Category Archives: New Utopia

By Leah MarieAnn Klett, Christian Post Reporter | Sunday, January 26, 2020 N.T. Wright, a retired Anglican bishop and now chair of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, recently released his latest book, "The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians," co-authored with Michael F. Bird. | N.T. Wright

Biblical scholar N.T. Wright believes that failing to read the New Testament in its proper context has a devastating effect on both the unity of the Christian church and the theological understanding of God and the world.

When we fail to care about or recognize the history, literature, and theology of the early Christians, we tend to make them in our own image, Wright told The Christian Post. We imagine that they're just like us with our sorts of concerns, yet very often they're not.

The early Christians, particularly those from the Jewish background, were celebrating the fact that in and through Jesus, something had just happened, and as result, the world was a different place, he continued.

In other words, this was news. Something had happened, something would therefore happen and they were caught up in this new movement. For us, Christianity has collapsed into being a set of good advice about how to go to Heaven when you die. We forget that it started off as news and about something that happened concerning Jesus. If we could reemphasize that, we would all be a lot healthier for it.

Wright, a retired Anglican bishop and now chair of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, is seeking to combat biblical illiteracy through his new book, The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians, co-authored with Michael F. Bird.

Complete with maps, diagrams, and a series of lectures, the book is intended for both students needing an introduction to the New Testament and any Christian feeling stuck reading Scripture, according to Wright.

Its an invitation to walk in the Jewish world, the Greek world, the Roman world of the New Testament, he said. What it was like living in those days, why people thought the way they did, why they looked at things the way they did. And then particularly, what can we actually say about Jesus himself, about the Gospels, about the early Christians, about Paul, about the resurrection?

His goal, Wright said, is to transform the way that the next generation learns and studies the new Testament, both in seminaries and colleges and in churches more broadly.

Its user-friendly enough for the absolute beginner, but then it'll take people on a long way from there into all sorts of exciting stuff, more than they'd ever imagined, he said.

The theologian stressed that the ultimate truth in the New Testament is deeply personal, not a mere how-to guide when it comes to living a good, moral life. He expressed hope that The New Testament in Its World will help modern-day believers study and apply the New Testament with a clarified focus and mission.

What you find in the New Testament is this deeply personal encounter; the documents themselves are breathing with this sense that we have actually met the living God in the person of Jesus and He's not like we thought He would be. And that's a bit scary, but it's also very affirming and supportive and life-transforming, he explained.

The New Testament is summed up in Galatians 2:20: I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me, Wright said.

I think that that sense of a debt of love, which only love can repay, is absolutely at the heart of the New Testament, he argued. "It's the same whether you fall in love with music or fall in love with great art or fall in love with another person. Then what you do as a result is not a list of rules. Its I need to plunge myself into this new reality and let it shake me and transform me.

According to Wright, the early Christians were seriously concerned with unity across cultures, ethnicities, and gender; in fact, the topic of unity is threaded throughout Pauls letters. But unity as a Christian imperative is something the modern world has largely forgotten about, he lamented.

As long as we are a wildly disunited, as we are in Western Christianity at the moment, then the powers that run the world take no notice office. Why should they? Because we're just a babble of different voices, Wright said.

The early Christians lived as family, supporting one another in practical, financial, and realistic ways, Wright contended.

They weren't just a religion; they were an outward-facing, but inwardly coherent family. I think it's a challenge to us today when in so many of our churches, the people around us rather look like us. We tend to gravitate towards churches where we feel comfortable because it's people of our culture, our socio-economic group.

The author of more than 80 books emphasized that the New Testament must be read using first-century eyes with 21st-century questions for greater theological and eschatological clarity.

He further delved into his earlier claim that many modern Christians are wrong about the idea of Heaven and the afterlife. The early Christians, he charged, didnt simply exist on earth to go to Heaven. Rather, they sought to bring Heaven to earth through the Gospel.

The early Christians were mostly Jews, and they believed that the world was good, that it was God's world, and that God's aim and intention was not to snatch some people from this world to go and live with Him, but so to remake the world, that it would make sense for God Himself to come and live with us, which is what it says at the end of the book of Revelation," Wright said.

The dwelling of God is with humans, not the dwelling of humans is with God. Of course, that then is the corroboree. But the point is that the New Testament as a whole addresses our culture by saying, Wait a minute, we may actually have been getting our Christianity itself somewhat wrong because we've been imagining the wrong goal to the process.

If Christians would truly study the Scriptures, they would see both the theology and the history addressing us in our historical moment, and saying, let's get the theology right, he said. Maybe this would really help with getting the church itself back on track.

Modern Western culture, according to Wright, has become increasingly Epicurean.

He explained: Its an ancient philosophy, which is that the gods, if they exist, are a long way away. They don't get involved in our world or we don't get involved in their world. So the best thing to do is let the world run itself and make itself. And if you want to pray towards this God, then fine, but don't expect very much from it. That's, that's Epicureanism in a nutshell.

He pointed out that Epicureanism has infected contemporary Western thought in ways that often we don't realize because it's the air we breathe.

Christians have done their best in the last 200 years to find a way of dealing with that, but often by appealing to Plato who said that we have souls that really belong in the upstairs world and that we want to get back there as soon as we can, Wright said. The frustrating thing to me as a historian and a theologian is that actually that's not how the early Christians saw things.

On its own, the simplistic love God, love people mantra popular among Western Christians is problematic, according to Wright, as it raises questions about which god you are worshiping, how its supposed to work, and who these people were supposed to be loving?

In the New Testament when Jesus says the two great commandments are love God and love your neighbor as yourself, this is not to the exclusion of the early Christian belief that with Jesus, the kingdom of God is actually arriving on earth as in Heaven, he clarified. But most people today in our world simply want to reduce this to an ethic: Here's what I'm supposed to do and then it'll be all right.

This book is trying to make people realize that the early Christians were not just a religious movement, they were an everything movement, he explained. This was a whole new way of being human. Of course, loving God and loving your neighbor; that's fine, that's in there. But it needs the structure, the scaffolding, the surround support system of all the other things which we get at through the historical study and theological analysis.

Still, Wright said hes optimistic about the future of Christianity, as he believes people are searching for something and growing through and past the sterility of post-modernity.

Its one of the reasons our political world is so confused. People are hoping if only they vote this way or support that policy, maybe that will be the way to utopia, he said. There is a lot of confusion.

He also challenged Western Christians to lay aside their arrogance, pointing out that most Christians in the world today are not Westerners and do not speak English as their mother tongue.

Christianity is flourishing in sub-Saharan Africa, in Southeast Asia, in Latin America, in all sorts of ways, Wright pointed out. And I think we in the West need to not say, Oh well they're a bit behind and they need to catch up with us. We need to say, Maybe it's we who've gone a bit over the hill and we need to be reminded of where the action really is.

I hope and pray that that will be the effect that this book and the study of the New Testament that goes with it will have on people."

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NT Wright on misconceptions about Heaven, the early Christians, and combating biblical illiteracy - Christian Post

In 2020, doomsday scenarios are legion. Bruce Munro talks to preppers of various stripes about getting ready for the end of the world as we know it.

He is a respectable professional who lives in the South Island. But he is stockpiling silver and gold against what he says is an inevitable, global, economic meltdown.

She is a successful New Zealand businesswoman who also heads up Survival Movement New Zealand. She is calling on the Government to stockpile enough food and fuel to buffer the country against risks ranging from droughts and war to meteors and solar flares.

He is an ordinary dad looking to shift permanently from Australia to New Zealand with his daughter. He has done the calculations. He has looked at the safest options. He wants to be living in Mosgiel when the world goes pear-shaped sometime after 2028.

Take your pick.

No, seriously, how would you most like, or most fear, the world as we know it to end?

Whatever your doomsday flavour - economic, political, natural, environmental, military, technological, social, climatic, extraterrestrial - there is someone who will tell you it is inevitable, imminent, inescapable ... and that you should be preparing for it.

Not that they are necessarily all barking mad. On Sunday it was announced the Doomsday Clock - set up in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to signal the proximity of nuclear, climate and other global catastrophe - had moved 20 seconds forward. It now sits at 100 seconds to midnight. The closest ever.

No wonder. The warning signs of a dozen different Armageddons lurking on the horizon are difficult to ignore.

