Globalization And Education Quotes

Ethical veganism results in a profound revolution within the individual; a complete rejection of the paradigm of oppression and violence that she has been taught from childhood to accept as the natural order. It changes her life and the lives of those with whom she shares this vision of nonviolence. Ethical veganism is anything but passive; on the contrary, it is the active refusal to cooperate with injustice

Being intelligent—being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel Prize—is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field.

We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power.

I believe that sanitizing this aspect of the modern and ancient world is at the root of our troubles as a culture now. We're bred to be smug about how peaceful we are, so we can watch television and feel safely distant from violence, when it is part of our makeup. That smugness means we don't feel we have to do anything about the violence we see, because it's obviously committed by people who aren't as educated or civilized as we are. By holding ourselves aloof from global and historical violence, we allow it to continue. If we are ever to survive as a species, we need to admit we are violent and find ways to ease the plight of the victims of violence worldwide. (No, invading a violent country and bombing it will not inspire its people to give violence up. Go figure.) We must face who we are and what creates violence: helplessness, envy, rage, even the drive to grab the good things of the world that are flaunted in the faces of the poor. We must take responsibility and protect each other from violence.

Any serious social, political, and economic change must include veganism.

The Kielburgers are extremely accomplished and educated people who have demonstrated that they know how to build an organization, sell a vision, and court powerful people. If they had wanted to make loads of money and eat caviar on a private yacht, they could have taken lucrative private-sector jobs and done just that. It is absurd to think that they instead decided to work sixteen-hour days for twenty-five years, spend hundreds of days per year apart from their families, and invest everything they had in building a global charity—all as a means to funnel money back to themselves.

To really change the world, we have to help people change the way they see things. Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological. So if you want to see real change, stay persistent in educating humanity on how similar we all are than different. Don't only strive to be the change you want to see in the world, but also help all those around you see the world through commonalities of the heart so that they would want to change with you. This is how humanity will evolve to become better. This is how you can change the world. The language of the heart is mankind's main common language.

Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.

5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media: 1 Post content that add value 2 Spread positivity 3 Create steady stream of info 4 Make an impact 5 Be yourself

Your mission statement says Galer Street is based on global "connectitude." (You people don't just think outside the box, you think outside the dictionary!)

We should always be clear that animal exploitation is wrong because it involves speciesism. And speciesism is wrong because, like racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism, classism, and all other forms of human discrimination, speciesism involves violence inflicted on members of the moral community where that infliction of violence cannot be morally justified. But that means that those of us who oppose speciesism necessarily oppose discrimination against humans. It makes no sense to say that speciesism is wrong because it is like racism (or any other form of discrimination) but that we do not have a position about racism. We do. We should be opposed to it and we should always be clear about that.

All it takes for generosity to flow is awareness. By actively pursuing awareness and knowledge, we can make choices that cause less harm and greater good to others in the global community of our shared earth.

In societies where incomes and educational levels are low, it is often far easier to get supporters to the polls based on a promise of an individual benefit rather than a broad programmatic agenda.

. . . to deny someone an education is not just a crime but a sin, because you are denying that person the opportunity to realize who he or she is meant to be.

I am opposed to animal welfare campaigns for two reasons. First, if animal use cannot be morally justified, then we ought to be clear about that, and advocate for no use. Although rape and child molestation are ubiquitous, we do not have campaigns for “humane” rape or “humane” child molestation. We condemn it all. We should do the same with respect to animal exploitation. Second, animal welfare reform does not provide significant protection for animal interests. Animals are chattel property; they are economic commodities. Given this status and the reality of markets, the level of protection provided by animal welfare will generally be limited to what promotes efficient exploitation. That is, we will protect animal interests to the extent that it provides an economic benefit.

So it is always preferable to discuss the matter of veganism in a non-judgemental way. Remember that to most people, eating flesh or dairy and using animal products such as leather, wool, and silk, is as normal as breathing air or drinking water. A person who consumes dairy or uses animal products is not necessarily or usually what a recent and unpopular American president labelled an "evil doer.

The routine expression of hatred for others is so common in the Arab world that it barely draws comment other than from the region’s often Western-educated liberal minority who have limited access to the platform of mass media.

We should never present flesh as somehow morally distinguishable from dairy. To the extent it is morally wrong to eat flesh, it is as morally wrong — and possibly more morally wrong — to consume dairy

Even if you think you are thinking and acting globally, there is always more to learn and know!

WONDERLAND It is a person's unquenchable thirst for wonder That sets them on their initial quest for truth. The more doors you open, the smaller you become. The more places you see and the more people you meet, The greater your curiosity grows. The greater your curiosity, the more you will wander. The more you wander, the greater the wonder. The more you quench your thirst for wonder, The more you drink from the cup of life. The more you see and experience, the closer to truth you become. The more languages you learn, the more truths you can unravel. And the more countries you travel, the greater your understanding. And the greater your understanding, the less you see differences. And the more knowledge you gain, the wider your perspective, And the wider your perspective, the lesser your ignorance. Hence, the more wisdom you gain, the smaller you feel. And the smaller you feel, the greater you become. The more you see, the more you love -- The more you love, the less walls you see. The more doors you are willing to open, The less close-minded you will be. The more open-minded you are, The more open your heart. And the more open your heart, The more you will be able to Send and receive -- Truth and TRUE Unconditional LOVE.

A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations, and the wrong incentives for teachers contributes to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two main tasks: giving everyone a sound basic set of skills, and identifying talent.

Our world is now so complex, our technology and science so powerful, and our problems so global and interconnected that we have come to the limits of individual human intelligence and individual expertise.

...by tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal under-educating in literacy has coincided with this unexpected explosion of global self-publishing. Thus people who don't know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll.

Millions of people work in global settings while viewing everything from their own cultural perspectives and assuming that all differences, controversy, and misunderstanding are rooted in personality. This is not due to laziness. Many well-intentioned people don’t educate themselves about cultural differences because they believe that if they focus on individual differences, that will be enough.

