This is a view from inside the church establishment. Even they see what is happening with their late teen early twenties cohort, and it is not a happy story for them. As I read this, the extremism that is the hallmark of the Theocratic Right, and its obsession with “values” issues like marriage rights, LGBT rights, abortion just don't reflect the world view of young adults, who are walking away.
1. People. The safety of people is threatened by a) vulnerable cyber infrastructure. See the National Geographic video American Blackout; and b) inequality leading to lower standards of living for the middle class. See the recent books by Hedrick Smith, Joseph Stiglitz, and Jeffrey Sachs.
2. Profits. See the various films and books on the financial crisis. For example, in the book Thirteen Bankers Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF, and James Kwak say that “too big to fail is too big.” Yet the banks are getting bigger and they have great influence in writing the laws on banking regulation.
3. Planet. I had heard that sea level might rise by 3 feet by the end of the century. The National Geographic program Earth Under Water suggests perhaps as much as 16 feet in 100 years and another 16 feet in the next 100 years. See .
These numbers may be high. However, what actions should we be taking in order to minimize the problem and to prepare for whatever sea level rise occurs?
I think systems science, and reflexivity theory, would be helpful in understanding these phenomena.
Singapore — Every five years, the United States National Intelligence Council, which advises the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, publishes a report forecasting the long-term implications of global trends. Earlier this year it released its latest report, “Alternative Worlds,” which included scenarios for how the world would look a generation from now.
One scenario, “Nonstate World,” imagined a planet in which urbanization, technology and capital accumulation have brought about a landscape where governments give up on real reforms and subcontract many responsibilities to outside parties, which then set up enclaves operating under their own laws.
The imagined date for the report’s scenarios is 2030, but at least for “Nonstate World,” it might as well be 2010: though most of us might not realize it, “nonstate world” describes much of how global society already operates. This isn’t to say that states have disappeared, or will. But they are becoming just one form of governance among many.
A quick scan across the world reveals that where growth and innovation have been most successful, a hybrid public-private, domestic-foreign nexus lies beneath the miracle. These aren’t states; they’re “para-states” — or, in one common parlance, “special economic zones.”
Across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, hundreds of such zones have sprung up in recent decades. In 1980, Shenzhen became China’s first; now they blanket China, which has become the world’s second largest economy.
The Arab world has more than 300 of them, though more than half are concentrated in one city: Dubai. Beginning with Jebel Ali Free Zone, which is today one of the world’s largest and most efficient ports, and now encompasses finance, media, education, health care and logistics, Dubai is as much a dense set of internationally regulated commercial hubs as it is the most populous emirate of a sovereign Arab federation.
This complex layering of territorial, legal and commercial authority goes hand in hand with the second great political trend of the age: devolution.
Effects – Death and Horrific Sickness – of First Waves of the Radioactive Tsunami in Japan
World Network For Saving Children From Radiation, Oct. 26, 2013: […] A case like this is just a tip of iceburg […] IKKO is a Buddhist monk. His life is ending. He is only 34 years old and lives in Hiwada town [near Koriyama] in Fukushima. He had a heart attack two days ago, and his doctor announced brain death. He is now connected to life-support. My sister in Fukushima knows him through her student […] She and IKKO got engaged and were planning to get married next year. She has just lost her father from cancer last April. He had worked at Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant […] My sister was present when IKKO had a heartattack and is in disbelief of what is taking place since he was fine before this […] There have been many cases of sickness and death among young generations in Fukushima although it is not reported by media…Mother from Tokyo, Japan during Q & A at Cinema Forum Fukushima, Published July 3, 2013 (at 2:20 in): In Japan, it’s really a total blackout of media, even though there are lots and lots of people who have been developing symptoms…I was outside on the 15th of March in Tokyo, and then about 1 month later, I had fever of like 103ºF for 8 days. And this [baby] boy, he was totally healthy, now he’s OK, but at the time he had 101ºF fever on and off for 13 times in the duration of 3 months. He had rash all over and he was really, really sick […] he became real skinny and he stopped growing for 3 or 4 months. It is really happening. I have 2 nodules in my thyroid, and my boy has countless number of minor nodules.”