Or how about the shaky global financial system? Around the world, private debt continues to balloon. New Zealand is right up there. Household debt levels, at 93% of GDP, are among the highest in the world. Bubbles are also appearing in housing markets, bond markets and stock markets worldwide.

I see bubbles everywhere,warns Yale Prof Robert Shiller, who has a Nobel Prize in economics. Prof Shiller predicted both the 2000 stock market crash and the 2007 United States housing market crash.

Last time, the banks were considered too big to be allowed to fail. But there are many who say the underlying problems that led to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) were plastered over by printing money rather than reigning in debt. As far back as 2010, the International Monetary Fund said a tax on financial activities was needed to pay for the next GFC. But its warnings have not been heeded. Could the next international pecuniary calamity, perhaps just around the corner, mean our whole monetary system keels over, taking with it governments, businesses, law and order?

Then, there is, of course, the gathering climate crisis.

The world is warming. The worlds oceans, which absorb 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases, are warming at a rate equivalent to five nuclear bombs of heat every second, day and night, 365 days a year.

Extreme weather events are increasing. Globally, since 1980, floods and various water events have quadrupled, while other climate events such as extreme temperatures, droughts and forest fires have more than doubled, the European Academies' Science Advisory Council says.

Close to home, Australian bush fires, piggy-backing off the worst drought in decades and record-breaking air temperatures, have scorched 18.6 million hectares and could keep burning for months.

It fits predictions of life in a climate-changed future. Scientists warn that beyond a global temperature rise of 2degC the impacts of climate breakdown will likely become catastrophic and irreversible.

Add to the horrendous list the increasing risk of nuclear warfare, an expected major earthquake on the Alpine Fault, the possibility of super volcanoes, the potential for synthetic viruses to be unleashed as bioweapons ... and it is hard to avoid the feeling the end is nigh. Or, at least, the end of life as we have known it.

SO, how best to prepare?

What are those who see the end fast-approaching in their rear vision mirrors doing to ready themselves?

What can be learnt from them?

If you do not live in a temperate, antipodean paradise at the bottom of the world, then the doomsday preppers clear message is - move there. Or at least buy yourself a bolt hole there and have a private jet capable of flying non-stop from the US to New Zealand fuelled and waiting for the apocalypse to kick off.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, has bought a multi-million dollar chunk of land on the edge of Lake Wanaka. Thiel has cited The Sovereign Individual, a roadmap to power and riches in a post-democratic future, as the book he is most influenced by. He has also called New Zealand a utopia.

He is not the only one.

Speaking of New Zealand as a favoured refuge in the event of a cataclysm, billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman told the New Yorker that saying youre buying a house in New Zealand is kind of a wink, wink, say no more.

It has been reported that five Silicon Valley executives co-own an escape jet, a Gulfstream G550, capable of reaching New Zealand without refuelling.

There are also unsubstantiated claims that up to 35 underground survival bunkers have been shipped to New Zealand by super-rich Americans scared by whatever end-game scenario they see on the horizon.

They might be on to something, according to Prof Nick Wilson.

The Wellington-based University of Otago academic says the risk of human extinction has never been higher. His particular focus is near-extinction events such as a northern hemisphere nuclear war (1.4% annual risk) or a global pandemic caused by a synthetic virus escaping a laboratory.

In such scenarios, Prof Wilson says the resources, development and relative isolation of New Zealand and Australia make them the worlds top two candidates for island refuges - hideaways where a remnant of humanity could hole-up until the dust settled and then begin rebuilding.

He has called on the Government of New Zealand to do three things; collaborate with Australia in planning for a near-extinction event, invest in resiliency and rehearse rapidly sealing the nations borders.

Also urging the Government to act is Lisa Er, founder of Lisas Hummus, which she sold in 2006, and head of Survival Movement New Zealand. In the face of risks ranging from drought to war, Er wants the Government to set up a disaster think tank and to stockpile and maintain a three month supply of food and fuel for the whole country.

Sarah Stuart-Black, who is executive director for the National Emergency Management Agency, says they are all over it, sort of.

The country has extensive and agile arrangements in place across agencies that would allow it to deal with a range of events, both foreseen and unforeseen.

This includes working with other countries to respond to emerging threats.

In regards to building resilience nationwide, a National Disaster Resilience Strategy was launched last year.

New Zealand has reasonable stocks of medical, food and other supplies. But individuals and families should make sure they have their own supplies, the nations emergency planner says. There is no mention of fuel.

Asked whether any members of Cabinet had a secret bunker or a panic room, Stuart-Black says Meeting facilities for Ministers are available within the Parliamentary precinct in Wellington. I would note that arrangements are also in place to move Parliament to Auckland on a temporary basis should Wellington become severely impacted by an earthquake.

It is best to ask Customs NZ about border closure rehearsals, she advises.

Customs NZ responds that bits of the border, including sea and air ports, are closed during regular national security exercises. But the country has never tried shutting down the entire border at one time - an action that would require Cabinet-level sanction - and so no-one knows how quickly it can be done.

Bottom line, despite uncertainties New Zealand is a better place than most to ride out a global meltdown.

But once here, where to live and how to prepare?

Hoard silver. And gold. That is the advice of a Dunedin man in the education sector who does not want to be identified.

I dont want to appear like a nutter, he says.

He is not anticipating the collapse of society. The world will keep turning. But he insists there is a financial adjustment coming that will be big enough to cause our paper money-based monetary system to keel over.

All those bills have to be repaid. But when the financial house of cards starts to fall, individuals and banks will be caught a long way short, he says.

I can already see cracks appearing.

Silver and gold, however, hold their value. In fact, their worth climbs every time the financial markets get spooked and soars when it crashes.

So, he has bought gold, silver coins, and silver bars. He owns five, 1kg bars of silver, worth $50,000 each.

When it does go awry, he is going to use his hoard to invest in property and companies.

Someone told him youre going to be king of the rats when it all falls down.

Better to be a king than a rat, he replied.

A different apocalyptic vision floats in the mind of Greg Cromack. An Australian-born New Zealand data programmer, Cromack is alarmed by projections of life in a climate crisis world.

A widower, he describes himself as a scared parent who worries about the future of his daughter.

Im a deep adaptation prepper, Cromack explains.

Were doing too little, too late to respond to climate change. Were going to have a hard time of it.

Cromack has decided Australia will be hit too hard. He plans to move permanently to New Zealand. But not to the North Island - that will be too chaotic. Nor to Canterbury - too dry. Nor the West Coast - too many storms.

Ticking all his climate change survivor boxes, however, is Otago. Specifically, Mosgiel.

From his research, a population of 3000 to 5000 individuals is ideal when things go pear-shaped. It will be a big enough community to be sustainably self-sufficient in food, energy and other basics such as healthcare.

Were going to have to respond to this on a community level.

Cromack does not believe we will have to wait long to see he is sadly correct.

People will be able to keep on lying to themselves that life is going great - I give us eight years ... That will be the point when everyone realises, thats it.

Cromack is friendly and voluble, especially compared with self-confessed hardcore doomsday preppers; the type that foresee a world gone not just ugly but nasty. They keep their heads low.

One, a Rambo-type individual who lives on the West Coast, tells a Dunedin-based intermediary he does not want to talk to a journalist. Another, who lives north of Wellington, does not want to detail his preparations but is happy to provide tips on how to prepare.

Put earthquakes, heatwaves, financial collapses or bioweapons to one side, however, and it becomes clear that the differences between how people believe the world as we know it will end are less important than actually preparing for it.

A message arrives from the Wellington doomsday prepper who is writing his top 10 tips.

Im sticking to the basics of prepping, he writes.

Im avoiding [listing] underground bunkers filled with enough gear to supply a small regional war.

Focus on how you'd suggest preparing for whichever armageddon you consider most likely, he is requested.

If you prep for one, you prep for the other, he replies.

Continued here:

Coronavirus: Could it be the start of a global disaster? - Otago Daily Times

By Doug Cantwell dcantwell@taosnews.com

Teams from Taos Charter School and Taos Integrated School of the Arts took fourth- and fifth-place honors, respectively, at the state-level "Future City" competition held in Albuquerque Jan. 11.

Future City starts with a question: How can we make the world a better place? To answer it, teams of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders imagine, research, design and build cities of the future that showcase their solution to a citywide sustainability issue.

