Duck Goes Moo!

U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion

picture from theonion.com

“Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed will of course act appropriately if we…if we…” said Bernanke, who then paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook his head in utter disbelief. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. None of this—this so-called ‘money’—really matters at all.”

“It’s just an illusion,” a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. “Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless.”

from theonion.com

You know, as funny as this Onion article might be, something like this could actually happen some day. I’ve often thought to myself what a society without money would be like. It wouldn’t have to be return to a barter system or the stone age, but the issue of how to get people to do complex and/or dangerous acts that need to be done (like surgery or digging sewer tunnels) without a monetary system or a some form of forced labor.

In the Star Trek universe there is no money (at least not on Earth and the main Federation planets) and it is said that everyone just does what they want to do. That makes some sense. I mean, someone might without a doubt want to be a surgeon and work hard to become such because they want to save lives, but what if not enough people want to do that? Also, who wants to be a garbage man or someone who handles toxic waste? There are many jobs no one would really want to do, unless everyone is ordered to do so under some sort of penalty.

I found this article online about economics in the Star Trek universe: Unofficial Economics of Star Trek

There they mention the concept of Participatory Economics, which is what the author believes the Star Trek economy is based upon.  If you read the wikipedia article on Participatory Economics you find an interesting description of what it is plus of some of the viewed pros and cons of such a system.

On NPR I heard them talk about the Taqwacore movement, which is a genre of Islamic punk and hip-hop music.  Pretty interesting stuff.

Here is the NPR article.

Rolling Stones has an article here.

I really liked both of these cartoons. Both of them come from different views on the whole economic crisis, but both do a very good job of arguing their case and make very effective use of imagery and visual metaphor to get that point across.

I haven’t done a cartoon, political or otherwise, in about half a year now. Should I go back into comic making or is my googly eye site awesome enough that I should focus solely on that?

Drawing the comics all the time took hours out of my week, while allgoogly.com only takes a few minutes out of each day and seems to be the more popular of my creative enterprises.

Oh well. Maybe this summer I’ll try to get back into the comics, at least start drawing new “Strange Bedfellows”, perhaps give it its own site.

I also thought about making an allgoogly.com FaceBook app that would show latest googlies or perhaps just a random one. Would people add that app if I made it?

Wow…

Want to know how each and every dollar of the recently passed stimulus bill is going? Check out recovery.gov.

Smashing Magazine recently detailed the changes made to whitehouse.gov the very second Barack Obama took over as president:

Smashing Magazine: Whitehouse.gov Redesign: The Change Has Come