“The coordination of the multibillion dollar Fukushima decontamination operation relies on Japan’s organized crime, the Yakusa, which is actively involved in the recruitment of “specialized” personnel for dangerous tasks. “The complexity of Fukushima contracts and the shortage of workers have played into the hands of the yakuza, Japan’s organized crime syndicates, which have run labor rackets for generations.” (Reuters, October 25, 2013) The Yakuza labor practices at Fukushima are based on a corrupt system of subcontracting, which does not favor the hiring of competent specialized personnel. It creates an environment of fraud and incompetence, which in the case of Fukushima could have devastating consequences. The subcontracting with organized crime syndicates is a means for major corporations involved in the clean-up to significantly reduce their labor costs. This role of Japanese organized crime also pertains to the removal of the fuel rods from Reactor no. 4. As documented in several GR articles, this undertaking –if mishandled– by careless workers under the lax supervision of corrupt subcontractors (linked to the Yakusa) creates an environment which could potentially lead to a massive radioactive fallout:
An operation with potentially “apocalyptic” consequences is expected to begin in a little over two weeks from now – “as early as November 8″ – at Fukushima’s damaged and sinking Reactor 4, when plant operator TEPCO will attempt to remove over 1300 spent fuel rods holding the radiation equivalent of 14,000 Hiroshima bombs from a spent fuel storage tank perched on the reactor’s upper floor. While the Reactor 4 building itself did not suffer a meltdown, it did suffer a hydrogen explosion, is now tipping and sinking and has zero ability to withstand another seismic event. A recent Reuters report documents in detail the role of Japan’s Yakuza and its insidious relationship to both TEPCO as well as agencies of the Japanese government including the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Nearly 50 gangs with 1,050 members operate in Fukushima prefecture dominated by three major syndicates – Yamaguchi-gumi, Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai, police say.
Ministries, the companies involved in the decontamination and decommissioning work, and police have set up a task force to eradicate organized crime from the nuclear clean-up project. Police investigators say they cannot crack down on the gang members they track without receiving a complaint. They also rely on major contractors for information. In a rare prosecution involving a yakuza executive, Yoshinori Arai, a boss in a gang affiliated with the Sumiyoshi-kai, was convicted of labor law violations. Arai admitted pocketing around $60,000 over two years by skimming a third of wages paid to workers in the disaster zone. In March a judge gave him an eight-month suspended sentence because Arai said he had resigned from the gang and regretted his actions. Arai was convicted of supplying workers to a site managed by Obayashi, one of Japan’s leading contractors, in Date, a town northwest of the Fukushima plant. Date was in the path of the most concentrated plume of radiation after the disaster. A police official with knowledge of the investigation said Arai’s case was just “the tip of the iceberg” in terms of organized crime involvement in the clean-up.”
Yet more disgusting news about what is happening to the American food system. I just can't say strongly enough: You must give serious consideration to the food you eat. Your health, and your life, and the health and lives of your family depend on your choices.
Phi Beta Iota: Water War is old news, but the dilitantes around government finally seem to be taking notice. The DNI and CIA are still incapable at serious futures studies, in part because they lack a holistic analytic model and just cannot get a grip on true cost economics. The good news is that any government with integrity is immediately able to combine solar power with water desalination and hydroponic agriculture to rapidly solve multiple challenges at once. Finding an honest government is the hard part. See also Robert David Steele,”Water: Soul of the Earth, Mirror of Our Collective Souls,” Huffington Post (5 January 2011).
Freedom of the press has not, in my lifetime, been under such serious threat as it is now. In some ways it is already too late, because today's corporate media is so corrupted that the freedom to say something is pre-compromised by the fact that few in media address the substantive issues of the day. Most of the reports you see in SR you won't see on your evening news — turn on the news any night and you can see this for yourself.
This is an essay published in one of the major foreign policy journals. Although it makes some good points, where it is appearing is one of the most important.
Is our relentless quest for economic growth killing the planet? Climate scientists have seen the data – and they are coming to some incendiary conclusions.
In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.
But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).
Waste land: large-scale irrigation strips nutrients from the soil, scars the landscape and could alter climatic conditions beyond repair. Image: Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto/ Flowers, London, Pivot Irrigation #11 High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA (2011)
Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”
There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.
Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.
CAPTCHA kaput? Software cracks “are you human” test
An artificial intelligence company says their algorithm can solve CAPTCHAs — those distorted jumble of letters used to prove you're not a bot — with 90 percent accuracy.
Microsoft's Kinect motion sensor has transformed from a novel gaming controller to a valued tool for robotics, and now is helping to interpret sign language in real time.
We can't say we haven't been warned.