The 2019-2020 theme was "Clean Water: Tap Into Tomorrow." Teams chose a threat to their city's water supply and designed a resilient system to maintain a reliable supply of clean drinking water.

The teams had to complete five deliverables: a virtual city design, using the SimCity computer platform; a 1,500-word essay about their city and its problem; a scale model of their city built from recycled materials; a project plan that explains their solution; and a presentation to judges at the state or regional competition.

Among the three Taos Charter School teams, Emma Atkinson, Violet Hay and Karissa Winters took fourth place overall out of 43 participating teams for their entry, "Vera City."

TISA students opted to work together as a single team of 10, with guidance from sponsoring teacher Sally Greywolf. Their entry, "Utopia," took fifth-place honors.

"It's an amazing program," said Greywolf. "We often have our kids work in groups of three, but collaborating with that many others presented a whole new challenge. It's when the struggles occurred, though - that's when the growth started to happen."

Greywolf pitched the idea to Avery Blair and Stephanie Daffron at Taos Academy. No one there had ever competed, but Blair and Daffron got three smaller teams organized.

"Students worked on these projects for months," said Blair, "and their hard work truly paid off. We were thrilled at how well the teams did during multiple judging and presentation sessions."

Judah Daffron, Aaliyah Padilla, Joaquin Rose and Lucy Schreiber won awards for "Best Green Architecture" and "Best Presentation" with their city, "Umakyat." The team also won honorable mention.

Theo Blaustein, Scarlett Brunson and Saul Rotman won the "Best Accessibility" award for their city, "New Jefferson."

According to Future City's website, it's one of the nation's leading engineering education programs. It has received national recognition and acclaim for its role in encouraging middle-schoolers to develop an interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Editor's note: Emma Atkinson is the daughter of Shane Atkinson, advertising manager at the Taos News.

Read more:

Two Taos teams place in top five at 'Future City' competition - taosnews

Thoughtful readers and critics are the greatest gift to any writer, and so I am grateful to George Weigel, Wilfred McClay, and David Novak for reading my essay on the meaning of Jerusalem with their usual mix of moral clarity and civilizational depth.

All four of us seem to agree that the modern West faces a serious moral and cultural crisis. Social pathologies like broken families, low birthrates, opioid deaths, and sky-rocketing rates of depression are getting worse. And we also seem to agree that charting our way out of this crisis demands a genuine religious awakening. We need to recover, restore, and renew the Judeo-Christian moral vision, which will require, as George Weigel puts it, a long, difficult, countercultural campaign of cultural resistance for the sake of cultural renewal.

The progressive idea that dethroning the God of the Hebrew Bible would improve human life is now showing itself to be a tragic lie. Weigel, once again, speaks well for all of us: if the true God is exiled, false godsbeginning with the false god of the imperial autonomous Selfwill be worshipped, with the grave public effects of deracination and decadence memorably on display in the case of a certain golden calf. And today, as Weigel describes, the golden calf rules again, as evidenced by

the irrationality of the proponents of abortion-on-demand and the related LGBTQ agenda, leading to the kind of unhinged behavior seen during the confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the degradation of our universities by a virulent identity politics that mocks any serious notion of academic freedom (or reason, for that matter); the grim determination of secularists to drive not just religiously-grounded argument but also religiously-informed philosophical and legal argument out of public life and public service; and the capture of the Democratic party by fevered activists who regard the God of the Bible as the enemy of human maturation and liberation.

The question is: how did the Western world get here? And does Jerusalem, both the real living city and the ancient civilizational symbol, offer us the best light unto the nations to chart our way backand thus our way forwardtoward a civilization that preserves and perpetuates the redemptive truths of being human?

In trying to sort out how we got here, it helps to know something about the history and spirit of Western religion, politics, and culture, and very few people know as much or think as deeply about these matters as Wilfred McClay.

In his response, McClay questions my claim that Jerusalemboth the living city and the civilizational symbolshould be seen as the singular moral capital of the West. He admits that there are not any other good candidates for the title, but then he reminds us that the West is really a product of two civilizational spirits: the spirit of Jerusalem and the spirit of Athens, of Hebraism and Hellenism, of piety toward the God of the Ten Commandments and the rational human quest to understand the natural world by our own lights and on its own terms.

McClay fully recognizes that such dichotomiesilluminated by thinkers like Matthew Arnold and Leo Straussinevitably simplify the complexity of both Jerusalem and Athens.

For what is the defining spirit of Athens: the belief in an ordered and knowable universe, or the tragic sense of natures irrationality and mans Sisyphean confrontation with a world that inevitably belittles and destroys even its greatest heroes? Is it Aristotle, or is it Aeschylus?

And what is the defining spirit of Jerusalem: a world of Thou Shalt Nots that try to restrain the sinful animal that is man, or a world of creative men and women created in the divine image, who build beautiful temples of gold as monuments of gratitude to the Creator?

But let me go McClay even one better: to understand the modern West, I think one needs to have in mind a triad of spirits: Jerusalem and Athens, to be sure, but also the modern spirit of Edinburgh, home of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment, now transformed (or mutated) into the postmodern spirit of Silicon Valley.

The prophets of Silicon Valley are not the direct descendants of the Athenians (or of Adam Smith and Joseph Blacks Edinburgh). They seek not simply to understand the world through human reason but to re-make it, to fix it, to bend it to human will. They believe that mans technological creativity and resulting technological power is the new and only liberator: liberating human beings from physical illness and psychic pain, and empowering every individual to choose ones destiny (or lifestyle) without natural or religious constraints and without any inherited obligations from ones ancestors. In Silicon Valley and its offshoots around the world, scientism and bohemianism come together. This is the spirit that defines our age.

And we should give the spirit of Silicon Valley its due. For the new science often serves a truly moral purpose: feeding the hungry, healing the sick, connecting the distant. The pediatric oncologist (not to mention the generations of researchers who armed him with the power to heal): he is a genuine moral hero.

But the problem is that the underlying theology (or anti-theology) of the new scientism is flawed: it assumes there is no God and thus that man is on his own. This anti-theology can lead to bitterness and depression: why do we live in such a painful world? It can lead to heroic resistance: we will find a cure. And it can lead to moral nihilism: without God, we are free to do anything we want. In a world of human paina world without a creator God Who actually cares about us and about what we dothe primary thing that matters is reducing pain, which means both enabling all to live as they please without guilt and preempting (through euthanasia and abortion, especially the abortion of handicapped children in the womb and diminished elders in nursing homes) those fragile human lives that would be marked forever by pain or lack of will.

Well, now we live in the world remade by this anti-biblical theology. And for all its successes, we are seeing the dark side: better medicine but also broken homes, better neonatal care but also cultural suicide driven by low birthrates, marvelous high-tech laboratories devoted to uncovering the truths of nature but also universities that marginalize or shut down those who wonder if the postmodern project has led us astray.

If my argument is that Jerusalem isor should bethe moral capital of the West, it is because I believe that the spirit of Athens and the spirit of Silicon Valley are both flawed. Athens, you might say, possessed realism without hope: it did not flinch from the dark realities of human nature, and it celebrated the heroic confrontation with mankinds seemingly tragic, mortal, cyclical fate. Silicon Valley, by contrast, possesses hope without realism: it dreams of a human world without limits, without suffering, and without shame, and it arms human beings with remarkable machines, pills, and digital pleasures that try to hold hunger, death, and anomie at bay.

Jerusalem, instead, offers human beings realism and hope: a truthful account of the wayward possibilities of men and women and thus the need to live under commandment, but also an understanding that human beings are creative because they themselves were created in Gods image and that human history has a beginning, a middle, and a providential end: from Egypt to the Promised Land, with twists and turns, with epochs of darkness and inexplicable personal tragedies, but ultimately a redemptive story if we heed the God Who started it and Who directs it, and Who takes pleasure in free human beings playing their revealed parts.

McClay puts this beautifully in his response to my essay, when he rightly observes that thinkers like Arnold and Strauss, great as they are, fail to capture the full dimensions of Hebraism in particular: its ebullience, its creative energy, its reverence for the law, its electric sense of living in a world suffused with moral significance.

I cannot imagine a better description of the true spirit of Jerusalem.

And that brings us to the real Jerusalem: the ancient Jewish capital of the modern Jewish state. While sympathetic to my overall argument, McClay also wonders whether the reality of modern Jerusalem lives up to the moral weight I have given it.

