Patrick Meier: #UgandaSpeaks: Al-Jazeera uses Ushahidi to Amplify Local Voices in Response to #Kony2012

08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Media
Patrick Meier

#UgandaSpeaks: Al-Jazeera uses Ushahidi to Amplify Local Voices in Response to #Kony2012

Invisible Children’s #Kony2012 campaign has set off a massive firestorm of criticism with the debate likely to continue raging for many more weeks and months. In the meantime, our colleagues at Al-Jazeera have repurposed our previous #SomaliaSpeaks project to amplify Ugandan voices responding to the Kony campaign: #UgandaSpeaks.

Together with GlobalVoices, this Al-Jazeera initiative is one of the very few seeking to amplify local reactions to the Kony campaign. Over 70 local voices have been shared and mapped on Al-Jazeera’s Ushahidi platform in the first few hours since the launch. The majority of reactions submitted thus far are critical of the campaign but a few are positive.

Read full post with graphics and many links.

Reference: Political Terror Scale

09 Terrorism, Civil Society, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement, Military, White Papers

Political Terror Scale Home Page

Political Terror Scale Levels

level 5 Level 5 : Terror has expanded to the whole population. The leaders of these societies place no limits on the means or thoroughness
with which they pursue personal or ideological goals.

level 4 Level 4 : Civil and political rights violations have expanded to large numbers of the population. Murders, disappearances, and torture are a common part of life. In spite of its generality, on this level terror affects those who interest themselves
in politics or ideas.

level 3 Level 3 : There is extensive political imprisonment, or a recent history of such imprisonment. Execution or other political murders and brutality may be common. Unlimited detention, with or without a trial, for political views is accepted.

level 2 Level 2 : There is a limited amount of imprisonment for nonviolent political activity. However, few persons are affected, torture and beatings are exceptional. Political murder is rare.

level 1 Level 1 : Countries under a secure rule of law, people are not imprisoned for their views, and torture is rare or exceptional. Political murders are extremely rare.

Learn more.

Tip of the Hat to Berto Jongman.

Mini-Me: PriceWaterHouseCoopers to Go Down?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth
Who? Mini-Me?

Robert Steele has for some time been saying that “The truth at any cost lowers all others costs.”  He has also been focusing on the importance of intelligence with integrity.  Among all governments, only Iceland appears to be serious about dealing with the financial crisis as it should be dealt with: as a criminal conspiracy enabled by all of the parties in both public and private sectors who sacrificed their integrity and betrayed the public trust.

Corporations operate under public charters.  It is difficult to police the corporations when the governments have themselves become criminalized, but the tide is turning — the public is beginning to recognize that governments  lack integrity and intelligence and cannot be trusted — in their present form — to manage the public interest.

When Goldman Sachs goes out of business the healing can begin.  Slamming PWC is a good start.

Old Landsbanki to sue PriceWaterhouseCoopers for ‘deliberate’ auditing errors

The resolution committee of the failed Icelandic bank Old Landsbanki has subpoenaed the international auditing firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers, accusing the company of creating wrong annual accounts which misled the markets. The committee’s damages claim runs to hundreds of millions of krónur.

Paul Craig Roberts: No Jobs for Citizens – Death Spiral

03 Economy, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Government
Paul Craig Roberts

No Jobs For Americans

Today (March 9, 2012) the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that 227,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created by the economy during February. Is the government’s claim true?

No. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that 44,000 of these jobs or 19% consist of an add-on factor derived from the BLS’s estimate that 44,000 more unreported jobs from new business start-ups were created than were lost by unreported business failures. The BLS’s estimate comes from the bureau’s “birth-death model,” which works better during normal times, but delivers erroneous results during troubled times such as the economy has been experiencing during the past four years.

Taking out the 44,000 added-on jobs reduces the February jobs number to 183,000, but does not provide a full correction. In an economy as troubled as the US economy is, most likely the deaths exceeded the births, but we don’t know what the number is. Was it 20,000? 50,000? What number do we deduct from the 183,000? We simply do not know.

Williams reports that seasonal adjustment factors do not work properly during troubled economic times and add their own overstatement to the jobs figure. If anyone could estimate the overestimate of new jobs that results from malfunctioning seasonal adjustments, it is John Williams, but he doesn’t provide an estimate.

Most likely, the new jobs did not exceed 150,000, a figure that would merely keep even with population growth and thus not reduce the rate of unemployment, which, consistent with this deduction, remained constant.

Let’s look now at the kind of jobs that were created. Of the new jobs reported by BLS,
92% are in services. Of this 92%, only 7% could possibly relate to exportable services–architectural, engineering, and computer systems services.

