Rickard Falkvinge: Net Generation Votes in a Year — Stand By for a Purge of Arrogant Ignorant Legislatures

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy

Rickard Falkvinge
Rickard Falkvinge

Why Can’t Offline-Borns Tell Difference Between Voluntary And Forced Actions?

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 03:24 AM PDT

Repression:  The conflicts and tensions between the net generation and the offline legislators are just escalating. The legislators are sitting on all the force, but the net generation is sitting on all the future. With the recent revelations of wholesale spying and surveillance by the United States’ NSA, these tensions have been brought to light again.

People and legislators who were born into the offline world were so through none of their choice. Nobody holds, or should hold, them responsible for being an offline-born. However, people should – and do – hold them responsible when they’re not even making an effort at understanding the net generation and dismissing their demands of privacy and dignity. Listening to lobbyists of big corporations does not count, even if those lobbyists call themselves “stakeholders”. They, too, are offline-born, and will just tell the legislators that the net needs to be curtailed more because it disrupts their business by allowing the competition to do the same thing at one-tenth the cost.

It isn’t just the United States and the NSA spying on their citizens in this manner. The European countries’ security forces do it too, and we know it all too well, even though it probably won’t mentioned too much in election campaigns.

The demands from the net generation of basic privacy, basic respect – even basic dignity – is just getting louder in the face of these egregious privacy violations. Unfortunately, it is usually met with undeserving disrespect from the offline-borns, legislators and lobbyists alike.

Continue reading “Rickard Falkvinge: Net Generation Votes in a Year — Stand By for a Purge of Arrogant Ignorant Legislatures”

Berto Jongman: Synthetic Biology Next Battleground?

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Will synthetic biology become a GM-style battleground?

David Shukman

BBC, 11 July 2013

Will the emerging science of designing and engineering new forms of life receive the same hostile reception as genetically modified food and crops?

This is the question facing the growing community of academic and commercial researchers exploring the potential of synthetic biology.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

For those pioneering this new field, the science offers a whole realm of exhilarating possibilities – dreaming up and building new organisms that will perform exactly what's ordered. It is a vision for taking control of nature.

Synthetic biology is a dimension beyond genetic modification.

While GM involves taking genes from one organism and inserting them in another, synthetic biology involves designing and creating artificial genes and implanting them instead – not just borrowing from the natural world but rewriting it or even reinventing it.

I used virtual reality to try to explain it last year.

At a major conference this week in London – the BioBricks Foundation SB6.0 – excited talk suggested that synthetic biology could become the next big thing in everything from energy to medicines to industry.

Read full article.

Mini-Me: Fracking Causes Earthquakes. Any Questions?

03 Environmental Degradation, 07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Law Enforcement
Who?  Mini-Me?
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

U.S. earthquake increase tied to disposal well boom

Wastewater, increasingly injected into deep disposal wells amid the energy boom, appears to be the culprit in an increase in U.S. quakes.

EXTRACT:

In a study out today that provides the strongest link to date between wastewater wells and quakes, seismologists and geologists say U.S. earthquakes have become roughly five times more common in the past three years. They warn about inadequate monitoring of deep wastewater disposal wells that are setting off these small quakes nationwide.

There are more than 30,000 such deep disposal wells nationwide. They're increasingly used as mile-deep dumping grounds for fluids left over from the more shallow hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” wells responsible for surging U.S. natural gas production. The earthquakes have been linked to the wastewater wells but not the fracking drilling wells themselves.

Read article with large graphic.

Neal Rauhauser: Democracy and Islam – Lost in Translation

Cultural Intelligence

 

Neal Rauhauser
Neal Rauhauser

A Streetcar Named Democracy

Ten years ago Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan famously quipped “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.” This was meant to prod Turks into thinking about their form of government, but the quote is applicable, albeit displeasingly so, for other situations in the Mideast.

The differences between the Sunni majority and the Shia and other related derivative sects are something of an analog to the split between Protestants and the Catholic church between four and five hundred years ago. Christendom fought it out, coming to the separation of church and state as a solution to the conflict. Islam is six hundred years newer that Christianity and they have not yet had such a resolution.

slices of islamOur society, with the Wars of Reformation long over and four hundred years of English liberalism as a foundation, has an expectation of what democracy means – a pluralist government with regular elections that enforces the rule of the law. What we are seeing in Egypt today is that the Muslim Brotherhood viewed democracy in the way Erdogan represented it; they rode it past the removal of a compliant strongman, then wanted to hop off at the “majoritarian Islamist” stop. What happened there a few days ago fits the definition of a coup, but our definition might be in need of an update.

Syrian Alawites, facing a loss of control of the country and an aggressive, majoritarian Sunni insurgency funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are suddenly interested in democracy – a peaceful, pluralist government strikes them as a better deal than payback for years of oppression at the hands of the Assad regime. If you ask any policy maker outside of the Arabian peninsula you would get a heartfelt “YES!” if you could point the way to achieving this. The conflict has already spilled into Lebanon, once part of Greater Syria, and it’s starting to draw would-be jihadis from across Europe, who can make it as far as Turkey without needing a visa. The border is porous and policy makers fret about radicalized jihadists returning home as hardened urban guerrillas after spending time in Syria.

