Category: Communities of Practice

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Journal: Environmental Lip Service vs the Real Deal

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Policies, Real Time, Threats, Topics (All Other)

Journal Access Site
Journal Access Site

Reid, Herbert G. and Taylor, Betsy, :John Dewey's Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism” in Ethics & the Environment – Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2003, pp. 74-92

This paper argues for the importance of John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to recent efforts to cultivate civic environmentalism while critiquing narrowly conservationist environmentalisms. We call for a strong version of civic environmentalism oriented towards holistic integration of ecological concerns into all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. Such a civic environmentalism argues that it is not enough to strive to preserve enclaved ‘wilderness' or ‘biodiversity' (as important as that is). It argues also for fundamental changes in the political and economic status quo, because ecological havoc is understood to be integrally linked with the structural forces that are increasing inequality and weakening democratic.

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Journal: Chuck Spinney Sends–On Torture–While Obama Signs Law Blocking Release of Torture Photos

09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Methods & Process, True Cost
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

Shades of Abu Ghraib

by Alistair Horne

National Interest

10.27.2009

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THE GRISLY subject of torture is back with us again, with fresh allegations of CIA misconduct. It is a subject which first came to occupy my thoughts when I was writing a book on the Algerian War, A Savage War of Peace, back in the 1970s. It has never left me.

. . . . . . .

YET NOT everyone was to become an apologist. Slowly, dissent and discord would rise. General Jacques de la Bollardière, a distinguished senior officer, highly decorated for his courage during World War II and sentenced to death in absentia by the collaborationist Vichy regime, was one such voice.   . . .

The terrible danger there would be for us to lose sight, under the fallacious pretext of immediate expediency, of the moral values which alone have, up till now, created the grandeur of our civilisation and of our army.

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Journal: Ron Paul as Truth-Teller & Weak Signal

03 Economy, 07 Health, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process, Reform

Intelligence Minuteman Dr. Ron Paul
Intelligence Minuteman Dr. Ron Paul
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Dr. Ron Paul calls Obama's H1N1 swine flu program a ‘total failure'

Rep. Ron Paul, the 11-term Republican congressman from Texas who mobilized millions of supporters and about $35 million for his unsuccessful presidential run last year, has added the federal government's faltering flu immunization program to his list of things worthy of denunciation.

A medical doctor himself, Paul, who at 74 is older even than John McCain, sees the Obama administration's oft-delayed H1N1 swine flu immunization plan as typical of many government-run programs — poorly planned, overloaded, inefficient, too expensive, late and quite possibly not even necessary.

Just another government grab for more federal power, as he puts it in a video….

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Journal: Chuck Spinney Sends–GOP Stalinists

05 Civil War, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Reform
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney
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This is rich….and hilarious.

November 1, 2009

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York

By FRANK RICHEXTRACT: The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.
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Journal: Baffling Patterns Form in Scientific Sandbox

Academia, Analysis, Earth Intelligence, Media, Methods & Process

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Brandon Keim

October 28, 2009

NOTE: Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecosystem and planetary tipping points.

With nothing more than beads in a glass box, physicists have revealed yet another mysterious property of granular solids, now recognized by scientists as a unique state of matter, like solids or gases.

When the box was filled to the brim and rotated, the beads moved in patterns known from convection clouds — another system whose basic physical dynamics are only dimly understood.

The experiment, displayed in a video posted Monday to arXiv, was a variation on one performed 70 years ago by Japanese physicist Yositsi Oyama, who observed that beads of different sizes placed in a rotating circular drum would eventually self-sort by size.

That intriguing result set in motion the study of granular solids, which behave in ways that can’t be predicted with known physical laws. And though research has accelerated in the last decade, scientific understanding of granularity is roughly akin to that of fluid dynamics in the 18th century.