Category: Earth Intelligence

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SchwartzReport: Celibacy Syndrome in Japan — An End to Skin on Skin, Heart to Heart?

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

schwartzreport newThis is an extraordinary trend going on in Japan. It is a very clear example of how national beingness is shaped through unnumbered small seemingly mundane choices made by individuals.

Why Have Young People in Japan Stopped Having Sex?
Abigail Haworth – The Guardian/Observer (U.K.)

Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first name means “love” in Japanese, and is a keepsake from her earlier days as a professional dominatrix. Back then, about 15 years ago, she was Queen Ai, or Queen Love, and she did “all the usual things” like tying people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples. Her work today, she says, is far more challenging. Aoyama, 52, is trying to cure what Japan's media calls sekkusu shinai shokogun, or “celibacy syndrome”.

Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren't even dating, and increasing numbers can't be bothered with sex. For their government, “celibacy syndrome” is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060. Aoyama believes the country is experiencing “a flight from human intimacy” – and it's partly the government's fault.

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SchwartzReport: Public Interest Headlines

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

schwartzreport newA Modest Proposal to Neutralize Gerrymandering
DAVID BRIN – Salon

Bernie Sanders: Americans Vote for the Lesser of Two Evils
JONATHAN TASINI – Reader Supported News/Payboy

Blow to Multiple Human Species Idea
MELISSA HOGENBOOM, Science Reporter – BBC News (U.K.)

Huge GMO News
Ocean Robbins – The Huffington Post

Japanese Farmers Producing Crops and Solar Energy Simultaneously
Institute of Science in Society

New York is Drowning in Bribes and Corruption
PAM MARTENS – Counter Punch

The Ocean Is Broken
 GREG RAY – THe Newcastle Herald (Australia)

US Court: Transcanada's Keystone XL Profits More Important Than Environment
STEVE HORN – Truthout

U.S. Races to Salvage Critical Antarctic Research Lost to Shutdown
ANDREW FREEDMAN – Wunderground.com

World Ocean Systems Undermined by Climate Change by 2100
Phys.org

You Need More Downtime Than You Think
FERRIS JABR – Salon

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Berto Jongman: Richard Yonck on Connecting with Our Connected World — the Coming Explosion of Human Consicousness in Context of an Internet of Things

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Connecting with Our Connected World

Richard Yonck

The Futurist, November-December 2013

We can only really communicate with a tiny fraction of our personal and global environment. But our world and our experience of it are poised to change dramatically as everything becomes increasingly interconnected. Here’s what we can expect in the coming era of the “Internet of Things.”

richard yonck
Richard Yonck

Whether it’s biological cells, electronic systems, or communities of people, networks increase in value as the number of nodes and connections grow. As Metcalfe’s law suggests, increased connectedness can lead to increased value and usefulness.

For many millennia, our ability to communicate was limited to those people with whom we could physically meet and interact. Writing and the ability to create records transcended this limitation, allowing us to communicate with others separated from us by physical space and even time. With the telegraph and telephone, near real-time two-way communication with nearly anyone, anywhere on the planet, became possible.

Our growing interconnectivity has allowed us to share knowledge and ideas, which in turn has advanced society even further. But it was the development of the Internet that really accelerated this process.

Perhaps equally important, our inventions made it possible to improve our communication with the physical world in the form of remote sensors and other telemetry. As computers process more input from satellites, sensors, radio-tagged devices, and so on, it’s been estimated more than 40% of all data will be entirely machine-generated by 2020; that is up from 11% in 2005, according to the 2012 IDC Digital Universe report. This trend will likely continue for some time.

Read full article.

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Jean Lievens: Are Cities the New Global Power Node?

Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Peace Intelligence
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

The End of the Nation-State?

By PARAG KHANNA

New York Times, October 12, 2013

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 had brought about a landscape where governments had given up on real reforms and had subcontracted 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.”

Read rest of article.

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Smart Planet: Fukushima Now a Global Disaster

03 Environmental Degradation, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Earth Intelligence

smartplanet logoFukushima nuclear disaster now global environmental problem

The Japanese government has asked for help — but is the plea two years too late?

Despite previous assurances, the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster continues to contaminate the world’s oceans — and the Japanese government is finally asking for international help.

The March 2011 power plant meltdown was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, and after frequent attempts to stem contamination — including the use of ice rings and the construction of a second processing plant to filter radioactive particles from contaminated water — the Japanese government has finally asked for global aid to stem radioactive leaks entering the Pacific Ocean, which is endangering the world’s food supply and ecosystems.

At a conference on Sunday, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said:

“We are wide open to receive the most advanced knowledge from overseas to contain the problem. My country needs your knowledge and expertise.”

Despite Abe’s comments to the International Olympic Committee last month that the leaks were “under control,” untold thousands of tons of radioactive liquid have entered the world’s oceans, with plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) reporting a new leak this week caused by human error, and a spill of 80,000 gallons in August.

Via: IBM Times

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John Rappoport: Promoting Diseases That Do Not Exist

07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government
Jon Rappoport
Jon Rappoport

Magic trick: promoting diseases that don’t exist

The disease/treatment/profit machine requires more and more diseases, even if they aren’t real.

Here is an unspoken but largely accepted medical notion of what a disease is:

A group of physical symptoms shared by many people, which has a single cause.

For example, take the flu. Wikipedia lists the common symptoms: chills, fever, muscle pains, headache, coughing. For each type of flu, there is single virus announced as the cause. E.g., Swine Flu; H1N1 virus.

Drug companies develop medicines and vaccines to kill the virus or prevent it from gaining a foothold in the body. They sell the drugs and vaccines. Profits soar. Nice and neat.

Of course, many doctors don’t bother to test patients to see if they have a disease like seasonal flu. It’s too time consuming to take a blood sample and send it to a lab and wait for the results.

So the doctor makes an eyeball diagnosis based on symptoms and the season of the year.

As I explained in my previous article, “What happens when only 16% of flu patients have the flu?”, a cursory investigation of this practice can lead to embarrassing results.

Every year, many blood samples from patients are, in fact, sent to labs, and only a small fraction of these “flu cases” turn out to reveal any flu virus at all.

But this fact is blithely ignored.

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