New ecology app makes wildlife viewing a cultural sport
Project NOAH and its innovative app are about to go global with a media blitz.
Social media to some is the antithesis of all things nature. With people’s heads often bent over handheld devices, it seems like the last thing they will do is notice a chirping bluebird or flying ladybug overhead. But a new app for the iPhone seeks to change all that. Slate reports that Project NOAH, or networked organisms and habitats, can make your mobile device into a handheld wildlife spotting tool.
There is a fascinating dynamic occurring within the Tea Party “movement, one that juxtaposes earnest individuals of all types with much more calculating opportunists who are responsive to money via “anonymous” channels made possible by the Supreme Court decisions to take all limits off corporate funding in politics.
Despite the story being told by numerous media outlets, we estimate that the lower two-thirds, perhaps even the lower four-fifths, of the Tea Party have no idea they are window dressing, hired hands in a political drama being orchestrated by the Republican mandarins who have been named in the media, and their long-standing financial backers, also named.
Among other impacts, this has dramatically lessened the Libertarian movement's prospects, and placed the Green and Reform parties so far over on the sidelines they cannot achieve any semblance of past modest successes.
The question to be asked: Who Benefits? This is not a question the Tea Party membership is considering with any degree of informed introspection. Nor is it a question that Wikipedia or other popular public sources of information have addressed with any sufficiency.
In recent years, a number of Quaker writers and organizations have argued that these core values and the future of our planet are threatened by an economic system that encourages people to consume increasingly scarce natural resources, resulting in environmental devastation, economic inequality, and wars for oil. The alternative they propose is living in “right relationship,” which means radically changing both our individual behavior and social structures so that our way of life honors all of God's creation.
“We draw on a Quaker legacy of passion for doing the right thing and going inward to discover what the right thing is,” explains the website of the Earth Quaker Action Team, which grew out of a gathering in the summer of 2009 where many Quakers felt that God was calling them to engage more vigorously with these issues. “We are people who recycle and re-use, who drive hybrids and bicycles, who take buses and shorter showers, and at the same time know that the sum of individual actions cannot make up for the destructive decisions taken by large structures. We realize we must turn to the power of collective action.”
Phi Beta Iota: We are sensing both an emergence and a convergence coming together in 2012.
The argument that social media fosters feel-good clicking rather than actual change, began long before Malcolm Gladwell brought it up in the New Yorker — long enough to generate its own derogatory term. “Slacktivism,” as defined by Urban Dictionary, is “the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.”
If you only measure donations, social media is no champion. The national chapter of the Red Cross, for instance, has 208,500 “likes” on Facebook, more than 200,000 followers on Twitter, and a thriving blog. But according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, online donations accounted for just 3.6% of private donations made to the organization in 2009.
But social good is a movement still in its infancy. Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. Let’s give the tools a little while to grow up before we start judging them.
All of that virtual liking, following, joining, signing, forwarding, and, yes, clicking, has a lot of potential to grow into big change. Here’s why:
Harrison Owen lives in Maryland and is immediately available to help any element of the U.S. Government, from White House to the smallest independent element of the U.S. Intelligence Community.
He is the inventor of Open Space Technology (OST). Below are links to reviews of his two most important books. At his home page (click on the photo) are links to Papers and other gold nuggets.
We consider his offering so very important to our shared future that below we summarize the ingredients. This knowledge is free and can be used by anyone anywhere.
The 90th Anniversary of Hungary's Dismemberment: Hungary declares “National Day of Unity,” AHF issues statement: “Trianon is not only tragic history, it is a lingering tragedy which continues to affect the Hungarian minorities and historical communities living in the states neighboring Hungary even today.”
At the time President Wilson said: “The proposal to dismember Hungary is absurd” and later Sir Winston Churchill said: “Ancient poets and theologians could not imagine such suffering, which Trianon brought to the innocent.” We are sad to report that they were right.
Phi Beta Iota: The day will come when many of the artificial political boundaries imposed by selected Western powers, not only in Africa but in Europe and elsewhere, are rejected. Professor Philip Allott of Cambridge has written the best book to date on the insanity and the human cost of these ill-considered impositions, see Review: The Health of Nations–Society and Law beyond the State. This is not to say that previous boundaries should be restored, but rather that the world is moving toward panarchy and hybrid governance–water may have one larger region and multinational governance, sewage a more local arrangement….and so on.
In his book, “NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe,” Daniele Ganser described their clandestine Cold War operations, run by European secret services, collaborating with NATO, the CIA and Britain's MI6 and Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) against a possible Soviet invasion, internal communist takeovers, or others on the political left gaining power.
EXTRACT:
In Italy, against both communist and socialist parties, it was claimed they wanted to weaken NATO “from within,” Italian judge, Felice Casson, learning that right-wing terrorists carried out bombings against civilians, blamed them on the left, neo-fascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra explaining the scheme as follows:
“The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”
In 2000, the Italian Senate was more explicit, saying:
“Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as had been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence,” meaning CIA mainly.
Former director William Colby admitted in his memoirs that covert western armies were a major CIA initiative, begun post-WW II, and restricted “to the smallest possible coterie of the most reliable people, in Washington (and) NATO” to keep the initiative secret.
Phi Beta Iota: CIA's importation of 100 Nazis a year after WWII (and probably many more, it has always considered itself above the law, both domestic and foreign) fueled a truly psychopathic perception of communism that led to policies and programs that today are clearly seen to be crimes against humanity, but back in the day were seen as “collateral damage” essential to contain communism while maintaining “control” over key governments.