While some American education experts may say that all learning should be 'fun,' I personally believe that the word "fun' is the wrong word to use. Learning should be challenging, meaningful, rigorous, engrossing, interesting, and satisfying.

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements—transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting—profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

I argued earlier that clientelism is an early form of democracy: in societies with masses of poor and poorly educated voters, the easiest form of electoral mobilization is often the provision of individual benefits such as public-sector jobs, handouts, or political favors. This suggests that clientelism will start to decline as voters become wealthier. Not only does it cost more for politicians to bribe them, but the voters see their interests tied up with broader public policies rather than individual benefits.

What is your hands to make a difference in the world?

For the mass prevention of disease, mass education is a key weapon.

According to Project Drawdown, four of the most effective strategies for mitigating global warming are reducing food waste, educating girls, providing family planning and reproductive healthcare, and collectively shifting to a plant-rich diet. The benefits of these advancements extend far beyond the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and their primary cost is our collective effort.

Limiting the power of government, in order to liberate the individual, was the great American revolutionary insight. Too much cooperation, avoiding conflict from ordinary people, these things aren’t acceptable in America although they may suit China, Indonesia, Britain, or Germany just fine. In America the absence of conflict is a sign of regression toward a global mean, hardly progress by our lights if you’ve seen much of the governance of the rest of the world where common people are crushed like annoying insects if they argue.

Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports

Thus the chief purpose of art education for life is to help students understand something about themselves and others through art and thereby contribute to personal growth, social progress, and a sense of global community.

The notion that we should promote “happy” or “humane” exploitation as “baby steps” ignores that welfare reforms do not result in providing significantly greater protection for animal interests; in fact, most of the time, animal welfare reforms do nothing more than make animal exploitation more economically productive by focusing on practices, such as gestation crates, the electrical stunning of chickens, or veal crates, that are economically inefficient in any event. Welfare reforms make animal exploitation more profitable by eliminating practices that are economically vulnerable. For the most part, those changes would happen anyway and in the absence of animal welfare campaigns precisely because they do rectify inefficiencies in the production process. And welfare reforms make the public more comfortable about animal exploitation. The “happy” meat/animal products movement is clear proof of that. We would never advocate for “humane” or "happy” human slavery, rape, genocide, etc. So, if we believe that animals matter morally and that they have an interest not only in not suffering but in continuing to exist, we should not be putting our time and energy into advocating for “humane” or “happy” animal exploitation.

Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realise just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged. Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. Don’t be so sure that you can convince Tea Party supporters of the truth of global warming by presenting them with sheets of statistical data.

Nowadays, being “connected” means 24/7 availability. Emailing, texting, Twittering, calling, keeping one’s website and Facebook status current seem essential to being and remaining relevant in the world. In addition to the positive impact of globally interconnecting humanity, the information era is also contributing to the creation of a high-tech, low-touch society. It is impacting language, the publishing world, education, and social revolts. Neurologists and other pundits, including Nicholas Carr in his Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, point out the paradoxical downsides of not setting healthy boundaries or applying discipline to how we engage technology. Some have gone so far as to suggest that it is making us “spiritually stupid” by keeping us too distracted to participate in spiritual practices. But how about this: can using technology with mindfulness lead to beneficial social and spiritual connection?

Wealth had made rigor optional in America. But everything had changed. In an automated, global economy, kids needed to be driven; then need to know how to adapt, since they would be doing it all their lives. They needed a culture of rigor.

In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about certain carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I have never witnessed in any university class. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols.

If we are ever going to see a paradigm shift, we have to be clear about how we want the present paradigm to shift. We must be clear that veganism is the unequivocal baseline of anything that deserves to be called an “animal rights” movement. If “animal rights” means anything, it means that we cannot morally justify any animal exploitation; we cannot justify creating animals as human resources, however “humane” that treatment may be. We must stop thinking that people will find veganism “daunting” and that we have to promote something less than veganism. If we explain the moral ideas and the arguments in favor of veganism clearly, people will understand. They may not all go vegan immediately; in fact, most won’t. But we should always be clear about the moral baseline. If someone wants to do less as an incremental matter, let that be her/his decision, and not something that we advise to do. The baseline should always be clear. We should never be promoting “happy” or “humane” exploitation as morally acceptable.

Things are highly interdependent. The very concepts of “we” and “they” are becoming irrelevant. War is out of date because our neighbors are part of ourselves. We see this in economic, educational and environmental issues. Although we may have some ideological differences or other conflicts with our neighbor, economically and environmentally we share essentially the same country, and destroying our neighbor is destroying ourselves. It’s foolish.

As we're told that 10 percent of all high school education will be computer-based by 2014 and rise to 50 percent by 2019, and as the PowerPoint throws up aphoristic bromides by the corporate heroes of the digitally driven 'global economy' -- the implication being that 'great companies' know what they're doing, while most schools don't -- and as we're goaded mercilessly to the conclusion that everything we are, know, and do is bound for the dustbin of history, I want to ask what kind of schooling Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had. Wasn't it at bottom the very sort of book-based, content-driven education that we declare obsolete in the name of their achievements?

The world of conspiracy theories is one where stupid people dismiss the expertise of highly qualified people, and attribute to these experts a wicked desire to lie to and gull the masses. In other words, they portray experts as sinister enemies of the people. Conspiracy theories reflect the increasingly prevalent notion that the average, uneducated person is always right – can always see the real truth of a situation – while the educated experts are always wrong because they are deliberately lying to the people to further a conspiracy by the elite against the people. It is increasingly being perceived as a “sin”, a crime, to be smart, to be an expert. Average people do not like smart people, do not trust them, and are happy to regard them as nefarious conspirators. They are constructing a fantasy world where the idiot is always right and honest, and anyone who opposes the idiot always wrong and dishonest. A global Confederacy of Dunces is being established, whose cretinous values are transmitted by bizarre memes that crisscross the internet at a dizzying speed, and which are always accepted uncritically as the finest nuggets of truth. Woe betide anyone who challenges the Confederacy. They will be immediately trolled.

education tends to move individuals toward a more extreme version of the dominant cultural tendency.