Arent there, he asks, deep divides between secular and Israeli Jews themselves over the meaning of the Jewish state and the nature of being Jewish? Doesnt modern Israel also possess its own anti-biblical forces, and isnt it also filled with people whose spiritual model is more the postmodernism of Silicon Valley than the ancient Hebraism of Jerusalem? As McClay puts it: Does the actually existing Jerusalem correspond to the political vision of Davidic restoration, and is there not a high degree of standard Western liberal-democratic pluralism underwriting the Israeli political order as it actually exists?

McClays challenge is welcome, and it is one I fully acknowledged in my original essay:

Like any normal nation, Israel has its share of corruption, imperfection, fecklessness, and internal division. No one is claiming that modern Israel isor ever will bea moral utopia. But the eternal ethos of Jerusalem once again shapes Jewish communities throughout the holy land. In their calendar, language, holidays, and landscape, Israeli Jews live in direct continuity with their biblical past. And alone among the advanced nations of the West, Israel has a high birthrate: a deep sign of cultural vitality connecting past, present, and future.

But I would go even farther, as I also did in my essay: the restoration of the Jewish people as a nation in their ancestral homeland, after centuries of dispersion, assimilation, assault, and near-annihilation: reason cannot explain this. Israel is the best evidence that God exists. And while many of the great Zionist founders believed more in the Jewish people than in God, more in the human greatness of the Bible than the sanctity of its commandments, they, too, were summoned to play some role in a story that they could notand we cannotfully understand.

The question that matters today is: will the Jews of Jerusalem shine brightly enough? Will modern Israel look to its own Hebraic past for moral and political guidance, as a figure like Menachem Begin did when he rose to power? Will the modern Zionist project of courageous nationalism and the rabbinic project of sanctified normalcy weave together into an exceptional nation-state that resists, imperfectly but differently, the deracination and decadence of post-modernitys golden calves?

Modern Israel is not yet the Davidic restoration. The waiting continues, and the mystery of the biblical human drama persists. God only knows what new twists and turns lie ahead, or whether some ultimate confrontation with Israels annihilationist enemies (like Iran) can be avoided. But as Weigel observes in his response, Jerusalems rising generation leaves one hopeful. Something has changed:

In my previous visits to Eric Cohens iconic city . . . discussions of religion and democracy tended to be polite but rather sterile; it appeared that the only available Jewish interlocutors for a Catholic thinker like me were open-minded and courteous but thoroughly and irretrievably secular. In 2015, by contrast, I experienced a new determination among younger Israeli scholars . . . to develop a biblically informed and philosophically sophisticated theory of Israeli democracy in particular and of the Western democratic project in general.

Here was a discussion with a future, I thought. Here was a first glimpse into the possibility of a Jewish and Israeli theory of democracy that, rather than imagining that serious reflection on the democratic present and future can only begin with John Locke, incorporated into its thinking the Hebraic vision of human nature and human relationships. The evolution of such a theory in Israel would certainly reinforce parallel work by Jews and Christians throughout the rest of the West.

The crisis of the West is real, but the message of Jerusalem is that all is not lost. Far from it. But religious Jews and Christiansand anyone seeking to live in truth who now recognizes that postmodern culture is a big lieneed to stop surrendering to the kingdom of secular humanism gone mad.

David Novak says it well in his own response: Once faithful Jews and faithful Christians submit their faith to the greater authority of any secularist universalism, becoming not only in the world but of it, they will sooner or later be done-in by that world. The alternative is moral courage: to defend our biblical inheritance, to build and rebuild our families and schools and cities in the divine image, to look again to Jerusalem as our lodestar and guide.

See the article here:

The Consequences of a World without Constraints - Mosaic

In 2020, doomsday scenarios are legion. Bruce Munro talks to "preppers" of various stripes about getting ready for the end of the world as we know it.

He lives in Otago. He is a respectable professional. And, he is stockpiling silver and gold against what he says is an inevitable, global, economic meltdown.

She is a successful New Zealand businesswoman who also heads up Survival Movement New Zealand. She is calling on the Government to stockpile enough food and fuel to buffer the country against risks ranging from droughts and war to meteors and solar flares.

He is an ordinary dad looking to shift permanently from Australia to New Zealand with his daughter. He has done the calculations. He has looked at the safest options. He wants to be living in Mosgiel when the world goes pear-shaped sometime after 2028.

Take your pick.

No, seriously, how would you most like, or most fear, the world as we know it to end?

Whatever your doomsday flavour - economic, political, natural, environmental, military, technological, social, climatic, extraterrestrial - there is someone who will tell you it is inevitable, imminent, inescapable ... and that you should be preparing for it.

Not that they are necessarily all barking mad. Yesterday it was announced the Doomsday Clock - set up in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to signal the proximity of nuclear, climate and other global catastrophe - had moved 20 seconds forward. It now sits at 100 seconds to midnight. The closest ever.

No wonder. The warning signs of a dozen different Armageddons lurking on the horizon are difficult to ignore.

Or how about the shaky global financial system? Around the world, private debt continues to balloon. New Zealand is right up there. Household debt levels, at 93% of GDP, are among the highest in the world. Bubbles are also appearing in housing markets, bond markets and stock markets worldwide.

"I see bubbles everywhere,"warns Yale Prof Robert Shiller, who has a Nobel Prize in economics. Prof Shiller predicted both the 2000 stock market crash and the 2007 United States housing market crash.

Last time, the banks were considered "too big to be allowed to fail". But there are many who say the underlying problems that led to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) were plastered over by printing money rather than reigning in debt. As far back as 2010, the International Monetary Fund said a tax on financial activities was needed to pay for the next GFC. But its warnings have not been heeded. Could the next international pecuniary calamity, perhaps just around the corner, mean our whole monetary system keels over, taking with it governments, businesses, law and order?

Then, there is, of course, the gathering climate crisis.

The world is warming. The worlds oceans, which absorb 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases, are warming at a rate equivalent to five nuclear bombs of heat every second, day and night, 365 days a year.

Extreme weather events are increasing. Globally, since 1980, floods and various water events have quadrupled, while other climate events such as extreme temperatures, droughts and forest fires have more than doubled, the European Academies' Science Advisory Council says.

Close to home, Australian bush fires, piggy-backing off the worst drought in decades and record-breaking air temperatures, have scorched 18.6 million hectares and could keep burning for months.

It fits predictions of life in a climate-changed future. Scientists warn that beyond a global temperature rise of 2degC the impacts of climate breakdown will likely become catastrophic and irreversible.

Add to the horrendous list the increasing risk of nuclear warfare, an expected major earthquake on the Alpine Fault, the possibility of super volcanoes, the potential for synthetic viruses to be unleashed as bioweapons ... and it is hard to avoid the feeling the end is nigh. Or, at least, the end of life as we have known it.

SO, how best to prepare?

What are those who see "the end" fast-approaching in their rear vision mirrors doing to ready themselves?

What can be learnt from them?

If you do not live in a temperate, antipodean paradise at the bottom of the world, then the doomsday preppers clear message is - move there. Or at least buy yourself a bolt hole there and have a private jet capable of flying non-stop from the US to New Zealand fuelled and waiting for the apocalypse to kick off.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, has bought a multi-million dollar chunk of land on the edge of Lake Wanaka. Thiel has cited The Sovereign Individual, a roadmap to power and riches in a post-democratic future, as the book he is most influenced by. He has also called New Zealand "a utopia".

He is not the only one.

Speaking of New Zealand as a favoured refuge in the event of a cataclysm, billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman told the New Yorker that saying youre buying a house in New Zealand is kind of a wink, wink, say no more.

It has been reported that five Silicon Valley executives co-own an "escape" jet, a Gulfstream G550, capable of reaching New Zealand without refuelling.

There are also unsubstantiated claims that up to 35 underground survival bunkers have been shipped to New Zealand by super-rich Americans scared by whatever end-game scenario they see on the horizon.

They might be on to something, according to Prof Nick Wilson.

The Wellington-based University of Otago academic says the risk of human extinction has never been higher. His particular focus is near-extinction events such as a northern hemisphere nuclear war (1.4% annual risk) or a global pandemic caused by a synthetic virus escaping a laboratory.

