I’ll be buying one soon. Three primary reasons. GigaOm said the new iPhone is capable enough on the Net that it will increasingly be used instead of a computer. Then there’s Me.com, the replacement for dot Mac, which puts everything in the cloud and syncs it to your other devices. This includes the iPhone address book, calendar, iPod files, and lots more. Finally, there is already a thriving market of applications for it, and this will keep growing.

This new iPhone could well be a paradigm-changer.

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We’re traveling this week. Not quite sure what our Net access will be like, so posting might be a bit random.

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Alex Steffen of WorldChanging talked with Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing about what kind of heroes we need to deal with the changing times, with climate change and peak oil.

Many people will be losing their jobs. Some won’t get new ones in a green economy. What happens to them and to the communities they live in?

That’s where the heroes come in.

Abandoned people and places are sometimes the ones who most need radical innovation; that, these days, new tools and models are practically scattered all over the ground, just waiting for people to pick them up; but that those who most need them are those who least know how to find them.

It’s also really important to listen to them because they will know things you have no clue about.

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.

Bad name, great idea. Take the ideas and spread them. Be optimistic. Help others. Work together. Listen. Got a rust belt city? Transform it. Yes, it can be done. But only by people willing to try.

This would not be lone stragglers wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape. As we’ve said again and again, worldending is a fool’s game, and what comes after will not be an adventure. Nor would it be the fantasy of a localist retreat to 19th Century farming communities that folks like Jim Kunstler hold so dear (I mean, for Christsakes, no one really wants that life — our ancestors all had that life and they fled it as soon as they could in great teeming masses)

Thank you. That’s precisely the problem with Jim Kunstler and his fellow doomsters. They want to retreat to rural farm life, make things by hand, like that would be any solution at all.

BTW, The Greening of the Rust Belt is already happening.

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He sees the biggest obstacle stopping us from going to renewables is the mistaken belief that oil prices are temporarily high and will drop. So rather than deal with the problem, we’re going on a witch hunt to see who is keeping prices up.

Even if we started drilling offshore everywhere now, we wouldn’t see the results for ten years. One big problem. All the offshore rigs are already in use. He thinks 5-7 years hard work in renewables like geothermal and wave power could “get us out of a very deep hole” but we need to start now. We also need to, among other things, eliminate long-distance commuting and grow food locally.

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This is something you might expect from a hard right slime squad, but not from the supposedly liberal New Yorker. It shows Obama in the Oval Office in Muslim garb with his wife as an AK-totin’ radical with a picture of bin Laden above the fireplace with the flag burning in it.

I’m speechless. What were they thinking?

[The Obama] campaign issued a statement by Bill Burton which Mike Allen of Politico.com reported as, “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds quickly e-mailed: “We completely agree with the Obama campaign, it’s tasteless and offensive.”

We look forward to future satirical New Yorker covers. Perhaps they could portray Obama as Stepin Fetchit or as a murderous Communist or, hey how about this laff riot, being lynched by a white mob. All in good satirical jest of course. Right.

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