The issues the Panthers organized around fifty years ago are still with us. Our justice system is unjust. Police conduct in nonwhite neighborhoods generates systematic abuses. The middle class is shrinking. Our education system not only continues to fail poor children, it often propels them to prison. In addition to these continuing issues, there are new wrinkles. The spectacular rise in economic inequality—“99 percent of all new income today goes to the wealthiest 1 percent”12—has caused the barons at Davos, Switzerland, to note that the immense political power the 1 percent wield because of their control of resources is skewing society and creating instability. Scientists warn us our planet is in jeopardy due to global warming. The future is uncertain.

College costs money- a lot. Yet education in itself is not of much value. For example, we can look to the general public's almost complete disregard for anything that educated people have to say about global warming, shrinking oil reserves, pollution, or the threat of nuclear annihilation. But if all this is true, why does something as worthless as a college diploma cost so much money?

I saw the figure of 178 Billion wasted/stolen from the people of a country by its corrupt and inept government. Such a figure could truly transform the entire country; education, health, roads, schooling, entrepreneurial environment... of millions of people, rather than be secreted away as a few more 0000's in global bank accounts for the greeders. We need to Rethink Public Service, Values, Ethics and Leadership.

Psychologists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, found that the better educated and wealthier a nation is, the less likely its population is to believe in a higher being. The Global Index of Religion and Atheism also assessed that poverty was a key indicator of a society’s tendency towards religion – so that poorer countries tend to be the most religious. The one exception to the rule? America. But in the strongly religious USA, despite the country’s wealth, there’s no universal healthcare, little job security, and a flimsy social welfare safety net. This means that the USA has a lot more in common with developing countries than she might like to think. Researchers from the University of British Columbia suggest that people are less likely to need the comfort of a god if they’re living somewhere stable, safe and prosperous.

You mean, let our most excellent Congress deal with this situation in the same way it has handled our other pressing national problems, such as global warming, terrorism, education, and our crumbling infrastructure?

Finally, and even more seriously, I fear a return to the international climate that prevailed in the 1920s and '30s, when the United States withdrew from the global stage and countries everywhere pursued what they perceived to be their own interests without regard to larger and more enduring goals. When arguing that every age has its own Fascism, the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi added that the critical point can be reached “not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned.” If he is right (and I think he is), we have reason to be concerned by the gathering array of political and social currents buffeting us today—currents propelled by the dark underside of the technological revolution, the corroding effects of power, the American president’s disrespect for truth, and the widening acceptance of dehumanizing insults, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism as being within the bounds of normal public debate. We are not there yet, but these feel like signposts on the road back to an era when Fascism found nourishment and individual tragedies were multiplied millions-fold.

Discrimination may occur out of a prejudice that is related to an individual's personal race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, political, belief system, educational or lack therein, culture, employment, or intellect.

All these so-called bread-and-butter provisions (for job security, health care, child care, education, and housing) are fundamentally about creating a context in which the rampant economic insecurity of our age is addressed at the source. And that has everything to do with our capacity to cope with climate disruption, because the more secure people feel, knowing that their families will not want for food, medicine, and shelter, the less vulnerable they will be to the forces of racist demagoguery that will prey on the fears that invariably accompany times of great change. Put another way, this is how we are going to address the crisis of empathy in a warming world.

As it happens, the first souvenir I bought was a dried llama fetus. Revolting as it may sound, my poor stillborn llama is actually rather cute. Frozen in the fetal position and dried stiff like beef jerky, it has the gentle, smiling face of a camel and plenty of soft, if slightly formaldehyde-scented, fur. I bought the llama fetus partly because it horrified me, but also for educational purposes, so that my eight-year-old daughter Sophia could show it to her class. (She refused.) Bolivians buy llama fetuses to ward off evil in its many guises. Bolivian miners—who, with a life expectancy of forty-five years, basically live their entire adult lives dying—look to llama fetuses for protection against dynamite explosions and the lung-destroying silicon particulates they inhale all day. Downing high-proof alcohol also helps. “The purer the alcohol, the purer the minerals I find,” one miner told me wryly.

That day was an education for me. I'll never forget it. Standing in teh doorway, watching the reaction of the men and women gathered there, I witnessed the poewrful effect of unwavering, uncomplaining, uncompromising leadership. It changed me. It was one of those moments when you say to yourself, [in italics] That's what I want to be when I grow up. and you know you've grown up a little already, simply because you recognize it. Norman called Ducky-Bob's party supply and ordered chairs while I wheeled the second bed out to the hallway. Mommy, Margaret Valentine, and I rushed around, getting everything we needed to cater the cramped but memorable even, and on Tuesday morning, about three dozen top members of the Chili's team jammed into Norman's room at Presbyterian Hospital. Norman didn't what his people to see him lying down, so I'd helped him get into a jogging suit and robe, and propped him up on one of those rolling carts they use to distribute meals. He was in unthinkable pain, but he spoke to them from his heart about how much he appreciated them, how committed he was to the success of the organization, and how far they could all go together.

you weren’t that unhappy. “Contrast him with the Air Corps man of the same education and longevity,” Stouffer wrote. His chance of getting promoted to officer was greater than 50 percent. “If he had earned a [promotion], so had the majority of his fellows in the branch, and his achievement was less conspicuous than in the MP’s. If he had failed to earn a rating while the majority had succeeded, he had more reason to feel a sense of personal frustration, which could be expressed as criticism of the promotion system.” Stouffer’s point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally—by comparing ourselves to people “in the same boat as ourselves.” Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is one of those observations that is both obvious and (upon exploration) deeply profound, and it explains all kinds of otherwise puzzling observations. Which do you

HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD To really change the world, we have to help people change the way they see things. Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological. So if you want to see real change, stay persistent in educating humanity on how similar we all are than different. Don't only strive to be the change you want to see in the world, but also help all those around you see the world through commonalities of the heart so that they would want to change with you. This is how humanity will evolve to become better. This is how you can change the world. The language of the heart is mankind's main common language.