In such scenarios, Prof Wilson says the resources, development and relative isolation of New Zealand and Australia make them the worlds top two candidates for "island refuges" - hideaways where a remnant of humanity could hole-up until the dust settled and then begin rebuilding.

He has called on the Government of New Zealand to do three things; collaborate with Australia in planning for a near-extinction event, invest in resiliency and rehearse rapidly sealing the nations borders.

Also urging the Government to act is Lisa Er, founder of Lisas Hummus, which she sold in 2006, and head of Survival Movement New Zealand. In the face of risks ranging from drought to war, Er wants the Government to set up a disaster "think tank" and to stockpile and maintain a three month supply of food and fuel for the whole country.

Sarah Stuart-Black, who is executive director for the National Emergency Management Agency, says they are all over it, sort of.

The country has "extensive and agile arrangements" in place across agencies that would allow it to deal with a range of events, "both foreseen and unforeseen".

This includes working with other countries "to respond to emerging threats".

In regards to building resilience nationwide, a National Disaster Resilience Strategy was launched last year.

New Zealand has "reasonable stocks" of medical, food and other supplies. But individuals and families should make sure they have their own supplies, the nations emergency planner says. There is no mention of fuel.

Asked whether any members of Cabinet had a secret bunker or a panic room, Stuart-Black says "Meeting facilities for Ministers are available within the Parliamentary precinct in Wellington. I would note that arrangements are also in place to move Parliament to Auckland on a temporary basis should Wellington become severely impacted by an earthquake".

It is best to ask Customs NZ about border closure rehearsals, she advises.

Customs NZ responds that bits of the border, including sea and air ports, are closed during regular national security exercises. But the country has never tried shutting down the entire border at one time - an action that would require Cabinet-level sanction - and so no-one knows how quickly it can be done.

Bottom line, despite uncertainties New Zealand is a better place than most to ride out a global meltdown.

But once here, where to live and how to prepare?

Hoard silver. And gold. That is the advice of a Dunedin man in the education sector who does not want to be identified.

"I dont want to appear like a nutter," he says.

He is not anticipating the collapse of society. The world will keep turning. But he insists there is a financial adjustment coming that will be big enough to cause our paper money-based monetary system to "keel over".

All those bills have to be repaid. But when the financial house of cards starts to fall, individuals and banks will be caught a long way short, he says.

"I can already see cracks appearing."

Silver and gold, however, hold their value. In fact, their worth climbs every time the financial markets get spooked and soars when it crashes.

So, he has bought gold, silver coins, and silver bars. He owns five, 1kg bars of silver, worth $50,000 each.

When it does go awry, he is going to use his hoard to invest in property and companies.

Someone told him "youre going to be king of the rats when it all falls down".

"Better to be a king than a rat," he replied.

A different apocalyptic vision floats in the mind of Greg Cromack. An Australian-born New Zealand data programmer, Cromack is alarmed by projections of life in a climate crisis world.

A widower, he describes himself as "a scared parent who worries about the future of his daughter".

"Im a deep adaptation prepper," Cromack explains.

"Were doing too little, too late to respond to climate change. Were going to have a hard time of it."

Cromack has decided Australia will be hit too hard. He plans to move permanently to New Zealand. But not to the North Island - that will be too chaotic. Nor to Canterbury - too dry. Nor the West Coast - too many storms.

Ticking all his climate change survivor boxes, however, is Otago. Specifically, Mosgiel.

From his research, a population of 3000 to 5000 individuals is ideal "when things go pear-shaped". It will be a big enough community to be sustainably self-sufficient in food, energy and other basics such as healthcare.

"Were going to have to respond to this on a community level."

Cromack does not believe we will have to wait long to see he is sadly correct.

"People will be able to keep on lying to themselves that life is going great - I give us eight years ... That will be the point when everyone realises, thats it."

Cromack is friendly and voluble, especially compared with self-confessed hardcore doomsday preppers; the type that foresee a world gone not just ugly but nasty. They keep their heads low.

One, a "Rambo-type" individual who lives on the West Coast, tells a Dunedin-based intermediary he does not want to talk to a journalist. Another, who lives north of Wellington, does not want to detail his preparations but is happy to provide tips on how to prepare.

Put earthquakes, heatwaves, financial collapses or bioweapons to one side, however, and it becomes clear that the differences between how people believe the world as we know it will end are less important than actually preparing for it.

A message arrives from the Wellington doomsday prepper who is writing his top 10 tips.

"Im sticking to the basics of prepping," he writes.

"Im avoiding [listing] underground bunkers filled with enough gear to supply a small regional war."

"Focus on how you'd suggest preparing for whichever armageddon you consider most likely," he is requested.

"If you prep for one, you prep for the other," he replies.

1. Make sure you have enough food for at least three weeks.

2. Ensure you have a means of purifying water.

3. Have a small gear bag with you at all times, containing a good pair of boots, a change of clothes, some food, a bottle of water, a first aid kit, a mask and some rope.

4. Make photocopies of your key documents, including passport and insurance, and put a copy on a usb drive.

5. Put together a comprehensive first aid kit.

6. Get first aid training.

7. Learn to construct a shelter, make a toilet, start a fire and cook over an open fire.

8. Plant a vegetable garden.

9. Make a disaster response plan with family, so everyone knows what to do.

10. Have a means other than a cellphone of contacting those close to you, such as a designated spot to leave messages.

Source: Maarty Lintern/Natural Disaster Prep NZ

How to prepare for a doomsday scenario:

1. Be the "grey man". Dont let too many people know you have prepared for what will come.

2. Test all your equipment before you need it.

3. Have a Bug Out location you can travel to if civil unrest occurs during a SHTF (Shit Hits The Fan) event.

4. Stock up on toilet paper and soap. Getting sick during a survival situation could kill you.

5. Everything will be valuable, so make sure you have items for trade.

6. Go diesel. Petrol will run out fast but diesel can be obtained at more places and diesel vehicles can run on cooking oil if need be.

7. The lone wolf dies alone. Hoard and train with family and friends so you can support and care for each other.

8. Dont put all your supplies in one place. A building collapse could destroy all your stores.

9. Pack an INCH (Im Never Coming Home) bag with enough gear for you to survive in the bush for at least two weeks.

10. Learn to use a .22 rifle or learn to trap. If protein becomes scarce, small game and livestock become options.

Source: Anonymous doomsday prepper, Wellington region

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Meet the Kiwis ready for the world's end - Otago Daily Times

Patrick Stewart can still act. That is, perhaps, no revelation. But the strongest moment in the series premiere of Star Trek: Picard comes when the show simply gives him a moment to emote, to condemn, to express his distress and regret over the state of the world. When pushed to explain why he left Starfleet, the fire that fueled The Next Generation smolders up, and the ghosts of Picards lost utopia are exercised.

He left Starfleet because of xenophobia, because of isolationism, because of an abandonment of the principals of altruism and mercy and acceptance that undergirded the Federation he knew and believed in. That connection to larger ideas of a once noble people turning its back on those in need, out of a fear for what opening ones doors to the world could invite in not only imbues this story with a real world resonance; its pure Trek. Theres power in one of the great architects of that interstellar community severing his ties when it shrinks from the ideals he holds so dear.

But its not enough to simply linger with a man meditating on his legacy and the institutions that crumbled on his watch. So we need a mystery box. And we need a terrorist attack from a group of synths on Mars that scared the Federation into submission. And we need Romulan refugees resettling in an old Borg cube. And we need Romulan fighters trying to root out and destroy the last of artificial lifeforms. And we need a mysterious young woman half-River Tam and half-Daisy Johnson to seek out Picards help to sort it all out.

Thats allalright. Its naive to expect a modern day science fiction show to rely on the staid, contemplative tone that The Next Generation thrived on. Theres nothing wrong with Dahj (Isa Briones) kicking ass in a hand-to-hand combat scene that makes Kirks karate chops look like childs play. Theres nothing wrong with a wire fu-esque battle between her and a cadre of Romulan attackers that involves dodging phaser fire, leaping grand distances, and gory explosions. Times change, and shows have to change with them, even if it means making allowances for the sort of fireworks that once disappointed fans in Picards jump to the big screen.

Its naive to expect a modern day science fiction show to rely on the staid, contemplative tone that The Next Generation thrived on.

