stick who bristles with imagination. Here she draws a fascinating story out of data collected by American federal departments of commerce and labor, about the changing fortunes of Mom, Dad and the kids–the “iconic family”, as Warren puts it.

This is her lecture given in June, 2007, as part of the UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures. Here she plays statistician, using graphs and charts to show how American families are working harder, saving less, taking on more debt, and how a rising cost of fixed living expenses puts families’ economic solvency at risk.

She talks for an hour, and it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but I love this kind of stuff–it’s what I used to do as a planner.

She’s written a book on the whole thing, called The Two-Income Trap.

So, where are we at with robots, anyway?

Here’s something that gave me an idea of what’s happening, and what’s coming. Here is a video about a robot swarm. I think to myself, if this is what gets shared on Youtube, what’s out there at the cutting edge of AI that we don’t see?

Watch Swarmanoid.

I speak here out of a lifelong fascination with robots. To me, the interesting robots are the ones that can make choices about how to behave: the kind of robots Isaac Asimov wrote about so vividly. It’s easy to imagine the Swarmanoid colony robot developing in sophistication, into something quite lifelike.