The election of Obama was a profoundly unserious act by an unserious nation, and, if you were Putin, the ChiComs, or the ayatollahs, you would have to be awfully virtuous not to take advantage of it....He's WEIRD in the sense of those students in the behavioral studies: Western Educated Idle Rich Deadbeat. He's not, even in Democrat terms, a political figure--as Bill Clinton or Joe Biden are. Instead, he's a creature of the broader culture: there are millions of people like Barack Obama, the eternal students of an unbounded lethargic transnational campus for whom global compassion and the multicultural pose are merely the modish gloss on a cult of radical grandiose narcissism. Even as he denies American exceptionalism, he gets turned on by his own.

The tyranny of merit arises from more than the rhetoric of rising. It consists in a cluster of attitudes and circumstances that, taken together, have made meritocracy toxic. First, under conditions of rampant inequality and stalled mobility, reiterating the message that we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get erodes solidarity and demoralizes those left behind by globalization. Second, insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college; and third, insisting that social and political problems are best solved by highly educated, value-neutral experts is a technocratic conceit that corrupts democracy and disempowers ordinary

...education is not the way out of the poverty trap. A high education level is no guarantee of high productivity. The truth of the matter is that regardless of institutional education level, workers around the world can be adequately trained on the job for high productivity.

The shift of the RSS’s urban membership core from the lower middle class (including small-scale traders) to educated professionals has moderated its once implacable opposition to globalization as well as encouraged its greater openness on a wide range of social and economic issues.

This first generation of corporate barons left a lasting, if dubious, legacy: they made America more hierarchical, with new divisions between management and labor, between a professional class and everyday workers. They made the economy more centralized, consolidating power into a few mega-companies and their owners; they made it more globalized, keyed to international capital and trade. They diminished the voice of the ordinary citizen in society and politics in favor of educated, professionalized elites. In short, they gave America an entirely new political economy, what some historians have called corporate liberalism.

This world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places where people are put to death for imaginary crimes - like blasphemy - and where the totality of a child's education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are countries where women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same societies are quickly acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced weaponry. If we cannot inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a dark future awaits all of us.

Global warming, environmental degradation, global flows of economic speculation and risk taking, overpopulation, global debt, new viruses, terrorism and warfare, and political polarization are killing us. Dealing with big questions takes a long-term view, cooperation, delayed gratification, and deep learning that crosses traditional silos of knowledge production. All of these are in short supply today. In the United States and much of the developed world, decisions are based on short-term interests and gain (e.g., stock prices or election cycles), as well as pandering to ignorance. Such decisions make the world worse, not better, and bring Armageddon ever closer.

With the dizzying rate of change in technology and increasing competition driven by the globalization of markets and technology, we must not only be educated, we must constantly re-educate and reinvent ourselves. We must develop our minds and continually sharpen and invest in the development of our competencies to avoid becoming obsolete.

The fact that, during the most miraculous decline of extreme poverty in human history, contributed to by ultra-cost-effective energy from fossil fuels, college-educated adults can think the rate of extreme poverty is getting worse due to fossil fuels shows just how completely our knowledge system trivializes the benefits of fossil fuels and of cost-effective energy as such.

Sift through threats for hidden possibilities. Every threat carries with it the potential for innovation. The problem of obesity contains the possibility of new kinds of nutrition. The problem of global pollution contains the possibility of new energy sources. The problem of high unemployment contains the possibility of new educational models. The list is endless, if you can learn to see what’s not there.

I am your mother. Whatever I do, I do for your own good. I do everything in the world for you, and you need to be a good son/ daughter and listen to me. You need to be a good son/daughter and respect your mother. No back-chat. Get to work.” Or, “You are only a child. You don’t understand how important your education is and what you need to do to be successful. I am much older, I know the importance of these skills.

As women gain rights, families flourish, and so do societies. That connection is built on a simple truth: Whenever you include a group that’s been excluded, you benefit everyone. And when you’re working globally to include women and girls, who are half of every population, you’re working to benefit all members of every community. Gender equity lifts everyone. From high rates of education, employment, and economic growth to low rates of teen births, domestic violence, and crime—the inclusion and elevation of women correlate with the signs of a healthy society. Women’s rights and society’s health and wealth rise together. Countries that are dominated by men suffer not only because they don’t use the talent of their women but because they are run by men who have a need to exclude. Until they change their leadership or the views of their leaders, those countries will not flourish. Understanding this link between women’s empowerment and the wealth and health of societies is crucial for humanity. As much as any insight we’ve gained in our work over the past twenty years, this was our huge missed idea. My huge missed idea. If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings.

Truman bluntly revealed the motivations behind this major shift when a group of American diplomats presciently warned him that an overtly pro-Zionist policy would harm US interests in the Arab world. “I am sorry, gentlemen,” he said, “but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”48 Initially, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA—what would become the permanent foreign-policy establishment of the new global American imperium—were opposed to Truman’s and his advisors’ determined partisanship for Zionism and the new state of Israel. Yet Truman, who did not come from a patrician background, had no higher education (he was the last US president without a college degree), and was inexperienced in foreign affairs, was not intimidated by the foreign policy establishment he had inherited.

Education 2000 was designed to increase our children's learning capacity while destroying their ability to critically think for themselves. You can learn more about Education 2000, also referred to as America 2000 and Global 2000, through reading: Educating for the New World Order by B.K. Eakman, published by Halcyon House ISBN # 0-89420-278-2-3441000, and A Critique of America 2000: An Educational Strategy by Kathi Simonds, published by Citizens for Excellence in Education.

[from an excerpt by her daughter Camille] Living on the land that has grown my food gives me a sense of security I'm lucky to have. Feeling safe isn't so easy for people my age, who face odious threats like global warming, overpopulation, and chemical warfare in our future. But even as the world runs out of fuel and the ice caps melt, I will know the real sources of my sustenance. My college education may or may not land me a good job down the road, but my farm education will serve me.

The Chinese government assigns capital to everything. Infrastructure development. Industrial plant buildout. Transport systems. Educational systems. Health systems. Everything and anything that puts people in jobs. Excruciatingly little of it would qualify as “wise capital allocation.” The goal isn’t efficiency or profitability, but instead achieving the singular political goal of overcoming regional, geographic, climatic, demographic, ethnic, and millennia of historical barriers to unity. No price is too high.

