TIM PALMER: In China the fallout is still being felt from an open rebellion over air pollution at the country's annual session of parliament.
It was a dramatic shift for a Congress that's normally seen as no more than a rubber stamp.
Sensing a growing environmental crisis, a third of the delegates rejected a key anti-pollution measure.
Meanwhile China analysts are now expecting major economic reforms from the new administration in Beijing after premier Li Keqiang declared that more sections of the economy needed to be handed over to private enterprise.
China correspondent Stephen McDonell has been covering the closing stages of the National People's Congress in Beijing.
(Ceremonial music)
STEPHEN MCDONELL: China's annual session of parliament, the National People's Congress, has closed with plenty of big vision from the country's new generation of leaders.
Xi Jinping told some 3,000 delegates what an honour it was for him to be president and he was talking up the so-called “China dream”.
(Sound of Xi Jingping speaking)
“China is a great nation with great creativity,” he said, “We created this Chinese culture and we will be able to expand our path towards Chinese development.”
But a third of the delegates listening to him had just staged a large revolt on the floor of the Great Hall of the People over pollution.
When it came time to endorse the members of a key committee overseeing environmental protection and resource conservation, 850 delegates voted no and 120 abstained.
WASHINGTON – Evgeny Morozov is a Belarus-born technology writer who has held positions at Stanford and Georgetown universities in the United States. His first book, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, argued that “Western do-gooders may have missed how [the Internet] … entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder — not easier — to promote democracy.” The New York Times described it as “brilliant and courageous.”
In his second book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Follow of Technological Solutionism, Click Here, Morozov critiques what he calls “solutionism” — the idea that given the right code, algorithms and robots, technology can solve all of mankind’s problems, effectively making life “frictionless” and problem-free.
Evgeny Morozov
Morozov argues that this drive to eradicate imperfection and make everything “efficient” shuts down other avenues of progress and leads ultimately to an algorithm-driven world where Silicon Valley, rather than elected governments, determines the shape of the future.
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All solutions come with cost. Shifting a lot of the responsibility to the individual is a very conservative approach that seeks to preserve the current system instead of reforming it. With self-tracking we end up optimizing our behavior within the existing constraints rather than changing the constraints to begin with. It places us as consumers rather than citizens. My fear is policymakers will increasingly find that it is much easier, cheaper and sexier to invite the likes of Google to engage in some of this problem-solving rather than do something that is much more ambitious and radical.
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I have a lot of respect for these people as engineers, but they are being asked to take on tasks that go far beyond engineering — tasks that have to do with human and social engineering rather than technical engineering. Those are the kind of tasks I would prefer were taken on by human beings who are more well rounded, who know about philosophy and ethics, and know something about things other than efficiency, because it will not end well.
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The newspaper offers something very different from Google’s aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.
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There are many problems I have with TED. It has created this infrastructure where it very easy to be interesting without being very deep. If TED exercised their curatorial powers responsibly, they would be able to separate the good interesting from the bad interesting. But my fear is they don’t care as long as it drives eyeballs to the website. They don’t align themselves with the thinkers, they align themselves with marketing, advertising, futurists who are interested in ideas for the sake of ideas. They don’t care how these ideas relate to each other and they don’t much care for what those ideas actually mean. TED has come to exercise lots of power but they don’t exercise it wisely.
De-extinction – reviving once extinct animals using technologies like cloning and genome sequencing – is sending scientist to either corners of the debate. Some are vehemently against it, saying its natural process, while others say we have an “obligation” to do it.
Stuart Pimm of Duke University argued in an opinion piece in National Geographic that these efforts would be a “colossal waste” if scientists don't know where to put revived species that had been driven off the planet because their habitats became unsafe.
“A resurrected Pyrenean ibex will need a safe home,” Pimm wrote. “Those of us who attempt to reintroduce zoo-bred species that have gone extinct in the wild have one question at the top of our list: Where do we put them? Hunters ate this wild goat to extinction. Reintroduce a resurrected ibex to the area where it belongs and it will become the most expensive cabrito ever eaten.”
Meanwhile Michael Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales who has championed de-extinction for years, stands firmly against this. “If we're talking about species we drove extinct, then I think we have an obligation to try to do this.” Some people say that scientists will be playing God if they go ahead with de-extinction. “I think we played God when we exterminated these animals.”