But whats more troubling is how generic so much of the rest of the episode feels. Make no mistake it is a tall order to follow-up to one of the most beloved science fiction series of all time and honor past successes while forging a distinct path for the series at hand. But if you shaved off the serial numbers and took away the Easter eggs, Remembrance could be any other modern science fiction show, with an aesthetic and dialogue and mysteries that suffice, which but dont wow.

The best you can say is that in the early going at least, Star Trek: Picard doesnt feel like fanservice. Sure, Picards dog is named Number One, and he orders earl grey tea, and he has a futuristic safety deposit box full of familiar trinkets. But when the show invokes the past, it does so in service of the story in the here and now.

And yet, thats both a blessing and a curse. Revealing Dahj as Datas daughter adds some emotional urgency to her pairing with Picard. Remembrance makes Brent Spiners guest appearances in the episode more than a fond recollection of everyones favorite android, but rather a touchstone for Picards close relationship with his former protege. For all the flack Star Trek: Nemesis caught, one of its saving graces was the way it suggested that, flesh and blood be damned, Data was Picards son and his family. So by making Dahj a sort of granddaughter to Picard through that bond, she becomes more relevant in the early going, when the show has to be economical about establishing its characters and its stakes.

But at the same time, thats part of the problem. Stewart and Briones do their best, but the on-screen chemistry isnt quite there yet. So the results feel more like Star Trek: Picard drafting on the good feelings of old, even as it seemingly wants to move in a new direction. Fans of the Next Generation will shudder to hear the name Bruce Maddox, the man who tried to have Data declared property, invoked. Still, it feels a tad cheap to have him missing and potentially responsible for some sort of new-fangled biological synthetic that is cloned or replicated or somehow otherwise spawned from Data.

All the while, Remembrance has the same, overly glossy look that the rest of modern Trek does. All the while, we get characters giving tearful statements that tidily deposit their backstories into the narrative, with performances that cant support the psychological weight the show wants to place on them outside of Stewart.

All the while, it offers yet another damn mystery box, where were left to guess who created Dahj and her twin sister, and whether the twins new flirty Romulan acquaintance is part of this apparent terrorist group, and what the true motivation of the synths who blew up Utopia Planitia was. The show apparently doesnt trust that it can muster that sort of intrigue while still putting its proverbial cards on the table.

And all the while, the viewer must cut through clunky scenes that try to establish every piece of this. Little of it is outright bad. Star Trek: Picard is a competent production with a stellar lead performer and enough reverence for the source material not to upset the applecart. But when youre bringing back one of televisions all-time great characters and invoking the legacy of the series that started a new age of Star Trek, its fair to expect better than this solid but less-than-inspired dose of adequacy.

None of it quite matches that one moment of personal truth in Picards interview or the real-life implications of his disdain for what the organization he once loved has become. While Remembrance builds on the strength of Stewarts presence and gravitas, in other moments it becomes just another off-the-shelf science fiction series, albeit one that can harness the history and setting of The Next Generation, The Original Series, and even the 2009 reboot.

In that one scene, though, Star Trek: Picard gives us a glimpse of the show it could be. Remembrance soars when it allows its lead performer to do what he does best and embraces the thematic resonance and introspection that were the hallmarks of his prior series. It sinks when it devotes itself to flash and whodunits and twisty reveals. Only time will tell whether, with so much narrative throat-clearing and table-setting out of the way, the series can set a better course.

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Star Trek: Picard and a Remembrance for its Best Performer - The Spool

CultureTVDeft plotting, fantastic performances, mystery and a twist that landed with a wallop: this was a return to Doctor Who at its best

Sunday, 26th January 2020, 10:56 pm

Doctor Who, BBC1, 7pm,

One of the biggest criticisms of the Jodie Whittaker era of Doctor Who is that it has lacked the ideas, surprises and ambition that made the modern show such a hit in the first place. But no such thing could be said about this weeks barnstorming "Fugitive of the Judoon" a return to Doctor Whos very best.

Well publicised was the return of fan-favourite the Judoon, the heavy-handed rhino police force whose search for an alien fugitive brought them to the small English town of Gloucester. Cue a first act built around novelty nostalgia, silly gags (theres a platoon of Judoon near the moon!) and the mystery of potential fugitive Lee (Neil Stuke) and his bubbly tour guide wife Ruth (Jo Martin). In reality, though, the Judoon were just a Trojan horse (or rhino) for an episode which featured shock after shock after shock.

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The first, of course, was the sensational return of John Barrowmans Captain Jack Harkness, whose attempt to teleport the Doctor up to his orbiting ship went awry after he accidentally teleported the companions instead.

After nine years away, you got the impression Barrowman had missed the role just as much as fans did (you can get excited now!), and it was a genuine thrill to watch Graham, Ryan and Yaz try to process this horny force of nature. No one delivers a cheeky one-liner like Barrowman, nor an ominous warning. Beware the lone Cyberman, he said one of many intriguing mysteries set up here.

If this episode had only featured the return of the Judoon and Jack Harkness, it could have been written off as a surrender to nostalgia, a desperate attempt to evoke past glories after last series failed experiment of only featuring new monsters. But then came the twist.

Lee wasnt the fugitive the Judoon were searching for. It was Ruth, the seemingly innocuous tour guide who had no idea why she had the ability to take out a whole squad of Judoon like Jason Bourne, or why she felt drawn towards a curious lighthouse by the beach. Once they arrived, however, it was resolved with the biggest swing this era has taken yet: a TARDIS buried in an unmarked grave, and the revelation that Ruth was in fact a previously unknown incarnation of the Doctor herself.

It is a twist that had been done before,with the Master having masked his identity using the same Time Lord technology in 2007s Utopia. Even so,thanks to some deft plotting, and fantastic performances from Jodie Whittaker and Jo Martin it landed here with an absolute wallop. Who is this new Doctor? Where did she come from? Is she from the Doctors past or her future? Why do neither of them know each other? Why is this new Doctor so badass and gun-toting? Never before has this era been so engulfed in fascinating questions; never before has it proved so gripping.

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Fugitive of the Judoon was everything Jodie Whittaker's Doctor Who era has been missing - inews

Bjarke Ingels: "If we can Change the Climate of the World by Accident, Imagine What we can Achieve by Trying"

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Bjarke Ingels is one of the most well-known architects of our time. During a conversation in Copenhagen between Ingels and Sky-Frame, he discussed his point of view, creating reality, immense courage and the secret behind his unwavering pragmatism.

Sky-Frame visits Bjarke Ingels on his houseboat, which is gently bobbing, moored right at the Port of Copenhagen. Gazing out to the sea, Bjarke speaks enthusiastically of his projects, the tempo in contrast to the leaden motion of the old 450-tonne car ferry, which Bjarke has converted into his family home.

With BIG, the Bjarke Ingels Group, he has become one of the most sought-after architects of our time. In 2019 alone, he and his team completed as many as 13 projects, including large-scale undertakings such as Copenhill, a zero-emission waste-to-energy plant. The innovative solution is the first of its kind in the world: utopia turned reality.

Combining pragmatism and utopia

Utopia is the concept of a world that is so perfect as to be entirely impossible. Pragmatism takes stock of reality and its conditions, exploring how to handle them. You may think that the two cannot be combined. But it is this very combination that reminds us with every new project: we have a little piece of the world here that we can turn into our own idea of utopia. That is how fiction can become factual.

The interview takes place in the loft-like living room of Bjarkes house ferry, where an enormous window pane grants sweeping views over the entire Port of Copenhagen. On the one side sits the Copenhill power plant, on the other side is Amalienborg Palace. This sort of setting is impossible to find in the old town. Thanks to my ferry, we are at the heart of it yet surrounded by open space.

Just you and the view

Here, on the water, the views and natural light are an integral part of the homes atmosphere. We watch the sun rise in the east and set in the west. That is the first axis. On the top storey, my wife and I have a little flat. It gives us sweeping views to the south and north: the second axis.

The Sky-Frameframeless sliding windowthat has been integrated into the houseboat allows them to experience its breathtaking setting up close. In an architects ideal world, the indoors and outdoors are separated by as little material as possible. We want the best and clearest glass with the lowest possible iron content. Zero colouration. We want as little structure, as few frames, as possible. The windows on our ferry are so transparent that you feel as though you can float right through them.