I knew how to make noise for a cause. It was natural, I understood, for Americans to feel disconnected from the struggles of people in faraway countries, so I tried to bring it home, calling up celebrities like Stephen Colbert to lend their star power at events and on social media. I'd enlist the help of Janelle Monae, Zendraya, Kelly Clarkson and other talents to release a catchy pop song written by Diane Warren called "This is for my Girls" the proceeds of which would go towards funding girls' education globally.

Many people in the West who stereotype all Muslims as terrorists don’t know about the side of Islam that reflects love and mercy. It cares for the poor, widows, and orphans. It facilitates education and welfare. It unites and strengthens. This is the side of Islam that motivated those early leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course, there is also the other side, the one that calls all Muslims to jihad, to struggle and contend with the world until they establish a global caliphate, led by one holy man who rules and speaks for Allah.

By most measures—most notably in education, wealth, and health—globalization has been great, but it was never going to last. What you and your parents (and in some cases, grandparents) assumed as the normal, good, and right way of living—that is, the past seven decades or so—is a historic anomaly for the human condition both in strategic and demographic terms. The period of 1980–2015 in particular has simply been a unique, isolated, blessed moment in time. A moment that has ended. A moment that will certainly not come again in our lifetimes.

Population growth accounts for much of the impact as cities have gobbled up farmland and forest land, as roads and highways have paved over more land, and as Third World farmers have cleared forest lands to eke out a living. However, during the late twentieth century it became apparent that rates of population growth were slowing throughout the world as urbanization, increasing education, and improved services simultaneously reduced the pressure to have large families and raised their cost. At present, it seems likely that global populations will level out at 9 to 10 billion toward the end of the twenty-first century.

The age-old trick of transfer pricing Taking advantage of the fact that they operate in countries with different tax rates, TNCs [transnational corporations] have their subsidiaries over-charge or under-charge each other – sometimes grossly – so that profits are highest in those subsidiaries operating in countries with the lowest corporate tax rates. In this way, their global post-tax profit is maximized. A 2005 report by Christian Aid, the development charity, documents cases of under-priced exports like TV antennas from China at $0.40 apiece, rocket launchers from Bolivia at $40 and US bulldozers at $528 and over-priced imports such as German hacksaw blades at $5,485 each, Japanese tweezers at $4,896 and French wrenches at $1,089. The Starbucks and Google cases were different from those examples only in that they mainly involved ‘intangible assets’, such as brand licensing fees, patent royalties, interest charges on loans and in-house consultancy (e.g., coffee quality testing, store design), but the principle involved was the same. When TNCs evade taxes through transfer pricing, they use but do not pay for the collective productive inputs financed by tax revenue, such as infrastructure, education and R&D. This means that the host economy is effectively subsidizing TNCs.

We cannot pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is convenient to support. We must stand with all the oppressed or none of the oppressed. This is a global fight for life against corporate tyranny. We will win only when we see the struggle of working people in Greece, Spain, and Egypt as our own struggle. This will mean a huge reordering of our world, one that turns away from the primacy of profit to full employment and unionized workplaces, inexpensive and modernized mass transit, especially in impoverished communities, universal single-payer health care and a banning of for-profit health care corporations. The minimum wage must be at least $15 an hour and a weekly income of $500 provided to the unemployed, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, the elderly, and those unable to work. Anti-union laws, like the Taft-Hartley Act, and trade agreements such as NAFTA, will be abolished. All Americans will be granted a pension in old age. A parent will receive two years of paid maternity leave, as well as shorter work weeks with no loss in pay and benefits. The Patriot Act and Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the military to be used to crush domestic unrest, as well as government spying on citizens, will end. Mass incarceration will be dismantled. Global warming will become a national and global emergency. We will divert our energy and resources to saving the planet through public investment in renewable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels. Public utilities, including the railroads, energy companies, the arms industry, and banks, will be nationalized. Government funding for the arts, education, and public broadcasting will create places where creativity, self-expression, and voices of dissent can be heard and seen. We will terminate our nuclear weapons programs and build a nuclear-free world. We will demilitarize our police, meaning that police will no longer carry weapons when they patrol our streets but instead, as in Great Britain, rely on specialized armed units that have to be authorized case by case to use lethal force. There will be training and rehabilitation programs for the poor and those in our prisons, along with the abolition of the death penalty. We will grant full citizenship to undocumented workers. There will be a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions. Education will be free from day care to university. All student debt will be forgiven. Mental health care, especially for those now caged in our prisons, will be available. Our empire will be dismantled. Our soldiers and marines will come home.

It’s easy to raise graduation rates, for example, by lowering standards. Many students struggle with math and science prerequisites and foreign languages. Water down those requirements, and more students will graduate. But if one goal of our educational system is to produce more scientists and technologists for a global economy, how smart is that? It would also be a cinch to pump up the income numbers for graduates. All colleges would have to do is shrink their liberal arts programs, and get rid of education departments and social work departments while they’re at it, since teachers and social workers make less money than engineers, chemists, and computer scientists. But they’re no less valuable to society.

It is feminist thinking that empowers me to engage in a constructive critique of [Paulo] Freire’s work (which I needed so that as a young reader of his work I did not passively absorb the worldview presented) and yet there are many other standpoints from which I approach his work that enable me to experience its value, that make it possible for that work to touch me at the very core of my being. In talking with academic feminists (usually white women) who feel they must either dismiss or devalue the work of Freire because of sexism, I see clearly how our different responses are shaped by the standpoint that we bring to the work. I came to Freire thirsty, dying of thirst (in that way that the colonized, marginalized subject who is still unsure of how to break the hold of the status quo, who longs for change, is needy, is thirsty), and I found in his work (and the work of Malcolm X, Fanon, etc.) a way to quench that thirst. To have work that promotes one’s lib­eration is such a powerful gift that it does not matter so much if the gift is flawed. Think of the work as water that contains some dirt. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water. For me this is an experience that corresponds very much to the way individuals of privilege respond to the use of water in the First World context. When you are privileged, living in one of the richest countries in the world, you can waste resources. And you can especially justify your dispos­al of something that you consider impure. Look at what most people do with water in this country. Many people purchase special water because they consider tap water unclean—and of course this purchasing is a luxury. Even our ability to see the water that come through the tap as unclean is itself informed by an imperialist consumer per­ spective. It is an expression of luxury and not just simply a response to the condition of water. If we approach the drinking of water that comes from the tap from a global perspective we would have to talk about it differently. We would have to consider what the vast majority of the peo­ ple in the world who are thirsty must do to obtain water. Paulo’s work has been living water for me.

