Find The Conversation

At the risk of contributing to your information overload, I wanted to share some things I’m reading, watching and listening to at the moment.  Inspiration is drawn from many sources, and even if something doesn’t inspire anything directly, a bit of knowledge can’t hurt.  Okay, it can hurt a lot.  Still… go for it!

Austerity Debunked
For citizens of Ireland or anywhere else that espouses austerity, you may like to know the influential paper that has been the  the whole reasoning behind austerity programs has just been blown to smithereens.  The Colbert Report demolished Reinhart and Rogoff in typically hilarious fashion last night.  It’s accurately described here in Business Insider, but you’re probably better off just watching him do it :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oa-Bfdkg3w
and the interview with the grad student who spotted their “error” :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgMV4KV6Qw0

Find The Conversation
If you’ve ever felt that humanity is on the wrong track, then you might wonder whether we’re taking the necessary steps to right our course.  This podcast goes some way towards addressing this.  Their website (and the start of each podcast) explains it better than I could, so dive in and take a listen.  Warning : may provoke thought.

From April to December of 2012, Aengus Anderson traveled America and recorded long, unstructured conversations with a cross-section of thinkers and doers, from transhumanists to neoprimitivists, urban farmers to musicians. The resulting conversations were wildly diverse but unified by a few themes: critiques of the present, hopes for the future, and discussions of what each thinker considered “the good.” The results may not yield any existential answers, but you’ll hear thoughtful and often provocative discussions emerging from a cacophony of ideas.

Find them on Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/theconversation-1
Or their website: http://www.findtheconversation.com/

The World Is A Battlefield
Contradicting Pat Benatar’s assertion, it turns out that the world is a battlefield.  Also on soundcloud, I heard this interview via “Democracy Now!”, an independent news organisation based in the US.  The reason I’m posting it is because it introduced me to the phrase “forward deployment”, meaning invading a country and preparing the ground for battle before you’ve actually “started” the war.  There are several levels of creepiness laid out here, describing the drone wars, outsourcing of secret prisons and torture centres.  I’m not sure if you even SHOULD listen to this.
https://soundcloud.com/democracynow/the-world-is-a-battlefield