A public forum was held today at the National Geographic's Washington headquarters for the TEDxDeExtinction conference where speakers came to share their views on the matter.
De-extinction has been in the works for more than a decade, ever since Dolly the Sheep demonstrated in 1996 that mammals could be cloned from cells in a lab dish. Spanish and French scientists worked for years on an effort to bring the Pyrenean ibex back from extinction, according to the National Geographic, by cloning cells that had been preserved from the last known animal of the species. However, this did not succeed as she gave birth to a deformed kid who died 10 minutes after birth.
It is my hope that our collective reflection on these questions will help create a powerful focus for Thursday's FREE event, Activating the Impulse of Evolution, and will serve as a foundation for the journey we'll be going on together:
1) What is your deepest or highest aspiration for your own spiritual development?
2) In your deepest moments of awareness and clarity, what have you sensed is possible for the evolution of your life, and for human life as a whole?
3) Where have you noticed that you get stopped or blocked in your spiritual evolution? To what degree have you seen that the obstacles to your deepest awakening are actually habits that you have the power to stop enacting?
4) How would you most deeply wish to serve life and humanity, if you had all the capacities you needed? What is your vision for your highest contribution in this life and this world?
5) What do you see as the relationship between your own evolution and the advancement of humanity? In what ways can you see that the highest potentials you want to fulfill and the changes you need to make are not merely personal, but universal to all human beings?
6) What are you most hoping to learn at this seminar?
This piece illustrates for me the difference between religion (The Roman Catholic Church) and spirituality.
I was stunned to learn, and checked and it is correct: “Less than five percent of money flowing through Catholic charities and hospitals comes from Catholic offering plates. Powerful Christian organizations have secured government funds to underwrite” their costs.
This essay gave me pause and made me think, and I hope it does the same for you.
Despite Vatican efforts to keep the public eye focused on pomp and circumstance, speculation about the real reason for Pope Benedict’s resignation dominates conversation about the papal succession: Is it the Vatileaksmoney laundering? Is it the pedophilia scandal? Might it have something to do with criminal charges filed in European courts? How about the impact of all three on Catholic Church coffers and pews? Is this about immunity or power or finances or brand management?
The Vatican claims to promote a “comprehensive culture of life,” but it is the Church’s comprehensive culture of corruption that refuses to die. Consider yesterday’s scandal in which Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien, resigned amid allegations of sexual contacts with priests. Last year O’Brien had called marriage equality a “grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right.” In fact, in 2012, he received a “bigot of the year” award from the British gay rights group, Stonewall. The combination makes him a poster boy for the notion that homophobia is a symptom of denial. Methinks he doth protest too much.
From the October death of Savita Halappanavar for lack of an abortion in Catholic controlled Ireland, to the pedophilia cover-up being unveiled gradually this spring in California, to the infighting exposed when the Pope’s butler leaked inside Vatican documents, to Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s efforts to obstruct contraceptive access regardless of the public health consequences—Catholic priorities increasingly appear to have two products: harm and hypocrisy. Those who still consider the Catholic hierarchy to be a source of moral leadership are living in a fantasy.
As someone who thinks the world could use a little moral leadership, I can’t resist indulging in a little fantasy of my own: Imagine how different things would be if the Dalai Lama were the next pope.
There is now a petition for a Wall Street Sales Tax online at: http://wh.gov/ARGi
The petition was initiated by the United Front Against Austerity. It has started off strong, and we want to keep the momentum building, so the more it's shared, the better. Thank you!
We've got until April 10 to get 100,000 signatures. Twitter people, can you put this in front of people like Robert Reich, Dean Baker and others to ask them to mobilize their networks?
Getting an official White House response would be huge, but this is also a way to push the concept in front of more people.
CHARGE!!!!!!
Phi Beta Iota: Wall Street transactions (both stock and currency) are among the most numerous in the economy, and they are tax free. The Tobin Tax and the Automated Payment Transaction Tax both call for the widening of the economic revenue “pie” beyond income taxes — indeed, an honest Congress and an honest Executive could eliminate all income taxes by applying either of these taxes (a fraction of a penny) across the economy starting with the financial transactions — including the shadow banks (hedge funds) — that are now completely outside the revenue stream. The FACT that the US Government has been BORROWING $1 trillion a year since 1980 in order to fund BOTH a grossly over-extended entitlements program and a grossly under-performing national security corporate welfare program, should be — but is not — a major public grievance.