There is one other extremely important aspect of synthetic thinking. The systems with which we deal are becoming increasingly complex. Think, for example, of the difference between a neighborhood grocery store and a global chain of retail stores like Wal-Mart or the difference between a tent or shack and a skyscraper. Scientists are searching for a way of dealing effectively with such complexity. Unfortunately, most of them are approaching the subject analytically. The result is identification of such a large number of variables and relationships between them that we are not able to handle them. However, if complexity is approached synthetically, by design, as in the design of a skyscraper or a city, there seems to be no limit to the complexity we can handle effectively.

Both studies in these respected publications relied on data from the Surgisphere Corporation, an obscure Illinois-based “medical education” company that claimed to somehow control an extraordinary global database boasting access to medical information from 96,000 patients in more than 600 hospitals.87 Founded in 2008, this sketchy enterprise had eleven employees, including a middling science fiction writer and a porn star/events hostess. Surgisphere claimed to have analyzed data from six continents and hundreds of hospitals that had treated patients with HCQ or CQ in real time. Someone persuaded the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine to publish two Surgisphere studies in separate articles on May 1 and 22. Like the other Gates-supported studies, the Lancet article portrayed HCQ as ineffective and dangerous.

American parents and educators are told to give children choices, to respect their desires, to ask them questions as opposed to issuing orders, to refrain from pressuring or coercing them to do work they don’t want to do, and to offer positive reinforcement all the time. Children are supposed to want to do the work—otherwise, they shouldn’t have to do it. In contrast, the scripts that Asian culture offers its parents include statements, not questions, and orders, not requests. Children are routinely told what to do, and particularly when it comes to academic work, parents and educators don’t spend much time asking them what they want or catering to those desires. Asian parents see these scripts as the natural order of the family and society; the elder has wisdom and a responsibility to teach and discipline the child, and the child needs to learn from those elders.

According to Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project, for example, one’s “cultural worldview”—that would be political leanings or ideological outlook to the rest of us—explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”16 More powerfully, that is, than age, ethnicity, education, or party affiliation. The Yale researchers explain that people with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.17 The evidence is striking. Among the segment of the U.S. population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,” compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the strongest “egalitarian” views.18 Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes the tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition,” the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways that will protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion.19 As Kahan explained in Nature, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today. Furthermore, leftists are equally capable of denying inconvenient scientific evidence. If conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from corporations and government. This can lapse into the kind of fact resistance we see among those who are convinced that multinational drug companies have covered up the link between childhood vaccines and autism. No matter what evidence is marshaled to disprove their theories, it doesn’t matter to these crusaders—it’s just the system covering up for itself.20 This kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity that surrounds the climate issue today. As

The accelerated deindustrialization of North America, Europe, and Japan, and the shift of manufacturing to Asia in general and to China in particular, has been the leading reason for this reappraisal.[93] This manufacturing switch has brought changes ranging from risible to tragic. In the first category are such grotesque transactions as Canada, the country with per capita forest resources greater than in any other affluent nation, importing toothpicks and toilet paper from China, a country whose wood stocks amount to a small fraction of Canada’s enormous boreal forest patrimony.[94] But the switch has also contributed to tragedies, such as the rising midlife mortality among America’s white non-university-educated men. There can be no doubt that America’s post-2000 loss of some 7 million (formerly well-paying) manufacturing jobs—with most of that loss attributable to globalization, as most of that production moved to China—has been the principal reason of these deaths of despair, largely attributable to suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-induced liver disease.

It is evident that wealth is even more unevenly distributed than income and that the gap is widening. Since 1976, wealth has increased by 63 percent for the wealthiest 1 percent of the population and by 71 percent for the top 20 percent. Wealth has decreased by 43 percent for the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population (Economic Policy Institute 2011). The widening gap has multiple causes. First, shifts in the U.S. tax code have lowered the top tax rate from 91 percent in the years from 1950 to 1963, to 35 percent from 2003 to 2012, allowing the wealthy to retain far more of their income (Tax Policy Center 2012). Second, wages for most U.S. families have stagnated since the early 1970s. Moreover, credit card, education, and mortgage debt have skyrocketed. Finally, the collapse of the housing market beginning in 2007 dramatically affected many middleclass families who held a significant portion of their wealth in the value of their home. By 2012, fully 31 percent of all homeowners owed more on their mortgages than their homes were worth (Zillow 2012).

There are many reasons why the tech revolution will hit the emerging world much harder than it will hit Europe and the United States. In developed countries, children are more likely to grow up with digital technologies as toys and then to encounter them in school. Governments in these countries have money to invest in educational systems that prepare workers, both blue and white collar, for change. Their universities have much greater access to state-of-the-art technologies. Their companies produce the innovations that drive tech change in the first place. This creates a dynamic in which high-wage countries are more likely than low-wage ones to dominate the skill-intensive industries that will generate twenty-first-century growth, leaving behind large numbers of those billion-plus people who only recently emerged from age-old deprivation. The wealth in developed countries helps them maintain much stronger social safety nets than in poorer countries to help citizens who lose their jobs, fall ill, or need to care for sick children or aging parents. In short, wealthier countries are both more adaptable and more resilient than developing ones.

The only word these corporations know is more,” wrote Chris Hedges, former correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave. To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.

