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Tom Atlee: Bitterness Dances with Hope – Focusing On the Essence

Politics
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Tom Atlee

Bitterness dances with Hope

Dear friends,

I like this article by Rebecca Solnit (who's writing I'm coming to love more and more) not because it comes from “the left” but because it calls for sanity and decency.  It acknowledges the overriding fact that our quasi-democratic system is itself deeply flawed in its design and corrupted in its practice.  It invites us to step out of our polarized, preachy bitterness – regardless of what “side” we are on and what evils and solutions we obsess about – and address the public issues we share with intelligence and compassion.

I can easily imagine someone on “the right” writing a similar essay, and if any of you know of such an article, please send it to me to share.

In the meantime, we each have the challenge of being true to our own perspectives and open to everyone else's as we try to make a better society out of this very strange one we've got.

Coheartedly,
Tom

Rain on Our Parade: A Letter to the Dismal Left

by Rebecca Solnit

Common Dreams, 27 September 2012

=====

I found myself saying “Yes!” to the following sentences in her closing paragraphs: “To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart…. Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as do it with generosity and kindness and style.”

I was dismayed that almost all of the comments attacked her.  So I added my own comment:

“I think Rebecca is spot on – with one exception. I think most of the conversation needs to be about how to change the political and economic systems that generate all the harms we end up protesting. The problem with electoral politics is less about whether we vote and who should be voted for and more about what we are doing between elections. To the extent we campaign and vote and go home or focus our activism on symptoms (the suffering and destruction fed by the systems), we will be faced with the same corrupted choices the next election.  To the extent we spend most of our energy transforming the electoral and political systems into something sane, we will then be routinely given political choices that not only reflect our values but, thanks to the sanity of the system, actually make a difference. I'm doing my bit with
http://empoweringpublicwisdom.us/, which is less about elections than accessing and empowering the potential wisdom of the diverse People as a whole.”

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Gold Transformer: Spain Falls to Pieces, As Predicted

Economics/True Cost, Politics
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Gold Transformer

Spain Falls to Pieces, as Predicted

The Daily Bell, Thursday, September 27, 2012

Be Very Careful, Beloved Spain … Two weeks ago I was interviewed by the Catalan newspaper El Punt Avui. I said it would be unthinkable for the Spanish state to stop Catalan secession by military force. Such action would violate EU Treaties and lead to Spain's suspension from the European Union. You do not do such things in the early 21st Century. “No pots ser membre de la UE si utilitzes la força” was the headline. I may have underestimated the vigour of the Spanish officer corps. First we have the robust comments of Colonel Francisco Alaman comparing the crisis to 1936 and vowing to crush Catalan nationalists, described as “vultures”. “Independence for Catalonia? Over my dead body. Spain is not Yugoslavia or Belgium. Even if the lion is sleeping, don't provoke the lion, because he will show the ferocity proven over centuries,” he said. – UK Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: The riots have begun again. What a surprise.

Free-Market Analysis: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports on Spain and what he provides us with is a look at the underbelly of Spanish despair that you won't read about in other similar mainstream reporting.

What Evans-Pritchard provides us with, in fact, is the bloody sociopathic grin that lurks under the current, escalating social tension. The grin is that of one collectively plastered across the faces of the armed forces. It is the same in Britain and soon will be, no doubt, in France and Germany.

As the “planned” – there is no other word for it except perhaps “directed” – demolition of Europe continues to bulldoze its way across the south of this great continent, the lurking violence of the organized military reveals itself once more.

There is increased talk about the “honor” of armed forces in Western mainstream media and this is probably no accident. Here, from the Associated Press:

Prince Harry, third in line to the British throne, began a four-month combat tour Friday in Afghanistan as a gunner on an Apache attack helicopter …”Prince Harry, like any soldier, considers it a great honor to represent his country in her majesty's armed forces wherever it chooses to deploy him,” St James's Palace said in a statement.

You see? This is a deliberate statement. The Afghan war has been subject to contentious debate in Britain, with former Prime Minister Tony Blair coming under attack as a war criminal by some for his role in involving Britain in that quagmire in the first place. But there is no context here: Harry is merely honored.

We used to read a lot about the “sacred honor of the German Reich,” etc. in the history books and would wonder how people could use such rhetoric. Now we know.

