Professor Muki Haklay kindly shared with me this superb new study in which he questions the alleged democratization effects of Neogeography. As my colleague Andrew Turnerexplained in 2006, “Neogeography means ‘new geography’ and consists of a set of techniques and tools that fall outside the realm of traditional GIS, Geographic Information Systems. […] Essentially, Neogeography is about people using and creating their own maps, on their own terms and by combining elements of an existing toolset. Neogeography is about sharing location information with friends & visitors, helping shape context, and conveying under-standing through knowledge of place.” To this end, as Muki writes, “it is routinely argued that the process of producing and using geographical information has been fundamentally democratized.” For example, as my colleague Nigel Snoad argued in 2011, “[…] Google, Microsoft and OpenStreetMap have really demo-cratized mapping.” Other CrisisMappers, including myself, have made similar arguments over the years.
Phi Beta Iota: This is hugely important. It comes down to “who controls the data in the aggregate,” yet another reason for an Autonomous Internet and Open Source Everything (OSE).
The country's soya industry is booming, but what is the impact on Argentinians and their land?
Filmmakers: Glenn Ellis and Guido Bilbao
For much of the past decade Argentina has seen a commodities-driven export boom, built largely on genetically-modified soy bean crops and the aggressive use of pesticides.
Argentina's leaders say it has turned the country's economy around, while others say the consequences are a dramatic surge in cancer rates, birth defects and land theft.
People & Power investigates if Argentina's booming soy industry is a disaster in the making.
By Glenn Ellis
As I flew in to Buenos Aires to make this film, all the talk was of President Cristina Kirchner’s latest gambit. Her foreign minister had pulled out of a meeting with the British foreign secretary to discuss the Falklands (or the Malvinas depending on your outlook). And for the people I rubbed up against in Argentina’s smart and chic capital, on discovering I was English, this, along with Maradona’s ‘hand of god’ moment, was the topic on everybody’s lips. “We won the war”, they would say. “After the fighting we got rid of our dictators but you had another 10 years of Thatcher.”
When I explained I was in the country to cover the soya boom, which has given Argentina the fastest growth rate in South America, but also allegedly caused devastating malformations in children, there was a look of disbelief. “Here, in Argentina? Why haven’t we heard about it?”
The March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami caused the deaths of approximately 16,000 persons, left more than 6,000 injured and 2,713 missing, destroyed or partially damaged nearly one million buildings, and produced at least $14.5 billion in damages. The earthquake also caused a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan’s eastern coast. After reading the first news reports about what the Japanese call “3.11,” I immediately drew associations between the accident in Fukushima and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 in what was then the Soviet Union. This was only natural, since studying the cultural fallout of Chernobyl has been part of my life’s work as an anthropologist for the past 17 years. Knowing rather little about Japan at the time, I relied on some fuzzy stereotypes about Japanese technological expertise and penchant for tight organization and waited expectantly for rectification efforts to unfold as a model of best practices. I positioned the problem-riddled Chernobyl clean-up, evacuation, and reparation efforts as a foil, assuming that Japan would, in contrast, unroll a state-of-the-art nuclear disaster response for the modern age. After all, surely a country like Japan that relies so heavily on nuclear-generated power has developed thorough, well-rehearsed, and tested responses to any potential nuclear emergency? Thus, I expected the inevitable comparisons between the world’s two worst nuclear accidents to yield more contrasts than parallels.
(There is a need) to recognize that just as the essence of knowledge is not as split up into academic disciplines as it is in our academic universe, so can intelligence not be set apart from statecraft and society, or subdivided into elements…such as analysis and estimates, counterintelligence, clandestine collection, covert action, and so forth. Rather … intelligence is a scheme of things entire. (Bozeman 1998: 177).
The principal failing of all intelligence endeavors to date, both in government (including law enforcement and the military), and in the private sector (across academia, civil society, commerce, the media, and non-government/non-profit), has been the lack of coherent comprehensive analytic models that by their very nature, foster an appreciation for the whole. In one word, they lack integrity — they lack the integrity of being whole; they lack the integrity of providing for relationships among all factors; and they lack the integrity of providing for true cost cradle to grave economic cost-benefit analytics.
The analytic model is what determines the maturity of the intelligence process, but it is irrelevant if the rest of “the thing entire” is a mess. If counterintelligence is not sufficient to eradicate traitors and special interests corrupting the decision-cycle entire; if collection is not coherent and responsive; if processing is marginal at best; and if constituencies are either ignored or ignorant — one cannot have intelligence. Intelligence without integrity is not intelligence. Integrity in this context is not about individual honor, rather it is about the coherence — the state of being whole and unfragmented — the integral consciousness of the whole, with intelligence and its constituencies being “one mind, one soul.”