The state, too, is in decline, though perhaps less obviously than the idea of the national community. The reason is simply that the global community of capitalists will not let the Western state reverse its post-1970s policies of retrenchment, which is the only way for it to adequately address all the crises that are currently ripping society apart. If any state—unimaginably—made truly substantive moves to restore and expand programs of social welfare, or to vastly expand and improve public education, or to initiate programs like Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration or Tennessee Valley Authority (but on a necessarily broader scale than in the 1930s), or to restore organized labor to its power in the 1960s and thereby raise effective demand, or to promulgate any other such anti-capitalist measure, investors would flee it and its sources of funds would dry up. It couldn’t carry out such policies anyway, given the massive resistance they would provoke among all sectors and levels of the business community. Fiscal austerity is, on the whole, good for profits (in the short term), since it squeezes the population and diverts money to the ruling class. In large part because of capital’s high mobility and consequent wealth and power over both states and populations, the West’s contemporary political paradigm of austerity and government retrenchment is effectively irreversible for the foreseeable future.

Charles is difficult to pigeonhole politically. Tony Blair wrote that he considered him a “curious mixture of the traditional and the radical (at one level he was quite New Labour, at another definitely not) and of the princely and insecure.” He is certainly conservative in his old-fashioned dress and manners, his advocacy of traditional education in the arts and humanities, his reverence for classical architecture and the seventeenth-century Book of Common Prayer. But his forays into mysticism and his jeremiads against scientific progress, industrial development, and globalization give him an eccentric air. “One of the main purposes of the monarchy is to unite the country and not divide it,” said Kenneth Rose. When the Queen took the throne at age twenty-five, she was a blank slate, which gave her a great advantage in maintaining the neutrality necessary to preserve that unity. It was a gentler time, and she could develop her leadership style quietly. But it has also taken vigilance and discipline for her to keep her views private over so many decades. Charles has the disadvantage of a substantial public record of strong and sometimes contentious opinions, not to mention the private correspondence with government ministers protected by exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act that could come back to haunt him if any of it is made public. One letter that did leak was written in 1997 to a group of friends after a visit to Hong Kong and described the country’s leaders as “appalling old waxworks.

The failure of Communism was consecrated in the fall of the Soviet Union. The remarkable thing is that, as in most cases when prophecy fails, the faith never faltered. Indeed, an alternative version had long been maturing, though cast into the shadows for a time by enthusiasm for the quick fix of revolution. It had, however, been maturing for at least a century and already had a notable repertoire of institutions available. We may call it Olympianism, because it is the project of an intellectual elite that believes that it enjoys superior enlightenment and that its business is to spread this benefit to those living on the lower slopes of human achievement. And just as Communism had been a political project passing itself off as the ultimate in scientific understanding, so Olympianism burrowed like a parasite into the most powerful institution of the emerging knowledge economy--the universities. We may define Olympianism as a vision of human betterment to be achieved on a global scale by forging the peoples of the world into a single community based on the universal enjoyment of appropriate human rights. Olympianism is the cast of mind dedicated to this end, which is believed to correspond to the triumph of reason and community over superstition and hatred. It is a politico-moral package in which the modern distinction between morals and politics disappears into the aspiration for a shared mode of life in which the communal transcends individual life. To be a moral agent is in these terms to affirm a faith in a multicultural humanity whose social and economic conditions will be free from the causes of current misery. Olympianism is thus a complex long-term vision, and contemporary Western Olympians partake of different fragments of it. To be an Olympian is to be entangled in a complex dialectic involving elitism and egalitarianism. The foundational elitism of the Olympian lies in self-ascribed rationality, generally picked up on an academic campus. Egalitarianism involves a formal adherence to democracy as a rejection of all forms of traditional authority, but with no commitment to taking any serious notice of what the people actually think. Olympians instruct mortals, they do not obey them. Ideally, Olympianism spreads by rational persuasion, as prejudice gives way to enlightenment. Equally ideally, democracy is the only tolerable mode of social coordination, but until the majority of people have become enlightened, it must be constrained within a framework of rights, to which Olympian legislation is constantly adding. Without these constraints, progress would be in danger from reactionary populism appealing to prejudice. The overriding passion of the Olympian is thus to educate the ignorant and everything is treated in educational terms. Laws for example are enacted not only to shape the conduct of the people, but also to send messages to them. A belief in the power of role models, public relations campaigns, and above all fierce restrictions on raising sensitive questions devant le peuple are all part of pedagogic Olympianism.

among the young, a portent of the world’s future. Hate crimes, violence against women, and the victimization of children are all in long-term decline, as is the exploitation of children for their labor. As people are getting healthier, richer, safer, and freer, they are also becoming more literate, knowledgeable, and smarter. Early in the 19th century, 12 percent of the world could read and write; today 83 percent can. Literacy and the education it enables will soon be universal, for girls as well as boys. The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors. People are putting their longer, healthier, safer, freer, richer, and wiser lives to good use. Americans work 22 fewer hours a week than they used to, have three weeks of paid vacation, lose 43 fewer hours to housework, and spend just a third of their paycheck on necessities rather than five-eighths. They are using their leisure and disposable income to travel, spend time with their children, connect with loved ones, and sample the world’s cuisine, knowledge, and culture. As a result of these gifts, people worldwide have become happier. Even Americans, who take their good fortune for granted, are “pretty happy” or happier, and the younger generations are becoming less unhappy, lonely, depressed, drug-addicted, and suicidal. As societies have become healthier, wealthier, freer, happier, and better educated, they have set their sights on the most pressing global challenges. They have emitted fewer pollutants, cleared fewer forests, spilled less oil,

The Blue Mind Rx Statement Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans. The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters. Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more. Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety. We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies. •Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits. •All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy. •Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both. •Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support. •Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.