Continue reading “Paul Craig Roberts: No Jobs for Citizens – Death Spiral”

Eagle: Extremist Groups Grow Fast – While Angry Often Armed Non-Extremists Ponder Their Options

01 Poverty, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence
300 Million Talons...

Southern Poverty Law Center Report: As Election Season Heats Up, Extremist Groups at Record Levels

The American radical right grew explosively in 2011, a third consecutive year of extraordinary growth that has swelled the ranks of extremist groups to record levels, according to a report issued today by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The rise was led by a stunning expansion of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement.

“The dramatic expansion of the radical right is the result of our country's changing racial demographics, the increased pace of globalization, and our economic woes,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the SPLC and editor of the new report.

“For many extremists, President Obama is the new symbol of all that's wrong with the country – the Kenyan president, the secret Muslim who is causing our country's decline,” Potok said. “The election season's overheated political rhetoric is adding fuel to the fire. The more polarized the political scene, the more people at the extremes.”

Many Americans are enraged by what they see as America's decline, and opportunistic politicians have done their best to stoke those fears and demonize President Obama in the process. For some, the prospect of four more years under the country's first black president also is an infuriating reminder that non-Hispanic whites will lose their majority in this country by 2050.

Continue reading “Eagle: Extremist Groups Grow Fast – While Angry Often Armed Non-Extremists Ponder Their Options”

John Steiner: Neuro-Economics – Convergence + RECAP

04 Education, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence
John Steiner

The brain science behind economics

Paul Zak, a pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics, talks about the genes
that can make or break a Wall Street trader, and about the chemical that
helps us all get along.

Eryn Brown

Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2012

Neuroscience might seem to have little to do with economics, but over the last decade researchers have begun combining these disparate fields, mining the latest advances in brain imaging and genetics to get a better understanding of the biological basis for human behavior.

Paul Zak is a pioneer in this nascent field of neuroeconomics. In a recent paper published in the journal PLoS One, he examined genes that may predict success among traders on Wall Street. His forthcoming book, “The Moral Molecule,” will explore how a chemical in the brain called oxytocin compels cooperation in society.

Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies at Claremont Graduate University, discussed this work with The Times.

Read full interview.

Phi Beta Iota:  Convergence is upon us.  Most universities do not get this, but a couple are struggling to change recalcitrant faculty and force the break-down of silos and the reconstitution of unified knowledge.  We are at the very beginning of most interesting times.

See Also:

Continue reading “John Steiner: Neuro-Economics – Convergence + RECAP”

James S. Berkman: Democracy and Citizenship + RECAP

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government
James S. Berkman

Democracy and Citizenship

March 9th, 2012

Head’s Weekly Letter – March 8, 2012

Dear Academy Families,

While I normally don’t discuss two speakers  at All School Meeting (ASM) within one month, the reality is that last week’s speaker was equally as provocative and exciting as the one two weeks before, so I will make this an “exception to the rule.”

Professor Loren J. Samons Jr. is the chair of BU’s Classics Department, a highly decorated teacher (both at BU and nationally), and a widely published scholar (his list of publications is several pages long). Perhaps most important for his impact at ASM, he has a drop-dead hilarious deadpan comic style (think “Saturday Night Life”), and he is able to bring ancient Greek topics vividly to life in terms of our own contemporary issues.

This week at ASM Professor Samons spoke to us about the ancient Greek definitions of “democracy” and “citizenship,” demonstrating how dramatically they differed from our own modern definitions. “Democracy” is the conjoined Greek words for “people power” – he joked that English speakers prefer to borrow prestigious sounding words from other languages, rather than using our own.  But while we Americans tend to think of democracy as providing certain citizen “rights” by birth (voting, trial by jury), these were not at all what distinguished ancient Athens as the first city state in Greece to practice democracy; for instance, other city states allowed the vote, even if a king ruled. Rather, ancient Athenians assumed that being a citizen was a group-given privilege (not a natural right) that involved other group-expected duties. Privileges included being chosen by lottery to serve in the legislature (just think of the savings in campaign spending if that’s how Congress were selected!), and duties included serving in the army almost yearly from age 18 to 59, for instance.  If you think about these two examples, you’ll notice that the very people voting to go to war were the ones having to serve in it. And since you served next to your friends and family (often a father, brother, and grandfather at your side), the realities of battle were both more personal and more demanding – flight was either not an option during battle (observed by those you loved), or once Uncle Georgios fled, you were right behind him.

While Professor Samons went on to detail the Hoplite army model of ancient Athens, his main points focused on citizenship, especially how our culture has lost its understanding of privileges combined with duties, and replaced that understanding with a sense of entitlement based on natural individual rights.  Our “political will” as a society reflects this, as we see presidential debates from both parties pander to what each voter wants, rather than to the spirit of individual sacrifice for the common good. Ancient Athens might have had many troubling qualities, such as an annual draft, but its spirit of democracy is a virtue we would do well to revive. At the Academy, learning about the classics helps to do just that!

Warm regards,
James S. Berkman
Head of School

See Also:

Continue reading “James S. Berkman: Democracy and Citizenship + RECAP”