One more reason why I love Norway

I love living in a country where relatively recent leaps in technology have created a total paradigm shift from the extreme poverty of 100++ years above, to the dizzying heights of affluence of today … WHILE some of us still remember the old days well enough to appreciate the contrast.

I love living in a country where the cultural values still reflect attitudes that were necessary during all those years of poverty: Self discipline, thrift, long-term planning, and a sense of responsibility for one’s neighbours.

I’m not sure that the next generation will manage to keep those advantages alive.

Glenn Beck’s Post-Election Plan: Buy Farmland and Guns!

Karyn shared this video on Wednesday.

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It shows Glenn Beck explaining his post-election plan: To buy farmland and guns.

Beck’s talk is interesting because it illustrates a huge problem that we’re coming up against in the Middle East, as well as in the Midwest and everywhere in between: Bigotry and its offshoot, Fundamentalism. When other people do this, there’s often a hint of subtlety about it. Not with Beck. He goes all out from the moment he opens his mouth. He starts with a splinter of insight, spins a story around it, and BELIEVES.

In some ways, I can understand him.

The Permanent Militarization of America

President Dwight Eisenhower was a Republican and a career officer, and he would (apparently) have been appalled at the amount we’re wasting on the military today. The author of this article quotes him as saying that

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,

When would be the best time to tackle Global Warming?

I’ve found a metaphor for Global Warming. It’s like the tall tree that’s growing close to a friend’s house.

• Fifty years ago, I could have disposed of it with a pair of clippers.
• Thirty years ago, it would have required nothing beyond a handsaw.

The Soul

I’ve had trouble defining the word “soul”, but believe that I’ve found a solution. A “soul” can be seen as the difference between the whole and the apparent sum of its parts.

Is education the (only) key?

In his article this morning’s in The New York Times, “Average is Over“, Thomas Friedman says that

“… one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in globalization and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to have more and better education to make themselves above average. Here are the latest unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Americans over 25 years old: those with less than a high school degree, 13.8 percent; those with a high school degree and no college, 8.7 percent; those with some college or associate degree, 7.7 percent; and those with bachelor’s degree or higher, 4.1 percent.

Forget bringing the jobs back from China. They’re gone.

The starting point for this morning’s reflections was a question from President Obama: What will it take to bring the iPhone work back from China to America? How much lower would our wages have to be? The answer, in a long article in the New York Times, is that those jobs are never going to come back, no matter how depressed our wages become.

Low wages may have been the driving force when we we first started sending jobs abroad, but they’re no longer the only force. The rivers of money that started to flow then have ground deep paths in our economic landscapes.

What happened to Saab?

Yesterday, I spent some time rummaging through a collection of Saabs in a scrap yard, looking for relays and pedal switches.  This morning, I read the inventory of the Saab museum, that’s currently up for sale by the bankruptcy manager. The similarity was striking. 

Are we missing the elephant in the cupboard?

Everybody talks about the US national debt these days, and how our wars are contributing to it.

It’s an important conversation, and I’m all for scaling back the wars – particularly those that can’t conceivably be won by military means. However, there’s also another conversation we need to have with ourselves, about the way that health care spending has spun out of control. Imagine the Federal budget as an overfull cupboard. We need to take something out, to give ourselves some wiggle room in there. What about starting with the elephant?

Nostalgia

We put our 22 year old Merceds up for sale last night, with a stern warning that the only straight and shiny surface on the car was the windshield. Everything else is full of rust and dents, the engine has an oil leak, and it’s gone as far as to the moon and part of the way back (literally). Karyn set the asking price to 6000 NOK = 1000 USD. The ad went online at 10:30 PM, and I was astonished to wake up to two eager buyers.

What on earth is going on? Do they think we’re kidding about the rust?