Here is the most low-tech explanation you will see on population growth, infant mortality and energy consumption, courtesy of the Swedish professor of global health, Hans Rosling. In the video below, Rosling makes strikingly clear through his lego demonstration that sustainable growth is only possible if we raise the living standards of the bottom two billion.
While the solution to this problem is elusive, there are few illustrations that you will find that present this global challenge in such clear terms as this video.
In March 2008, eleven military veterans or family members, all with PTSD, participated in a pilot program where each received 10 to 15 hours of EFT, a form of Energy Psychology, over a 5-day period at a location in San Francisco. This pilot program and its follow-up are the centerpiece of OPERATION: Emotional Freedom, a full-length documentary film. The 10-minute excerpt here shows brief segments from the intake interviews of four of these participants, all combat veterans, snippets of their treatment, and brief segments of their comments at the end of the 5 days. The text embedded in the film shows their initial symptoms and their progress three months later. The improvements held on one-year follow-up.
The myriad protests from Istanbul to São Paulo have one thing in common – growing dissent among the young, educated and better-off protesting against the very system that once enriched them. And therein lies the danger for governments
If the “new protest” can be summed up, it is not in specifics of the complaints but in a wider idea about organisation encapsulated on a banner spotted in Brazil last week: “We are the social network.”
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What does ring true, however, is his assertion that a driving force from Tahrir Square to Occupy is a redefinition of notions of both what “freedom” means and its relationship to governments that seem ever more distant. It is significant, too, that many recent protests have taken place in the large cities that have been most transformed by neoliberal policies.
This map that I recently found – Arabs, Persians, and Turks – is a good starting point. When do you think this map was created? I think it reflects thinking from closer to the time Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic than today. The population figure of 70 million for Turkey is within the last ten years, but the thinking is dated.
Our children, grandchildren, and all the generations that follow are going to curse us. As the Republicans in the senate and the house, and their Theocratic Right base block any meaningful action on climate change, and Obama is reduced to doing what he can through executive order, our world is slipping away. The changes are going to be mind-boggling. Here is just one aspect of what is coming. Miami, as this story makes clear, is doomed. As Ha! rold Wanless, the chairman of the department of geological sciences at the University of Miami says, “It's not a question of if. It's a question of when.”
Even more than Silicon Valley, Miami embodies the central technological myth of our time – that nature can not only be tamed but made irrelevant.
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One of the first consequences of rising seas will be loss of drinking water.
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Miami Beach has other infrastructure problems, too. One of them is how to dispose of the 22 million gallons of sewage the city's residents create each day.
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Beyond all these fears that keep south Florida's environmentalists and urban planners up at night, rising sea levels present an even more chilling threat to life in greater Miami. Turkey Point Nuclear Plant, which sits on the edge of the Biscayne Bay just south of Miami, is completely exposed to hurricanes and rising seas. “It is impossible to imagine a stupider place to build a nuclear plant than Turkey Point,” says Philip Stoddard, the mayor of South Miami and an outspoken critic of the plant.
Pakistan: The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Tuesday named former president Pervez Musharraf as the prime suspect in the December 2007 assassination of ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
The head of the FIA's Joint Investigation Team, Deputy Director Khalid Rasool, told the Rawalpindi Anti-Terrorism Court that Musharraf “hatched” a criminal conspiracy to cause a breach in Bhutto's security detail that directly led to her murder. His motive was to secure his rule, Rasool's filing said.
The Anti-Terrorism Court Special Judge summoned Musharraf to appear for a hearing on 2 July.
Comment: Just before her assassination Bhutto expressed to friends her concern about an assassination plot involving Musharraf and three other senior officials at the time. They include former head of Pakistani intelligence, Hamid Gul. Eventually all those involved in the conspiracy are likely to be brought to trial.
This is the third active case against Musharraf that could lead to his execution. A fourth potential capital case is the treason accusation that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif mentioned yesterday. That case has not yet begun.
OUR OBJECTIVE: Figure out how to take one million people out of a virtual hell and resettle them into a virtual heaven, using only $500 million ($500 per person), and three ingredients available in plentitude: sunlight, barren earth, and salt water. Begin within 90 days and finish within two years. In so doing, create the playbook for addressing the needs of the two billion extreme poor so as to end the migration pressures on Australia, Europe, Russia, Turkey, and the USA.*
* Three hard things in one package: # of people, fixed low-cost per person, and zero base start — in the middle of a moonscape with no supporting foundation. This is about speed & scale combined, and open source and low cost per person plus assured sustainability combined. A non-trivial challenge no one else has addressed.
INTRODUCTION:
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Both human understanding and critical technologies have advanced far beyond the understanding of most academics, civil organizations including labor unions and religions, corporations, governments, law enforcement, media, the military, and non-government/non-profit organizations.
Hybrid public governance rooted in open-source decision-support — legal ethical evidence-based decision-support — is the wave of the future that we must all ride if we are to prosper.
My email is robert.david.steele.vivas [at] gmail [dot] com. I seek to attract ideas from those who believe, as I do, that there is plenty of money to create a prosperous world at peace — we simply lack applied intelligence with integrity across all traditional organizations. There are new leaders in place who appear disposed to listen. The time for Alternative C2, Open Source Everything (technical), and M4IS2 (human factor) has arrived.
