Who asked you? I mean me!

I got asked to write my thoughts on what Obama would need to do, and in what order, once his presidency begins, so I thought I'd put it up here as well...

It does seem like we’re in a pretty confused place, no? War, depression, energy problems, global over-population, and rampant fundamentalism (on every side). It almost feels impossible to know where to begin.
And maybe that’s part of the problem. Any one of these issues by itself could be cataclysmic. How do you decide which to respond to first, when they are so intertwined that you can’t respond to any one in isolation?
At the same time, these are all symptoms of even larger problems. For example, you’ve got to stop the economic meltdown as soon as possible, but the real issue is that we don’t make anything. Everything is done either better or cheaper somewhere else. So our economy is just a service economy- we offer each other services, from banking to law to entertainment. No wonder the stock market fell apart, it’s based on fluff!
And nobody can deny that war, energy problems, and religious fundamentalism are all deeply intertwined. They’re all related to our inability to change. I mean, really, we know that we need to move to alternative energy sources, for liberal environmental and for conservative national sovereignty issues. We need to be able to control our own energy needs, and do it in a way that is both renewable and non-detrimental to the planet we live on. This seems like one of the most obvious things we could say. And somehow we haven’t done it. Even though it’s caused us to go to war, and fomented a lot of hatred against us, we are still resistant.
So here’s my thoughts- after dealing with our current economic crisis, Obama should make our country the leading producer of alternative energy. Everyone around the world is going to need it, no one has claimed the market yet, we’ve got the space and the resource to do it, and it will enable us to drastically cut back our military presence abroad and our dependence on people who don’t particularly like us. And it’s something that conservatives and liberals can get behind.
The other issue that needs to be dealt with is the pervasive feeling of powerlessness. It feels like our overall confidence in humanity’s ability to make positive changes is at an all-time low. Corporate fraud, political corruption, genocides and religious zealotry- who are we supposed to turn to anymore? And I think the response to powerlessness is two things- apathy and violence. People either respond by turning away or by getting angry. And so while many of us in America hope change will happen, but sit back waiting for someone else to do it, many in other countries give up on the political system as a means of change and resort to violence, terrorism, and genocide.
We need to feel confident in the human race’s ability to lift itself up. That we don’t always have to give in to our greed and violence, that we can participate in our own lives and the lives of those around us, and actually have the ability to make things better.
And I have no idea whether or not Obama can do it, but he caused a greater surge in hope and belief through his election than I have seen in a long time.

Monkey Wars

Religion has been a cause for a lot of division. But often it's an excuse.
Really, I think the only way there would be no wars is if there were no countries (no groups big enough to have wars).
But that's a bit difficult, no?
No countries is tricky.

But really, for whatever the distinction, religion, country, skin color, whether or not you have stars on your belly (the star-bellied sneetches who live on the beaches), as long as there are big enough groups who will back one person's ideas, you're gonna have war. If two people disagree, vehemently, and can't find any way to solve the situation, they might get into a fight. At worst, maybe they'll kill each other. But if each of them has thousands of followers, you get a war.

It seems like the two simians closest to humans are the chimpanzee and the bonobo. The two of them, in fact, are quite similar to each other as well.

Chimpanzees, like us, are patriarchal societies. And are one of the only animals besides us who have wars, who have big groups getting together to fight one another.

But bonobos are matriarchal societies. And they have no war. They don't even really have much fighting. They are an impressively sharing species.
Oh, and they have sex. Lots of sex. With ever possible combination of bonobo they can find. Male with female, male with male, female with female, in the family, out of the family. Seems the only ones who don't get to have sex are the babies (they wait until six months old or so).

I'm not saying, I'm just saying

Who's your daddy? Maybe who's your mommy!

Stock Market in the First Place

The stock market has always been a strange thing to me. I mean, the value of the stock of a company has only minimal relation to the actual value of a company. I mean, a stock can go up twice, three times, even six times its value in a day. You can't tell me that company is actual worth six times its value in a day. It sure as hell hasn't made six times as much stuff.
So, you've got this system in which an abstract relationship to money begets more money. In other words, abstract projections on monetary change begets real money which begets real change.
Companies have to base their corporate planning on how to maintain or increase their stock valuation in a quaterly basis. So, the amount that other people will decide that they are worth in play money somehow translates to what they actually are worth. Companies can go backrupt selling the same amount of product that they were selling yesterday if their stock plummets.
What?
That just doesn't make any sense to me.
And the fact that companies have to worry about their short term bottom-line more than their long-term one in order to maintain their stock values is one of the stupidest business models I could possibly imagine.
How could a model that says you should only think about were you will be in three months and ignore where you will be in three years possibly be considered even functional?
This is not some guy, just out of college, not wanting to think any further than the next three months. That's fine.
This is a company which makes something, brings in and expends millions of dollars, and has lots of people working there. It's the business model of a four-year-old.
All for the dictates of a speculative game. Which is all the stock market is. A fucking game. Not based on what a company does, how "good" or "bad" they are, either morally, socially, or economically, but based simply on how much other people want to buy and trade invisible insignificant amounts of ownership of a company, but don't want to have any involvement with the company itself.
Does a stock broker buy Boeing because he has ideas on how they should build new airplanes?
No wonder the stock market is falling apart.
It shouldn't have stayed together this long in the first place.
Time for a new economic model, for fuck's sake!