There are four Whole of Government constituencies for decision-support that are not being addressed coherently because the Office of Management and Budget does not appear to “do” Whole of Government” management: strategy, policy, acquisition, operations. The individual Departments cannot be expected to make up for this deficiency at the presidential level–but they should be held accountable for coherent threat support to acquisition in the context of respect those of the ten threats to humanity that are within their mandate. Our current practice of doing intelligence support to each stovepipe in isolation from the whole is counter-productive, and we generally only do the “threat” in generic terms and do not tailored analytic support to strategy development and testing; to 360 degree policy both current and future; or to acquisitions beyond token support to individual weapons systems that are never themselves called into question for being unnecessary, unaffordable, and often untransportable..
“From SOPA and PIPA to ACTA to CISPA to the TPP and now back to CISPA, internet activists have been caught up in a deliberately bewildering game of whack-a-mole with freedom-crushing legislation. Now, ISPs are doing an end run around the whole legislative process altogether and voluntarily collaborating with the entertainment industry to spy on their own customers. All of this is enough to leave concerned netizens demoralized, and in the war of attrition that is exactly the goal. Join us today on The Corbett Report as we explore a real, grassroots, alternative solution to the problem of internet censorhip that can help to end this government/corporate control over our communication once and for all.”
For our interests, if you care to watch this, you could probably just skip to 21.30 ~; as the first half the video is just concerned with discussing SOPA, etc, and general activism that you're likely already aware of. From 22min till the end is where they really dig into pirate internet solutions and mesh networks that are the meat of the issue.
22-28Min: James Corbett and radio-host Jack Blood discuss the possibility for setting up pirate-internet networks as a response to the incessant efforts of internet-fascists and their legislative puppets to pass proposals such as CISPA. Blood mentions his experience/success with localized, pirate broadcasting that circumvents centralized/censored networks.
28-38Min: Clip from a CNet-Trialogue that discusses what are known as Mesh Networks. Mesh Networks, originally conceived of by the Military-Industrial Complex, are a tool citizens can now leverage to liberate themselves and set up decentralized, uncensored internet accessibility. Requiring only a small investment into already-existing radio equipment, people can set up these networks by first adapting their Smart-Phones. Because of their processing power Smart Phones can serve as Mesh Network nodes that allow for the creation of a node-to-node Wi-Fi Network. This allows for the complete bypassing of any potential government lockdown.
38-43Min: Corbett highlights the work of Tony Cartalucci @ http://localorg.blogspot.com/. Cartalucci's article Decentralizing Telecom explains the practical side of implementing these new types of web-networks at a local level.
Includes 1947 US naval expedition led by Robert Byrd broken off after being attacked by objects that vertically take off from the sea. Russian scientists hypothesize US military HAARP bases on Antartica and Alaska are intended for identifying the characteristics of wormholes used by alien visitors to access and leave earth.
I agree the two parties have become virtually indistinguishable in many respects. But the Republican Party is far more dangerous, in my opinion. And I think Democrats kowtow to big business interests and the Military Industrial Complex mainly because they are more or less forced to if they want to be able to consistently challenge Republican Party dominance. That's no excuse, of course. But I think it's very misleading to portray both parties are essentially opposites sides of the same coin. Anyway, this article points out some important differences between the two parties.
Since last fall, Republicans have pretended to be more moderate – but their politics are harsher and more destructive than ever
After watching voters punish the GOP in the 2012 elections, Republican elites have been talking a brave game about reforms that would make the party less repulsive to Latinos, women and gay-friendly millennials. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the GOP's hip-hop-quoting young standard-bearer, is pressing conservatives to back an amnesty for undocumented immigrants. Dozens of party stalwarts, headlined by former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, renounced their opposition to gay marriage in a Supreme Court brief. GOP bigwigs have even launched New Republican – a group modeled after Bill Clinton's centrist Democratic Leadership Council – which seeks to rebrand the party as “colorblind,” “not anti-government” and dedicated to “ending corporate welfare.”
Don't be fooled. On the ground, a very different reality is unfolding: In the Republican-led Congress, GOP-dominated statehouses and even before the nation's highest court, the reactionary impulses of the Republican Party appear unbowed. Across the nation, the GOP's severely conservative agenda – which seeks to impose job-killing austerity, to roll back voting and reproductive rights, to deprive the working poor of health care, and to destroy agencies that protect the environment from industry and consumers from predatory banks – is moving forward under full steam.
