For all, this 55 year old teacher reveals that “our misfortunes” (ecological catastrophy, destruction of civil services in public administration, work slavery, the reign of money…) have been made possible “because of our incapacity to resist”. He indicates “I will do like Hippocrates did. I try to find the root of the causes. It is vain to fight against consequences.” He believes that this “impotency to resist”, this “infantilization”, is “programmed in the Constitution”. Since “those who write the Constitutions first think of how to preserve their own interests”, to “change things” and put in place “a real democracy”, he sees only one way forward: to randomly draw citizens who will write by themselves a new Constitution.
Phi Beta Iota: In French (verbal) with superbly executed English sub-titles. As soon as the film starts, roll the cursor over the second red button in lower right of the YouTube screen (has small white CC inside the red box) and click, this turns on the subtitles.
Phi Beta Iota: This may well be the most important post Dr. Patrick Meier has done to date. Robert Steele is writing a new chapter or article, Public Administration in the 21st Century: New Rules, Hybrid Forms, One Constant — The Public that will integrate and expand on the core insight at the conclusion of the below post: routing around government may be the most important non-violent ethical means of displacing corrupt governments and restoring the sovereignty of the public.
When Philippine President Joseph Estrada was forced from office following widespread protests in 2001, he complained bitterly that ”the popular uprising against him was a coup de text.” Indeed, the mass protests had been primarily organized via SMS. Fast forward to 2012 and the massive floods that recently paralyzed the country’s capital. Using mobile phones and social media, ordinary Filipinos crowdsourced the disaster response efforts on their own without any help from the government.
Below is a very important 2 part analysis of the meaning of the recent heat wave in the US and and the nature of reported temperature increases in general, and whether or not they can be attributed to increases in CO2 concentrations.
The author, John Christy, is a highly regarded climatologist, albeit a skeptical one. At the end of Part II, Christie gently eviscerates the recent analysis by climate activist/scientist James Hansen, et al, by definitively showing how Hansen's analysis is biased to produce a preordained answer, both in terms of Hansen's selection of its data interval and his metric of choice. (See Hansen's op-ed in Washington Post here and I would urge readers to download his report). Anyone interested in trying to sort the wheat from the chaff in the climate wars ought to study these two papers. (I have not changed a word, but reformatted them in a few places, breaking paragraphs into “bullets” and highlighted i; I also inserted a few comments in [red] to clarify his points.)
guest post by John Christy, UAHuntsville, Alabama State Climatologist
Let me say two things up front.
The first 10 weeks of the summer of 2012 were brutally hot in some parts of the US. For these areas it was hotter than seen in many decades.
Extra greenhouse gases should warm the climate. We really don’t know how much, but the magnitude is more than zero, and likely well below the average climate model estimate.
Now to the issue at hand. The recent claims that July 2012 and Jan-Jul 2012 were the hottest ever in the conterminous US (USA48) are based on one specific way to look at the US temperature data. NOAA, who made the announcement, utilized the mean temperature or TMean (i.e. (TMax + TMin)/2) taken from station records after adjustments for a variety of discontinuities were applied. In other words, the average of the [adjusted] daily high and daily low temperatures is the metric of choice for these kinds of announcements.
Unfortunately, TMean is akin to averaging apples and oranges to come up with a rather uninformative fruit.
Efforts to limit the terrible destructiveness commonly associated with intractable conflicts ultimately depend on the ability of people in a full range of conflict roles to successfully play their part in a broad peacebuilding effort. Though each circumstance is, to some degree, unique, there is also much to be learned from others who have solved similar problems before. The goal of the Beyond Intractability (BI) system is to make such knowledge more widely and freely accessible, so people aren't forced to “reinvent the wheel.” To the extent we can all contribute to a knowledge base on better ways of approaching and transforming intractable conflicts, the closer we can come to limiting the destructiveness of these situations around the world.
The project does not advocate or teach one particular approach. Rather, it provides access to information on many approaches which can then be adapted to many different situations. Our goal is to give people new ideas to think about and new hope. As a free Internet service, BI provides information that is much more affordable and accessible than traditional training programs or hard-to-find books. BI is also constantly growing and changing, making the breadth, depth, and potential of the peacebuilding field more clearly visible.
Want Massive Positive Change? Here's the Easiest, Surest Way!
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