Trying to see the Mideast as we saw eastern Europe during the Cold War – as a place that needed and wanted to be liberated, is fundamentally incorrect. Islam is the substrate upon which societies there are built, and we have to see things as they are, not through some simple minded lens of western rhetoric. Egypt’s coup may be the clean, well lit, safe stop for its people. If we insist on enforcing our idea of what democracy means we could well be compelling the Egyptians towards something similar to what is happening in Syria, and no one wants to face that.

I see varying opinions on this, some simple minded and knee jerk, while others are carefully measured positions by those who have traveled and worked in the region. The only consensus I see right now is that rushing to judgment could have grim consequences.

Chuck Spinney: Has the US Lost Its Grand Strategic Mind?

02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

As Esam Al-Amin explained here, Mohamad Morsi made some colossal blunders during his one year rule of Egypt, as its democratically elected president.  He was elected in what most observers regard as a reasonably fair election.

But the exclusive report by Al Jazeera (also attached below) reveals that the United States — which claims to support democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere — has been actively involved in bankrolling Morsi's opposition, and in so doing has continued its long policy of subverting Islamist democratic victories when they win fair elections (Hamas in  2006) or threaten to win fair elections (Algeria  1991).

Al Jazeera reveals how stark contradictions continue to rip through the three legs of the moral triangle that is US foreign policy — i.e., the contradictions between  (1) the values we profess to to the world that we uphold, (2) the values we actually hold as demonstrated by our actions abroad as well as at home (don't forget the neo-fascist, non-accountable, hidden hand the emerging American deep state exemplified by the NSA scandal) and (3) the world we have to deal with deal with (in this case epitomized by the changing conditions of the Arab Spring).

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Has the US Lost Its Grand Strategic Mind?”

Owl: Top Violators of Religious Freedom

Cultural Intelligence
Who?  Who?
Who? Who?

Top Violators of Religious Freedom

“For its own safety's sake, America should give much higher priority to promoting global religious freedom. Whenever governments in unstable places persecute believers, that policy is not merely bad in itself but dangerous because it has the perverse effect of weakening moderate people of faith and empowering extremism. Those were some of the broad conclusions drawn by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom as it prepared its 2013 annual report, released April 2013. Some of its harshest words were reserved for religious repression in former Soviet places like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Russia itself, including the north Caucasus. The Boston bombings had lent a grim topicality to the report's findings, said Katrina Lantos Swett, who chairs the panel.”

This Commission's list of top violators of religious freedom differs from that of the State Department:

Continue reading “Owl: Top Violators of Religious Freedom”

BIG EVENT: 31 Jul – 4 Aug Geestmerambacht, The Netherlands OHM2013 — Observe – Hack – Make

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Gift Intelligence, Hacking, Peace Intelligence

ohm2013-rect-550px

About OHM2013

OHM2013 – Observe. Hack. Make. is a 5-day international outdoor technology and security conference. OHM2013 is currently requesting proposals for content.

A motley bunch of around 3000 hackers, free-thinkers, philosophers, activists, geeks, scientists, artists, creative minds and others will convene from all over the world for this informal meeting of minds to contemplate, reflect, share, criticize, look ahead, code, build, and more.

An otherwise unassuming stretch of land, just 30km (20mi) North of Amsterdam, will be transformed into a colourful oasis of light providing a backdrop for this unique event. It is an immersive experience, with an emphasis on interaction.

The four-yearly Dutch hacker camps provide a very open, friendly and relaxed atmosphere, with a high level of knowledge. The campsite is buzzing with energy, ideas and projects, not least because people from various backgrounds are interacting. It is a non-commercial community event where every visitor is also a volunteer.

Event Home Page and Call for Participation

Maps: OHM GIS – OpenStreetMap – Google Maps

Please Circulate Freely (txt version) (PDF version):

Robert David STEELE Vivas
Robert David STEELE Vivas

ROBERT STEELE: This is legitimate hacking's third wind (ham radio was the first, cyber and social engineering the second). This takes hacking to a new level, with an emphasis on “Do It Yourself” and thus fullfils the guidance from Buckminster Fuller: do not seek to repair a pathologically damaged system, instead create a new system to replace it, and route around the old system.  I have proposed a lecture and a workshop (originally commissioned for the Wales Intelligence Conference in 2013), and am seeking donations to cover travel — estimated $1,500.  I particularly solicit donations for pre-conference and post-conference sessions, in person or via Skype, anywhere in Europe including the UK that will help cover travel including side trips, and perhaps a bit more to support the work of our 501c3.  I am on stand-by for Afghanistan and believe they won't move on replacing the KIA/WIA until September for a 1 October start date.

2013 Intelligence Future — The Third Era of Local to Global Intelligence Robert Steele Overview & Workshop 2.7

See Also:

Public Intelligence 3.6

Steele on Hackers at PBS

Who Is Robert D. Steele?




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