Unconstrained thought

Bjarke may well draw inspiration from his view, but his method of incorporating a range of perspectives and adjacent systems in his projects involves taking in the wider context:

Certainly, this does not help us to keep a clear head. But it puts us in touch with the major challenges we face. This way of zooming out, called reframing in psychology and sociology, gives us a view of the bigger picture, the overarching framework. Rather than understanding a single building, we want to understand the neighbourhood and the ecosystem in which it exists.

We start not with the answers but with the big questionsWe dont just do away with boundaries. We ask the big questions and bear the consequences.

Taking innovation a step further

The newly opened waste-to-energy plant situated in the middle of the industrial island in the Port of Copenhagen is solid proof of Bjarke Ingels ability to answer the questions he asks. Its chimney emits no pollutants: 99.9 per cent of all particles generated during the process are filtered or cleaned. It gives us the opportunity to show the world that clean technology benefits, not just the environment but the very inhabitants of our cities. The power plant is proof of the architect's complete trust in the human capacity to do something about climate change:

Architecture is more than just commentary. It doesnt just make you think about reality. It makes reality.

Seeking alternatives to the standard

BIG always questions reality, uninterested in standard solutions. That is not to say that the standard is bad: A standard solution does not become the standard because it is bad but because it does its job extremely well, predictably and efficiently. If you want to surpass those standard solutions, you cannot ignore them. You must understand what is good about them.

To challenge the status quo and instead pursue opportunities for growth, ask yourself how the world has changed. Once you find the answer, you will start seeing the small fissures. The parts where our current reality and the standard solutions diverge because they no longer fully match. Those fissures are opportunities for finding alternative answers and changing reality.

As architects, it is our duty to observe, listen and understand in order to recognise change.

That drive to diverge from the great monotony of the masses is what gives many a city its soul - the drive to find exemplary, trailblazing solutions. Within any local culture, architects face a tough struggle to show that things can be done differently. Once you achieve that and once the alternative option has been built, welcomed, perhaps even loved, it may become a point of reference for other architects. They can look at it and ask: If they can build a power plant with ski slopes on it, why cant we?

Bjarke Ingels points out that he and Sky-Frame share this ongoing pursuit of innovation: By constantly striving for perfection,they have successfully reduced all minor necessities to invisibility wherever it was able to.

The success of a window system lies in its ability to disappear, draw no attention and never be in the way. For architects, a structure consisting entirely of weather protection and insulation and nothing else would be perfection. No other product comes as close to that dream as Sky-Frame does.

Bjarke Ingels ongoing quest for a better solution ultimately led him to Sky-Frame. We were looking for sliding windows with the most minimal structure possible. The fixed and opening parts had to be indistinguishable.This is the slimmest, most elegant and most minimalistic product on the market.

As an architect or designer, you advance a project by criticising everything you have already done until there is nothing left to criticise. Of course, you never reach that point. But if you never stop improving and refining your work, you can get remarkably far.

Sometimes, people ask me what is next, now that I have achieved everything. They must be joking. We are light years away from our full potential. We just keep edging closer. And we will never achieve perfection, but we can approximate it by pursuing it relentlessly.

Despite his visions and his global success, his simplicity and groundedness might be the source of the pragmatism that has helped him succeed. Living on a houseboat has been very educational. As modern humans, we take everything for granted: electricity, heating, running water, plumbing. When you move onto a boat, you suddenly become this tiny, self-sufficient ecosystem. And you realise how much water you really use because you have to fill one tank and empty the other. It is like a giant Tamagotchi that your own well-being depends on.

About Bjarke Ingels

Bjarke Ingels was born in Copenhagen on 2 October 1974. After completing degrees at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Kongelige Danske Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole) in Copenhagen and the Escola Tcnica Superior dArquitectura in Barcelona, he worked at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam from 1998 to 2001. He experienced the Royal Academy as a highly conservative environment, but his time in Barcelona left a lasting impression on him. It continues to influence his work to this day.

In 2001, Bjarke Ingels and his Belgian colleague Julien de Smedt founded the architectural firm PLOT in Copenhagen. Five years later, in 2006, he established the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) in Copenhagen. The company opened a second branch in New York in 2010 and employs more than 400 members of staff from 25 countries today. In 2009, Ingels co-founded the KiBiSi design agency.

BIG has outgrown its modest beginnings as an architectural firm. Today, it is a research and development facility specialising in urbanism. Its holistic service portfolio also includes interior, landscape and product design. BIG is currently working on projects in Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East.

Find out more on Sky-Frame's website.

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Bjarke Ingels: "If we can Change the Climate of the World by Accident, Imagine What we can Achieve by Trying" - ArchDaily

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Waldane Walker's profanity-laced ending to his valedictory speech at the recent 2019 graduation exercises at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts (EMCVPA) was not merely a farrago of ignorance and downright display of what the late celebrated Caribbean renaissance giant and cultural icon Rex Nettleford immortalised as bhuttooism; rather, it camouflaged a far more painful, heartbreaking, and distressing truth: For some time now, successive governments and their ministers responsible for crafting education policy, have failed to address the fundamental weakness that has undermined our entire education system, and even the kind of thinking that lies at the heart of the current decay.

The burning question, at least to me, is whether those students occupying places at our secondary and tertiary institutions can actually think. The concerning fact is that, while increasing numbers of tertiary students are graduating with certificates and degrees, a great many university and college educators among us are privately astonished that so very few of their students know anything, can write a literate paragraph, or can actually think for themselves.

I have come away from the lecture hall believing that this is because more and more of our students are being drilled to pass formula exams that are no longer a reliable guide to whether they have the vital quality and ability to think laterally and originally.

Fostering creativity

This, I suspect and I put it down to no more than a suspicion is because, in the main, our exam system is now perched at the pinnacle of an establishment which has been taken over by ideas that are profoundly anti-teaching and anti-education; a kind of post-modernism that has brought large sections of education in this country to its bending knees.

The rage in mainstream education today is all about fostering creativity among students. The alleged lack of creativity in schools, colleges, and universities was what lay behind the ideology of progressive education. The theory, as I understand it, is that children's innate creativity is harmed or stifled by being taught in any structured way by adults. Teachers, therefore, had to become facilitators, taking a back seat while children discover knowledge for themselves. The result is a catastrophe in our education system.

Much of this thinking shadowed the ideas put forward by the American academic Richard Sennett in his tome The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998), in which he argues that the single-minded drive for money and success is all that appears to motivate the middle class and, consequently, their children and soon all children would grow up believing that is all life is about.

The knowledge economy?

The upshot of this was that creativity as we had come to know it, defined as identifying problems and solving them, had to be set free from elitist things such as exam standards. Schools, goes the argument, controlled knowledge from above, which implied that teachers had the audacity to actually teach. This, we were told, was out of joint with the new knowledge economy.

I don't quite know what Charles Leadbeater, the British author who popularised the idea of the knowledge economy in his book Living on Thin Air: The New Economy (1999), would quite make of this. But the idea appears to mean, contemporaneously at least, that society now revolves exclusively around communications and computers, that people must become mobile entrepreneurs, and that they must take responsibility for their own educational development and work opportunities. Fine.

But I ask: When was knowledge ever not an integral part of the economy? The notion that changes of this magnitude are new shows a disturbing contempt for history. The seismic shift of the industrial revolution and the birth of the modern age knock the Internet into what the Americans call a cocked hat. For people have always adapted, precisely because knowledge was controlled from above and taught to succeeding generations. The assault on the very nature of education we are witnessing in this country today breeds deep-seated fear for our future.

I say this because computers or videos are seen as the key to the new creativity because they can respond to children's and young adults' multiple intelligences. This is to say, interactive electronic education packages now means the average Jamaican child can conjure up pictures or graphics to explain things. This denigrates linguistic or mathematical intelligence as no more important than the visual or spatial ability, which lets a young learner or a child click on a mouse and be entertained by the resulting images. And yet, without mastery of language and number, a child or young adult isn't going to get very far in the global space on computers or anything else.

What is even more telling, as we have experienced, is that these young learners are put in charge of their own learning process. The startling suggestion is that computers will liberate them from teaching. Teachers are only now needed part-time, some claim, and have to reinvent themselves as facilitators to be able to enable students to access the technology.

