“Technology, and particularly communications technology, generates the conditions of possibility for changes in power structures. Daniel R. Headrick argues in The Tools of Empire that 19th century European imperialism, which at one point controlled three quarters of the surface of the Earth, only became possible when transport and communications technology resulted in the establishment of economic networks […] After all, before a colony could become valuable and annexed to a European economy, a communication and transport network had to be laid.
Moment 1: The Emergence of Decentralized Networks; Moment 2: The Crisis of Decentralized Networks; Moment 3, the beginning of the transition: Hacker Culture as the successor to the decentralized systems era
UPDATE 28 June: Added Linked-In Exchange at End of Post
Landmark Forum 001
First, I want to thank Bob for making this experience possible. I am about to go into an intense three-day boot camp but have already gotten my first insight from a meeting last night.
“Accept responsibility for how you are heard, not for what you say.”
Duh. Not so obvious to me. I have gone my whole life assuming that I should put what I think on the table and rely on others to triage, ingest, etc. So this is my first big insight, the undertone is that your body language is part of how you are heard and obvious impatience, which I have already been trying to curb, is a downer.
I will not return as Miss Congeniality, but I am certainly going to return vastly more sensitive to effect rather than intent.
Landmark Forum 002
This is exhausting. It is also very worthwhile, and the course does NOT impose any restrictions on going to the bathroom or taking an urgent phone call, nor does the course force everyone to expose their innermost concerns. In a class of about 120, there are ample volunteers for the training points to be made. At no time did I feel, observe, or hear anyone else observe, that the course was over-bearing.
Writing from: Aspen, CO. I’m speaking/attending the National Geographic Environmental Conference (focus of the conference: adapting to climate change).
I had the good fortune of sitting on a conference panel with Mayor Fetterman of Braddock, PA.
He’s a great bear of a guy (he makes me, at 6′ 1″ and well built, look small in comparison), but despite his size, he looked like he was slowly being crushed by the weight of the world when he showed up at the panel.
His story explained why. He’s spent the last decade trying to save a storied American town, crushed by global economic and financial forces. Forces that gutted a prosperous steel town of 18,000 with some historical treasures (e.g. the first Carnegie Library) and a thriving retail sector.
When Fetterman arrived in Braddock, the town was already in shambles. The population had fallen to below 3,000 and gang crime was rampant. In fact, the landscape of the town was so bleak, the town was used as a setting for the darkest apocalypse movie I’ve ever seen, “The Road“
Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground.
No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.
Click on Image to Enlarge
There are growing signs they were mistaken.
Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation's drinking water.
In 2010, contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los Angeles dog park. Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil and gas drilling waste have appeared in Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the nation's most stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early 1990s, releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be needed to supply Miami's drinking water.
There are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.
Federal officials and many geologists insist that the risks posed by all this dumping are minimal. Accidents are uncommon, they say, and groundwater reserves — from which most Americans get their drinking water — remain safe and far exceed any plausible threat posed by injecting toxic chemicals into the ground.
But in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn't always work.
Wealthy Americans aren’t just leaving tax-heavy states like New York and California, they’re leaving the country.
U.S. citizens are defecting at record levels in order to escape high taxes, the New York Post reported. About 8,000 U.S. citizens are projected to renounce their citizenship in 2012, or about 154 a week — versus 3,805 in 2011, or about 73 per week, according to immigration officials, the Post reported.
They want to avoid tax bills resulting from the proposed 55-percent hike on the wealthy and the anticipated expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts at the end of the year, the Post reported.
“High-net-worth individuals are making decisions that having a US passport just isn’t worth the cost anymore,” Jim Duggan, a lawyer at Duggan Bertsch, which specializes in protecting assets of the wealthy, told the Post.
“They’re able to do what they do from any place in the world, and they’re choosing to do it from places with much lower tax rates,” he said. “Some are philosophically disgusted at the course our country is taking in all kinds of ways. They’re making a strong protest of, ‘Enough is enough.’ But largely it’s an economic decision.”
But to leave means finding a new country and obtaining citizenship and there are many that are eager to welcome wealthy Americans, such as Australia, Norway, Singapore, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, and Antigua, according to the Post.
These countries tend to offer a fast track to citizenship and protections from the Justice Department and IRS.
I've used The Brain myself and have played a number of these webinars. It takes some commitment, but it's really an infotention tool far more than just a mind-mapping tool. –Howard
“Your Brain lets you make unlimited connections and instantly find any idea or file. This seminar will cover how to start, grow and manage a single Brain on every aspect of your life.”
Your Brain lets you make unlimited connections and instantly find any idea or file. This seminar will cover how to start, grow and manage a single Brain on every aspect of your life.
Visit www.thebrain.com for more information on TheBrain. TheBrain is knowledge management software for thinkers!
As I have indicated in earlier blasters, I find the parallels between the political forces corrupting defense “science” and climate “science” to be stunning (e.g., directly here or more subtly here).
Attached is a very thoughtful piece by the distinguished Australian scientist Garth Paltridge. His subject is the psychological state of play in the politicization of climate science, and without saying so, he reinforces the parallels. Note the author's reference to Eisenhower's farewell address toward the end of the essay. Most people remember Eisenhower's phrase for its snappy reference to the military-industrial complex. Ike should have included Congress, but deliberately chose not to and removed the reference to Congress from an early draft, in effect, placing sensibility before common sense. If you read the farewell address carefully (here), you will see that Eisenhower's warning was really a more nuanced one about public policy becoming prisoner to the special interests feeding off uncontrollable cash cows those interests helped to create — a point more in tune with the quote highlighted by Paltridge.
Readers should note I reformatted Paltridge's essay to highlight what I think are important points, but did not change any words or the order of those words. A link is provided to the original form, should you prefer it.
22 JUN 2012 00:06:00 | UPDATED: 22 JUN 2012 10:46:02
GARTH PALTRIDGE
Garth Paltridge is an emeritus professor with the University of Tasmania, a visiting fellow at the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He is the author of The Climate Caper: facts and fallacies of global warming, Connor Court, 2009. He was a chief research scientist with the CSIRO division of atmospheric research.
The broad theory of man-made global warming is acceptable in the purely qualitative sense.
EXTRACT:
The bottom line of all this is that deliberate understatement of the uncertainty of the science allows overstatement of the climate change problem. [CS note: in the Pentagon, downplaying the future consequences of current decisions and “threat inflation” are part of what is the known as the “front loading” power game, defined here.]
Phi Beta Iota: Within Climate Change, Carbon is less important than sulpher or mercury, but favored by Maurice Strong and Al Gore as a global financial derivatives scam. Climate Change is at best 10% of Environmental Degradation, high-level threat to humanity #3, after #1 Poverty and #2 Infectious Disease. Governments have become so corrupt — less the Nordics, Netherlands, and Singapore, with Brazil, China, India, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela having their own forms of making do — that only hybrid panarchy (M4IS2) rooted in the craft of (public) intelligence will scale to meet all these challenges. Governments–as a general statement–do not represent their publics but have instead sold out to the wealthy–the public servants having failed to hold the political class accountable with intelligence and integrity. As David Weinberger notes so ably, experts are not really expert, only all of us together will do. Organized people armed with organized knowledge can beat organized wealth and their corrupt political servants (self-made servants we might add — the wealthy did not bribe the politicals– the politicals fell from grace and shake down the wealthy).
