The future belongs to the society that best educates its citizens. And we citizens should determine the success of our nation, city or community not by what we can collectively destroy, but what we can build. In a world where the old norms have been wiped from the earth and everything is undergoing a grand remaking, it’s time now, to demand, the investment in our minds that will spring us into the next.

Right now, we, the United States, spend more money on our military than the rest of the world combined. And a culture of militarism persists. In these last decades, we have chosen to cut funding and ignore our crumbling services that are the very nature of what a government is supposed to do. We have allowed our schools to degrade into a shameful apparatus of failure while pumping more money into that which kills: more bombs, more tanks, more robots for war.

Continuing to spend half our budget on our war machine and expect our tools of government to foster prosperity is preposterous. We can no longer underfund education, thereby funding costly ignorance, and expect to lead in this world. We’re falling behind. In business, invention, technology, and ideas. We get what we pay for. In the uncertainty of “what is next,” will we be the ones able to comprehend the transformative thinking necessary to participate in life on this planet after we’ve come to realize the existential changes coming at us at increasing speed? -jk-

In corporate villainy news, Blackwater is now Xe. Yes, the world’s most powerful mercenary army that brought you the huge profits of privatized war is undergoing a new “look and feel.” A new identity for a new age. I.E. post-Bush and the outsourcing of everything — that which makes the rich richer and everybody else doesn’t know about. But now that we know about the massacres, the killing with impunity, getting paid vastly more than US troops, and the utter contempt for any notion of accountability, they, of course, need a new brand. As they are heavily tied to the war effort and US presence everywhere in the world, especially in Iraq. So get ready for brand Xe. With as much money as they spend on PR, maybe they’ll drop some major coin on the redesign and it will get into all the award books, so we can oogle over cutting-edge design and ruthless militarism at the same time. -jk-

Northland Poster Collective features the art of social justice, the tools of grassroots union organizing and labor activism, and the craft of union workers. And how corporate and government policies target the health and environment in communities already impacted by racial, class and other injustices.

If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. -jk-

With its daily roll of the latest happenings in the Good Blog, the musings of the blue in the face Good Anchor, and its ability to pull together complex events under the microscope of impeccable information design, GOOD really is a treasure to behold in both style and substance. Just how are military robots changing the face of war? Remember the Three-Trillion Dollar War? Is a plane really more fuel efficient than a Prius? You’ve lost your job, what do you do now? How much can you learn in the bathroom? Algae? Depression? Transparency? Now What? In these weird days of reexamining our lives and what is really important in them, amidst financial and ecology collapse, war and famine, culture and design, the state of our planet and its people really is, good. -jk-

We are bottom-up. Youth savvy. Tech friendly. Bold idea generating. And we’re organized — a worthy band of realistic idealists ready for the challenges ahead.

The fringe existence of our social and environmental justice movements now pulses through the old channels and makes our message for truth and equality known. Right in the face of savage capitalism, our collective moment in history has arrived.

And all of them must go! The greed pushers and the wealth snatchers. The naysayers and the obstructionists. The corrupt and the selfish. The laissez-faire. The trickle-down. The big polluters and the big moneyed interests that have sacrificed our common, public good in the name of private gain for far, too, long.

We are on the verge of a monumental, transformational shift in our way of living on this Earth. More equitable. More sustainable. More just. More diverse and inclusive, positive and collective. Open-minded, creative thinking and community led. Energized, mobilized, and ready to usher in our new progressive era in the only way it ever happens — by and for, the people. -jk-