Somalia has been steadily slipping from global media attention over the past few months. The large scale crisis is no longer making headline news, which means that advocacy and lobbying groups are finding it increasingly difficult to place pressure on policymakers and humanitarian organizations to scale their intervention in the Horn of Africa. I recently discussed this issue with Al-jazeera’s Social Media Team whilst in Doha and pitched a project to them which has just gone live this hour.
The joint project combines the efforts of multiple partners including Al-Jazeera, Ushahidi, Souktel, Crowdflower, the African Diaspora Institute and the wider Somali Diaspora. The basis of my pitch to Al-jazeera was to let ordinary Somalis speak for themselves by using SMS to crowdsource their opinions on the unfolding crisis.
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I am often reminded of what my friend Anand Giridharadasof the New York Times wrote last year vis-a-vis Ushahidi. To paraphrase:
They used to say that history is written by the victors. But today, before the victors win, if they win, there is a chance to scream out with a text message, a text message that will not vanish, a text message that will remain immortalized on a map for the world to bear witness. What would we know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, Germans and Jews, Hutus and Tutsis, if every one of them had had the chance, before the darkness, to declare for all time:
In 1971, Lewis Powell, a mild-mannered, courtly, and shrewd corporate lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, soon to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court, wrote a memorandum to his client, the United States Chamber of Commerce. He outlined a critique and a plan that changed America.
Complete excerpt below the line — real history killing real people.
The violence at the heart of colonialism is exposed in Richard Gott's history
Richard Drayton
Guardian, 7 December 2011
Amazon Page for Reviewer's Book Nature's Government
“We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers.” So David Lloyd George explained the British government's demand at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference to keep the right to bomb for “police purposes in outlying places”. Airpower had shown its value in spreading what Winston Churchill, when defending in 1919 the use of poison gas against “uncivilised tribes”, had called “a lively terror”. Richard Gott shows how a hundred years earlier more hands-on means were used to similar ends: the heads of rebel slaves in Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831 were cut from their bodies and placed on poles beside the roads. The mutilation of the corpses of the defeated never quite goes out of fashion.
Amazon Page
Empires have always depended on violence. Killing, torture and the destruction of property are essential to those tasks of destroying resistance, extracting information and collaboration, and demonstrating dominance that underly all conquest. But it is the privilege of conquerors to tell stories that flatter their own past. It is, thus, rare to find the historians of any imperial power describing the ugly business of the frontier as more than unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise honourable enterprise. Britain is no exception: from the Victorians until the 1950s, its historians mainly saw in the British empire a great engine for diffusing liberty and civilisation to the world. If such Whig piety declined in the era after Suez, later scholars, studying particular places and times, never connected all the episodes of massacres, rebellions and atrocities. Popular historians continued profitably to sell happy stories of the empire to the British public – always marketed as daring revisionist accounts.
Gott's achievement is to show, as no historian has done before, that violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British empire.
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What Gott loses by this focus on resistance, however, is any subtlety in understanding the meanings of collaboration. He repeatedly imposes the lens of 20th-century nationalism, and even anti-fascism, so that those who did not rebel become traitors or “fifth columnists”. He does not examine with care or sympathy the varieties of loyalism, and the motives and experiences of those who chose, however mistakenly, to throw in their lot with the British. Neither does he explore how the economic and technological bases of British power changed between 1750 and 1850. For the revolution that science and industry brought to production, transport, communication and war made Britain able to attract and to extort indigenous collaboration more easily, and changed how the British understood themselves as a nation and their rights in the wider world. The empire was made by more than violence.
“What is keeping us from thriving?” asks the new movie, Thrive. The answer it gives is “the global elite,” the people who control the financial system that in turn controls everything else. Operating through the power institutions of our society, this elite pursues a conscious agenda of total world dominance, purposely suppressing anything that would disrupt their power: from clean energy to alternative cancer cures.
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If there ever was an Illuminati orchestrating world events, it has lost control. Today, the atmosphere among the financial elite fluctuates between panic and resignation. They cannot be bothered to suppress films like Thrive, like What on Earth, like Moon Rising, magazines like Infinite Energy, and all the information freely available on the Internet that is accelerating the shift of consciousness away from separation and scarcity.
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Despite its flaws, in its invocation of evil and in its appeal to technological salvation, Thrive arouses our conviction that the world isn't supposed to be this way, and that a much better world is closer than we dare think. Even if it wrongly ascribes the source of the problem and misidentifies the essence of the solution, still it will stimulate people to deepen their questioning of the boundaries of consensus reality. This is a good thing. Once the questioning starts, it will not stop until we arrive at a new story aligned with the spirit being born today.
I was surprised to see this HRRR forecast model prediction of tonight's Northeast snow showing no snow for Harrisburg and York, PA, and showing the axis of heaviest snow (4-8″) over or west of State College, PA. This disagreed with overnight AccuWeather and NWS forecasts that showed it further east. This storm will be a good test of last minute “nowcasting” by the new higher-resolution models that we have access to this winter season. I thought I'd “crowdsource” this forecast on the WeatherMatrix Facebook page so my readers could weigh in.
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This is an example of how Social Media is revolutionizing weather forecasting, something I'll be writing about in WeatherWise magazine‘s Jan-Feb. 2012 issue, and it's not at all unseen here at AccuWeather — when our company was started 50 years ago, our founder Joel Myers noted that the average consensus forecast of his entire meteorology class would always beat the best daily forecasters – which is why we have a twice-daily map discussion here at HQ to get all of the meteorologists on the same page – an internal crowdsourcing if you will.
Berlin, 1 December 2011 – Corruption continues to plague too many countries around the world, according to Transparency International’s 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index released today. It shows some governments failing to protect citizens from corruption, be it abuse of public resources, bribery or secretive decision-making.
Transparency International warned that protests around the world, often fuelled by corruption and economic instability, clearly show citizens feel their leaders and public institutions are neither transparent nor accountable enough.
The United States Report summarizes and analyzes 73 bribery demands in the U.S. reported anonymously to TRACE’s online Business Registry for International Bribery and Extortion (BRIBEline) between July 11, 2007 and November 15, 2011.
A key finding from the United States report is the prevalence of bribe solicitations made in exchange for an undue advantage. Over one-third of bribe demands in the United States – the highest rate among countries studied to date by BRIBEline – are premised on an improper quid pro quo, such as winning new business (25% of all reported demands), agreeing to attempt to influence a government official in exchange for a bribe (5%) or receiving inappropriate favorable treatment, such as a favorable court ruling (4%).
Phi Beta Iota: Both recommended for a full reading (neither is very long).
“A new concept is coming out from the fogs of the present situation: a right to insolvency. We’ll not pay the debt.
The European countries have been obliged to accept the blackmail of debt, but people are refusing the concept that we have to pay for a debt that we have not taken. Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Debt the first 5000 years, (Melville House, 2011), and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, in La fabrique de l’homme endetté (editions Amsterdam, 2011), have started an interesting reflection on the cultural origin of the notion of debt, and the psychic implications of the sense of guilt that the notion of debt brings in itself. And, in his essay, Recurring Dreams The Red Heart of Fascism, the Anglo-Italian young thinker Federico Campagna locates the analogy between the post Versailles Congress years and the present in the debt-obsession:
Phi Beta Iota: Gripping. Mankind is at a philosophical turning point. Organized people are confronting organized money, and the integrity of humanity is in the balance.
