As America's middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades — against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News — fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canadian regulators today announced they would reject efforts by Canada's right-wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.
Canada's Radio Act requires that “a licenser may not broadcast … any false or misleading news.”
in a world of constant flux a person who is not curious is screwed.
John Seeley Brown
In the past eight weeks as I have become more familiar with Internet2’s award to build a backbone to connect upwards of 200,000 unified community anchor institutions into a national network and have put this knowledge alongside that of the peer to peer open knowledge resource Commons represented by Michel Bauwens, I had a gut feeling that somehow someway there is a connection yearning to be made between these two very disparate groups. There is nothing overly obvious in my construct. It is just a tacit feeling that there is a huge potential here.
One thing that I observed from listening to the lecture that I did not get out of the book is that there are ever evolving ways of interpreting one’s surroundings and what is happening. JSB used the same two examples of self-taught surfers in Hawaii and World of Warcraft generation of knowledge that he did in his April 2010 Power of Pull lecture. But by late June 2010 he had evolved these concepts in new interesting and refreshing ways. One point in the lecture that was quite critical indeed was the concept of study groups in the learning 21st-century terms as opposed to education the 19th century term. Success now is found to be dependent to a very large extent on one’s ability to form study groups and that these groups could enable a self-motivated socialized learning experience that a more solitary approach to some rigid curriculum could not. And of course in the world of constant technology change the idea of a rigid curriculum is found wanting.
When Defense Secretary Robert Gates told West Point cadets that you’d have to be crazy to commit U.S. troops to wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, media commentators quickly detected a slap at his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who oversaw those conflicts.
But what about everyone else in the U.S. power structure who went along with those insane and bloody wars? Shouldn’t such people – whether they acted out of ideology or opportunism – be kept away from levers of authority that might get others killed?
For instance, what about the top editors at the Washington Post, the New York Times and a host of other establishment publications and TV outlets who hopped on the pro-war bandwagon and mocked anyone who suggested that negotiations or some less violent means might be preferable? Read more….
Phi Beta Iota: Like most others, Dr. Gates finds his integrity late in life. It was not just those who lied to the public who betrayed the public trust, but also those like Dr. Gates who kept silent. A handful of us tried to buy full page advertisements against the wars, only to have them rejected by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, etcetera. This is what happens when the “elite” value their membership in the elite club more than they value their integrity. Integrity matters most when you can still make a difference, not after the fact when you have reaped all you could from “going along.” At this juncture in time, the simple best thing for America–apart from Electoral Reform–would be the resurrection of integrity among our senior officials.
Advocates of humanitarian intervention like to use Kosovo as an example of a “good” war to distinguish it from Bush's bad war in Iraq and the Bush/Obama bungles in Afghanistan. But Kosovo was a template for bungling and blowback in the wars of empire that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The below article is outlines some of the reasons why this is so.
A recent Council of Europe report says that during and after the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict, militia leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) tortured and killed hundreds of Serbs and political rivals in secret Albanian hideouts, removed their organs for sale and dumped their bodies in local rivers.
The report added that these people were also heavily involved in drug, sex and illegal immigrant trafficking across Europe. Yet while all this was going on, the NATO powers had decreed that Serbia should be bombed into accepting the KLA as Kosovo's legitimate rulers — rather than the more popular Democratic League of Kosovo headed by the nationalist intellectual Ibrahim Rugova advocating nonviolent independence.
Recent years have not been kind to Western policymakers. They have shown an almost unerring ability to choose the wrong people for the wrong policies. Think back to the procession of incompetents chosen to rescue Indochina from the communist enemy. Does anyone even remember their names today? Yet at the time they were supposed to be nation-savers. Read more….
Phi Beta Iota: It is now known that the World Wars were enabled by bankers intent on empowering the evil side with loans so as to force the good side to borrow heavily. Bankers–and corporate mercenary interests with zero respect for “the public interest,” have created a world of grostesque inquality instead of a prosperous world at peace. Revolution 2.0 is connecting the public–that is phase one–to be followed by phase two, an informed public that will not brook corruption.
Here's a little-spoken truth learned via crowdsourcing:
Most people don't believe they are capable of initiative.
Initiating a project, a blog, a wikipedia article, a family journey. Initiating something even when you're not putatitively in charge.
At the same time, almost all people believe they are capable of editing, giving feedback or merely criticizing.
So finding people to fix your typos is easy.
A few people are vandals, happy to anonymously attack or add graffiti or useless noise.
If your project depends on individuals to step up and say, “This is what I believe, here is my plan, here is my original thought, here is my tribe,” then you need to expect that most people will see that offer and decline to take it.
Most of the edits on Wikipedia are tiny. Most of the tweets among the billions that go by are reactions or possibly responses, not initiatives. Q&A sites flourish because everyone knows how to ask a question, and many feel empowered to answer it, if it's specific enough. Little tiny steps, not intellectual leaps or risks.
I have a controversial belief about this: I don't think the problem has much to do with the innate ability to initiate. I think it has to do with believing that it's possible and acceptable for you to do it. We've only had these doors open wide for a decade or so, and most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it. [Emphasis Added.]
There's a huge shortage… a shortage of people who will say go.
Wikileaks just released a motherload of info on the taboo subject of Saudi Arabian royal rents.
The 1996 cable — entitled “Saudi Royal Wealth: Where do they get all that money?” — describes legal and illegal ways that royals grab money, according to Reuters.
For legal ways, there's the monthly allowance given to thousands of princes and princesses. This ranged from $800 a month for “the lowliest member of the most remote branch of the family” to $270,000 a month for sons of Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud.
For illegal ways, schemes include skimming $10 billion yearly from off-budget projects related to defense and infrastructure. One Saudi prince complained: “One million barrels per day” go entirely to “five or six princes.”
It's nothing to start a revolution over, but the sheer scale of payments might anger the Saudi people. The big concessionary social-welfare package offered last week was worth only $37 billion. Big anti-government protests are scheduled for later in March.
Phi Beta Iota: The cable is also valuable in demonstrating that the US Government (regardless of party in power) chose to sell our soul for Saudi crude.
NightWatch Essay: Some time ago, David Goldman, purporting to channel Oswald Spengler for Asia Times Online, wrote a farsighted essay [And Spengler is…] that anticipated, predicted and warned that modern impulses in the youth of the Middle East would rise up against conservative institutions to assert a modern definition of being Arab, Berber, Turk, Persian as well as Muslim. He identified the cohorts under 25 as the driving force in these pan-regional impulses.
The events that began in December 2010 in Tunisia seem to have validated parts of Goldman's prophecy. He foresaw the struggle as one between modern educated youth and the conservative, sclerotic Islamic clerisy of mullahs and ayatollahs. In the essay, Spengler did not anticipate an intermediate phase in which the cohorts of modernization battled the stodgy pan Arab socialist authoritarian strong men.
Few prophets live long enough to see even part of their vision come to pass, as has Goldman's in 2011. However, the youth that started the pro-democracy movement lack the experience and shrewdness to plan well. Still, they have spoken the language of human rights, individual worth and elected, accountable government. The words should have been a rallying call to the Western democracies.
Those states that have the maturity and wisdom to help guide the Arab pro-democracy movement are the great western democracies, who else. But, the great democracies in North America and Europe have dithered. President Reagan's beacon on a hill has not shined its light on the Arabs.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