Here’s the four point battle plan, which we’ll return to at the end of the book: Disregard the Doomsayers: The misguided belief that “it’s too late” to act has been co-opted by fossil fuel interests and those advocating for them. It’s just another way of legitimizing business-as-usual and a continued reliance on fossil fuels. We must reject the overt doom and gloom that we increasingly encounter in today’s climate discourse. A Child Shall Lead Them: The youngest generation is fighting tooth and nail to save their planet, and there is a moral authority and clarity in their message that none but the most jaded ears can fail to hear. They are the game-changers that climate advocates have been waiting for. We should model our actions after theirs and learn from their methods and their idealism. Educate, Educate, Educate: Most hard-core climate-change deniers are unmovable. They view climate change through the prism of right-wing ideology and are impervious to facts. Don’t waste your time and effort trying to convince them. But there are many honest, confused folks out there who are caught in the crossfire, victims of the climate-change disinformation campaign. We must help them out. Then they will be in a position to join us in battle. Changing the System Requires Systemic Change: The fossil fuel disinformation machine wants to make it about the car you choose to drive, the food you choose to eat, and the lifestyle you choose to live rather than about the larger system and incentives. We need policies that will incentivize the needed shift away from fossil fuel burning toward a clean, green global economy. So-called leaders who resist the call for action must be removed from office.

Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults. Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other. All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness. In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education. Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments. They met for lunch at the Pentagon to develop an action plan. One cause of the problem was the president’s fervent belief that annual trade deficits of about $500 billion harmed the American economy. He was on a crusade to impose tariffs and quotas despite Cohn’s best efforts to educate him about the benefits of free trade. How could they convince and, in their frank view, educate the president? Cohn and Mattis realized they were nowhere close to persuading him. The Groundhog Day–like meetings on trade continued and the acrimony only grew. “Let’s get him over here to the Tank,” Mattis proposed. The Tank is the Pentagon’s secure meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It might focus him. “Great idea,” Cohn said. “Let’s get him out of the White House.” No press; no TVs; no Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s personal secretary, who worked within shouting distance of the Oval Office. There wouldn’t even be any looking out the window, because there were no windows in the Tank. Getting Trump out of his natural environment could do the trick. The idea was straight from the corporate playbook—a retreat or off-site meeting. They would get Trump to the Tank with his key national security and economic team to discuss worldwide strategic relations. Mattis and Cohn agreed. Together they would fight Trump on this. Trade wars or disruptions in the global markets could savage and undermine the precarious stability in the world. The threat could spill over to the military and intelligence community. Mattis couldn’t understand why the U.S. would want to pick a fight with allies, whether it was NATO, or friends in the Middle East, or Japan—or particularly with South Korea.

Finally, I would like to point out that now in the age of English, choosing a language policy is not the exclusive concern of non-English-speaking nations. It is also a concern for English-speaking nations, where, to realize the world’s diversity and gain the humility that is proper to any human being, people need to learn a foreign language as a matter of course. Acquiring a foreign language should be a universal requirement of compulsory education. Furthermore, English expressions used in international conferences should be regulated and standardized to some extent. Native English speakers need to know that to foreigners, Latinate vocabulary is easier to understand than what to the native speakers is easy, child-friendly language. At international conferences, telling jokes that none but native speakers can comprehend is inappropriate, even if fun. If native speakers of English – those who enjoy the privilege of having their mother tongue as the universal language – would not wait for others to protest but would take steps to regulate themselves, what respect they would earn from the rest of the world! If that is too much to ask, the rest of the world would appreciate it if they would at least be aware of their privileged position – and more important, be aware that the privilege is unwarranted. In this age of global communication, some language or other was bound to be come a universal language used in every corner of the world English became that language not because it is intrinsically more universal than other languages, but because through a series of historical coincidences it came to circulate ever more widely until it reached the tipping point. That’s all there is to it. English is an accidental universal language. If more English native speakers walked through the doors of other languages, they would discover undreamed-of landscapes. Perhaps some of them might then begin to think that the truly blessed are not they themselves, but those who are eternally condemned to reflect on language, eternally condemned to marvel at the richness of the world.

The culture generated by peer-orientation is sterile in the strict sense of that word: it is unable to reproduce itself or to transmit values that can serve future generations. There are very few third generation hippies. Whatever its nostalgic appeal, that culture did not have much staying power. Peer culture is momentary, transient, and created daily, a “culture du jour,” as it were. The content of peer culture resonates with the psychology of our peer-oriented children and adults who are arrested in their own development. In one sense it is fortunate that peer culture cannot be passed on to future generations, since its only redeeming aspect is that it is fresh every decade. It does not edify or nurture or even remotely evoke the best in us or in our children. The peer culture, concerned only with what is fashionable at the moment, lacks any sense of tradition or history. As peer orientation rises, young people's appreciation of history wanes, even of recent history. For them, present and future exist in a vacuum with no connection to the past. The implications are alarming for the prospects of any informed political and social decision-making flowing from such ignorance. A current example is South Africa today, where the end of apartheid has brought not only political freedom but, on the negative side, rapid and rampant Westernization and the advent of globalized peer culture. The tension between the generations is already intensifying. “Our parents are trying to educate us about the past,” one South African teenager told a Canadian newspaper reporter. “We're forced to hear about racists and politics…” For his part, Steve Mokwena, a thirty-six year-old historian and a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, is described by the journalist as being “from a different world than the young people he now works with.” “They're being force-fed on a diet of American pop trash. It's very worrying,” said Mokwena—in his mid-thirties hardly a hoary patriarch.on a diet of American pop trash. It's very worrying,” said Mokwena—in his mid-thirties hardly a hoary patriarch. You might argue that peer orientation, perhaps, can bring us to the genuine globalization of culture, of a universal civilization that no longer divides the world into “us and them.” Didn't the MTV broadcaster brag that children all over television's world resembled one another more than their parents and grandparents? Could this not be the way to the future, a way to transcend the cultures that divide us and to establish a worldwide culture of connection and peace? We think not.

As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we’ve been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations. When one asks what the motivations of Islamists and jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want good schools for their kids. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society. Liberals imagine that jihadists and Islamists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring a group like the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove that he was doing anything for religious reasons. Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if he said he did these things because he was filled with despair and felt nothing but revulsion for humanity, or because he was determined to sacrifice himself to rid his nation of tyranny, such a psychological or political motive would be accepted at face value. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate religion every time. The game is rigged.

The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?