The world is being whipped up by the hard military men waiting in the proverbial wings. Soon they will surge to the fore and the reality of modern capitalism will be revealed for what it really is, a thin veneer. Here's some more from Evans-Pritchard's article:

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DefDog: Living Under Drones – Outcomes in Pakistan

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Economics/True Cost, Government, Ineptitude, Knowledge, Military, Peace Intelligence, Politics
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DefDog

Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan

This report is the result of nine months of research by the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School (Stanford Clinic) and the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law (NYU Clinic). Professor James Cavallaro and Clinical Lecturer Stephan Sonnenberg led the Stanford Clinic team; Professor Sarah Knuckey led the NYU Clinic team. Adelina Acuña, Mohammad M. Ali, Anjali Deshmukh, Jennifer Gibson, Jennifer Ingram, Dimitri Phillips, Wendy Salkin, and Omar Shakir were the student research team at Stanford; Christopher Holland was the student researcher from NYU. Supervisors Cavallaro, Sonnenberg, and Knuckey, as well as student researchers Acuña, Ali, Deshmukh, Gibson, Salkin, and Shakir participated in the fact-finding investigations to Pakistan.

EXTRACT (One Sentence from Each Summary Paragraph):

First, while civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the US government, there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians

Second, US drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury.

Third, publicly available evidence that the strikes have made the US safer overall is ambiguous at best.

Fourth, current US targeted killings and drone strike practices undermine respect for the rule of law and international legal protections and may set dangerous precedents.

Summary Recommendations:

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Yoda: $16 Trillion Or So – Opportunity Costs & Integrity Lost

03 Economy, Commerce, Corruption, Economics/True Cost, Government
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QE For the People: What Else Could We Buy With $29 Trillion?   (September 24, 2012)

Central banks could be helping communities instead of enriching predatory, parasitic “too big to fail” banks and financial feudalism.

In a system that depends on lies and the credulity of the citizenry, the greatest lie is that the Federal Reserve's “quantitative easing” bailouts of the banks somehow help our citizens and communities.

To clarify this, ask yourself this question: what else could we have bought with the $29 trillion the Fed loaned or backstopped to the banks?

If you enjoy quibbling about the total sum of Fed support, be my guest; the Levy Institute came up with $29 trillion after poring over all the data, while the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) tally topped $16 trillion. That's 100% of the nation's GDP and roughly 100% of the $16 trillion national debt.

Click on Image to Enlarge

While we're asking about opportunity costs, let's ask what else we could have bought with the $10 trillion that the Federal government has borrowed and blown in the past 11.7 years. The national debt was $5.727 trillion when G.W. Bush was sworn into office on January 20, 2001. It had risen to $10.626 trillion when President Obama was sworn into office in January, 2009. It is now $16.016 trillion, an increase of $5 trillion in less than four years in “debt held by the public” (i.e. the Chinese central bank, the Japanese central bank, the Federal Reserve, etc.)

You can check the totals for any recent date on treasurydirect.gov.

From time to time I have suggested alternatives to “wars of choice” and bailing out the financial Plutocracy, for example Cost of Iraq War: $3 Trillion; Cost of Solar Plants to Power all 105 million U.S Households: $500 Billion (April 10, 2008) and We’re Dropping the Ball on Renewable Energy (June 25, 2011).

$500 billion is roughly 3% of $16 trillion. That is rather astounding, isn't it? We could have switched to a (largely) solar-powered electrical grid for a mere 3% of what the Fed squandered to save the “too big to fail” banks. Yes, yes, I know we need a massive energy storage system for any solar-powered grid; shall we throw $1.1 trillion at the problem? That would total a mere 10% of what the Fed has provided to “save” crony-capitalist financial feudalism.

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Yoda: Ana Cristina Pratas – Digital Bridges for Learners

04 Education, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Liberation Technology
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Digital Bridges for Learners

Ana Cristina Pratas

CristinaSkyBox, 27 September 2012

Although I have always tried to reach out individually to students, whether through their preferred learning style, topics which related to their social environment and interests,  or with activities they enjoyed in class, never has there been a point in time when the emphasis of learning was so learner-centred as now.  With the increasing implementation of mobile tech, learning is revolving around the student: with their iPads, they can work calmly through their iBooks or create their own book with materials which they choose and are relevant to both themselves and their course work.

In turn, this also has implications for the teacher – new roles in the classroom and often new approaches and patterns in teaching. However, with all the freedom of learning, there are hiccups which also occur. How willing are students to (initially) take on the responsibility for their learning, particularly when they have grown up in cultures where rote-learning was customary or where they were comfortable in shifting responsibility of their learning outcomes to teachers?

All freedom demands responsibility and accountability – characteristics which students are not always ready to take on board.

Freedom is also a learning process and bridges need to be built, put in place for both learners and teachers.

Full post and two graphics below the line.

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