Global Kinetics

According to Dictionary.com, Kinetics, is the branch of mechanics that deals with the actions of forces in producing or changing the motion of masses. I personally like the sound of the word and I thought that with the increasing complexity of interconnected problems and issues in this planet, it would be interesting to sort of explore and discover the kinetics of the continuously changing world and learn from other people in the process. While I do not profess to understand the political or socio-economic actions and forces in producing the necessary global changes, I thought this blog can be a good forum of various ideas and opinions - important or trivial, intelligent or dull, relevant or irrelevant - just about anything actually! On that note, I consider myself to be a student of Global Kinetics!

The G8 Summit in Japan for instance is faced with a lot of criticisms. According to The Economist (July 3, 2008), global institutions are in fact, an outdated muddle. Global clubs like the G8 are talk shops teeming with people discussing issues they no longer know about. According to the article, "But what is the point of their discussing the oil price without Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest producer? Or waffling about the dollar without China, which holds so many American Treasury bills? Or slapping sanctions on Robert Mugabe, with no African present? Or talking about global warming, AIDS or inflation without anybody from the emerging world? Cigar smoke and ignorance are in the air".

G8 and all those types of imbalanced or misrepresented global groupings and the events that they shape form significant part of the overall Global Kinetics. From an individual standpoint, it's kind of scary that your personal or national future in one way or another, partly depends on the kind of direction that those elite global clubs decide to take on. The constraints cited by the author of the same article are thought-provoking when he said, "Any solution must accept three constraints. First, better institutions will not solve intractable problems. A larger G8 will not automatically lick inflation, a better World Food Program would not stop hunger. Second, no matter how you reform the clubs’ membership rules, somebody somewhere will feel left out. Third, you cannot start again. In 1945 the UN’s founders had a clean slate to write upon, because everything had been destroyed. The modern age does not have that dubious luxury, so must build on what already exists."

The article also mentioned about McCaine's proposed alternative which is a NATO-like democratic sub-committe within the global club. Such alternative of course poses a concern especially on which countries will you include and which ones are excluded (I actually wonder how different is McCaine's proposed panacea from George Bush' imperial type of Globalization). Given the status quo where G8, the multilaterals, the UN's imbalanced Security Council, etc. are not in the position to solve our global problems, what then could be the feasible solution?

I don't know.