What utter nonsense! Teachers cannot be replaced by computers, no matter what the rabid, capitalist, disruptive innovators among us espouse. Far from being more democratic, as I have heard it said, this abdication of adult responsibility would further disenfranchise our children who would be further lost without proper guidance. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, it is only by being taught hard facts that children and young adult learners learn those critical lessons about objectivity, evidence, and argument, which help identify problems and solve them. In this regard, Waldane Walker's disbelievingly disrespectful and misguided profanity at the end of his valedictory speech lifts the veil of the cult of creativity eating away at our native soul and exposing what is happening in our classrooms throughout the country at all levels of the education system. This cult has produced a classroom orthodoxy that has replaced challenges by feelings, and independent thought by propaganda.

If you doubt me, then I invite you to observe that in some quarters knowledge is now said to be obsolescent. Thanks to Walker and his supporters at the EMCVPA, among students and faculty alike, we now know that skills are increasingly being taught in a knowledge vacuum and then dressed up as pretend knowledge to be tested in formula exams and public spaces like graduations.

Of course, the world is changing, and rapidly so. But unless we all have basic knowledge, we can neither build upon it nor adapt to new challenges.

The chilling assault on education at varying levels over recent weeks was conducted in the face of a Government which, by its utterances, seeks to be tough on restoring traditional education standards. This is a sensible, if not urgent objective, and should be encouraged and supported by all well-thinking Jamaicans. For the EMCVPA's 2019 valedictory speech incident and the nationwide furore it evoked is only the latest piece of evidence to surface proving the existence of a pernicious ideology being promoted which strikes at the heart of education itself in this country.

The Walden Walker-EMCVPA incident, furthermore, is best viewed as the latest example of the way traditional education is being bullied relentlessly under the guise of promoting creativity by misguided class warriors intent on fanning the flames of social resentment against traditional education in favour of homogenised mediocrity to cover their own intellectual and political bankruptcy.

The late Beverly Lopez

As a practising Roman Catholic and woman of deep faith, the late Beverly Lopez would have understood that death is something that happens in life, rather than to life. She died, I am reliably informed, kneeling beside her bed in a praying position. While among us, she exhibited at all times kindness of spirit, a calm but willing disposition to solving problems, and an assured confidence in the future of the country in which she had her being, and which nurtured her successful business acumen. I, like the entire Stella Maris Church community, mourn her sudden passing and shall forever remember her for her faithfulness and long-standing commitment to helping the poor and dispossessed. I am certain that on the day she died Christ received her as a friend.

Everton Pryce is a former educator and government advisor. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or lxpryc@yahoo.com.

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The cult of creativity the new Utopia - Jamaica Observer

Wollerau, in canton Schwyz, which is often seen as a tax paradise.

While discussions about the increasing rift between the rich and the poor are ongoing in many countries, an opinion piece in the New York Times has hailed Switzerland for its high levels of wealth distribution. Switzerland is a less socialist but more successful utopia than Scandinavia, it wrote. Is there any truth in this?

Series: Social inequality in Switzerland

In recent years, social inequality has been a popular topic in research, media, politics and even everyday conversation.

It is also a hot issue in Switzerland. One notable sign of this has been the Young Socialist partys 99% Initiative, which demands that capital income like interest or dividend payments be taxed at a higher rate than earned income. The initiative aims to achieve justice and trim the privileges of the superrich once and for all, the youth group says.

However, in an opinion piece headlined The Happy, Healthy Capitalists of Switzerlandexternal link, published in the New York Times in November, author and investor Ruchir Sharma reckons that Switzerland is the paradise of equality. Forget Scandinavia, he writes. Switzerland is richer and yet has a surprisingly equal wealth distribution.

Could the dispute about social inequality be an imported debate from countries such as France or the US? Is Switzerland really the paradise of equality?

Depending who you ask, opinions are very different:

Switzerland is doing pretty well, says Reto Fllmi, Professor of International Economics at St Gallen University. Statements like the middle class is falling behind is a debate imported from the US.

Conditions are stable in Switzerland, says Marco Salvi of Avenir Suisse, a liberal think tank. Taking pension assets into account, wealth distribution is more or less equal.

In Switzerland, the distribution of wealth is the least equal in the world, says Professor Robert Fluder from the University of Bern. And when it comes to income inequality, it ranks in the middle.

These contradictory statements indicate how political and controversial this question is. And so, for the first part of an in-depth series (see box) looking at the issue, we have gathered together a few facts and figures about Switzerland.

The Distribution of Wealth and Income in Switzerlandexternal link, a research paper by Reto Fllmi and Isabel Martinez, finds that inequality between rich and poor is not overly pronounced in Switzerland and that the income gap has not widened a great deal over the past 100 years. However, there is one exception: Income and wealth of the superrich have recently increased, says Fllmi.

In a studyexternal link published earlier this year, meanwhile, Avenir Suisse concludes that Switzerland exhibits a remarkably stable and equal income distribution.

An evaluation by the Swiss Federal Tax Administration shows, however, that the distribution of wealth became increasingly unequal in Switzerland between 2003 and 2015. During this period, the richest 1% of the population saw its wealth increase by almost 43 percent. The weakest three-quarters saw assets increase by 18.6 percent. (Occupational pension assets are not included in this calculation.)

Die Reichsten 10% haben am meisten Vermgen

Fluder, from the University of Bern, says that the results of these studies are contradictory.

It depends to a large degree on which data and definitions you look at, he says. For this reason, he and a colleague have launched a research projectexternal link to establish a new database and create a poverty monitoring tool.

Fluder does say that there is a tendency towards increasing inequality in Switzerland, though it is not as significant as in Germany or the US. Health insurance premiums and rents are on the rise, while wages are only increasing moderately. This is why times are getting tough for the Swiss lower middle-class, he says.

The tax system and the welfare state greatly influence the redistribution of wealth and therefore social equality. Compared to other European countries, wealth redistribution in liberal Switzerland is relatively low, tax rates are moderate, and neither health insurers nor pension funds redistribute from rich to poor.

Other Swiss peculiarities also contribute to social inequality:

During both World Wars, rich people living in one of the warring countries lost a considerable part of their assets, which paradoxically led to greater equality, even though it did not necessarily mean the poor were better off. This was not the case in Switzerland, where the war actually widened the gap between rich and poor.

With a home ownership rate of almost 40 percent, Switzerland has the lowest rate in the whole of Europe. And with continuously rising property prices, homeowners are becoming increasingly rich. The majority of people in Switzerland dont benefit from this.

With its low taxation rates, Switzerland intentionally attracts rich foreigners. These celebrities and superrich make a difference in the balance sheets.

Inheritance tax rates have been reduced in Switzerland and are lower than in most other countries, which preserves wealth.

Capital gains are not taxed in Switzerland. Any private person who sells shares and makes a profit does not have to pay tax on their profit, and its usually the rich who hold the shares.

Looking at it more closely, there is actually only one tax that serves equality. Switzerland is one of the few countries with a significant wealth tax, Fllmi says.

After reading this, you may wonder how it can possibly be that Switzerland fares so well when it comes to social equality. Whats the secret?

In its study, Avenir Suisse identified the following elements that could inspire other countries in their quest to fight inequality: a highly flexible labour market; a dual education system; a (semi) direct democracy and decentralised taxation.

According to Fluder, there is another secret: In Switzerland, low wages have not dropped as sharply as in other countries. This is partially due to the minimum wage policies of the trade unions.

Salvi believes that Switzerlands strong labour market is the reason why inequality is less pronounced here than in other countries: Our high employment rate is certainly a decisive factor for this, he says. Moreover, Switzerlands income level is pretty high by international standards, even when adjusted for living costs. Those who earn little in our country are still considered well-off internationally, says Salvi.

Fllmi agrees: In Switzerland, over 90 percent of 25-year-olds have completed some sort of education either by finishing their vocational training or graduating from college or university. Internationally, this is a record-high level.

Those having completed their vocational training earn between CHF4,500 and 5,500 in Switzerland, depending on the sector they work in. These are solid wages, Fllmi says. If a country has many people without vocational training who earn a low income, the wage distribution will be completely different.

The bottom line is this: even if Switzerland is not the paradise of equality as stated in the New York Times, it could certainly be worse compared with other countries.

Translated from German by Billi Bierling, swissinfo.ch

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Is Switzerland a utopia of wealth distribution? - swissinfo.ch