EXTRACT: What we are witnessing in the 21st century is the empowerment of sovereign individuals to confront the legitimacy and authority of a sovereign nation state's government via digitally driven means. As witnessed in Tunisia, revolution has been attempted and achieved via digitally driven leaderless groups. [ATCA: Tunisia: A Digitally Driven Leaderless Revolution, 15th January 2011]
Revolutionaries are leveraging digital technology to self-organise, to learn and to proliferate. Incumbent leaderships struggle to keep up because their thinking is generationally out-of-step and based on traditional forms of centralised hierarchical control and resource allocation.
Egypt: Today is the “day of rage.” On 25 January, a day honoring Egyptian police, tens of thousands of people demonstrated against the government, calling for President Mubarak to step down. Police used water cannon and tear gas against rock throwing demonstrators.
Egyptian security forces used rubber bullets to disperse an estimated 8,000 demonstrators in Alexandria's central Sidi Gaber Square. More than 1,000 people from various opposition groups protested in Mansoura and an estimated 15,000 protesters occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo. Nearly 5,000 protesters demonstrated in Mahalla and dozens of youth were reportedly protesting in Minya.
Two protestors and one policeman died in the clashes. As in Tunisia online social media served as the channel for organizing the demonstration in large numbers without official permission.
The government cut or restricted aaccess to internet, phone and social media networks, spreading confusion among protesters and temporarily sealing the largest Arab country off from the rest of the world. Access was later restored, although services remained intermittent.
NightWatch Comment: Despite a US statement that the government of Egypt is stable, the demonstrations show that it has suppressed a large undercurrent of potentially incendiary opposition, whose capabilities are not known. Sclerotic regimes like those of Mubarak never know the depth or expanse of their real opposition because they are so busy suppressing it.
This creates the condition for a field-grade officers' coup to install a reformist government, which Egypt has experienced whenever a government has overstayed its welcome. Sadat and Mubarak did that and Mubarak is overdue to have it done to him. If the demonstrations continue for two more weeks, the Mubarak era will be over.
US-Arab States: The United States will use the “Tunisian example” in its talks with other Arab states, U.S. envoy Jeffrey Feltman said during a visit to Tunis, Al Jazeera reported 25 January. The Arab world faces many of the same challenges, and Washington hopes the governments will address legitimate political, social and economic concerns, Feltman said.
NightWatch comment: This is the kind of statement a US official might well regret he ever made. The dedication to democratic change might be commendable, provided the Arab voters are capable of handling it in a sophisticated fashion. That is the rub because the outcome of elections in Arab states or territories to date has not produced results that reinforce US strategic interests, such as the security of Israel.
The political upheaval in Tunisia has not spent itself. It is a gross exaggeration to describe a government of Ben Ali cronies as a revolutionary government. More violence and change are likely.
If the Mubarak government in Egypt is replaced by a revolutionary, anti-US fundamentalist regime, citing the Tunisian example in the name of democracy, all US policy in the Middle East since 1973 becomes unhinged. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran will look like inconvenient by comparison.
Phi Beta Iota: The US Government appears to be severely out of touch with both the negative and the positive forces that are converging in 2011 and 2012, both domestically and internationally. Legitimacy is lacking, along with integrity, on all sides. Corruption versus truth…the ripple effect continues. Israel–and its many dual-nationals with Top Secret clearances in policy positions, will spin this against the public interest, and our politicians and bankers will go along with the spin. Lacking is public intelligence in the public interest. Note the tires burning in the streets–we anticipate such tire burning in the USA within the year.
Core paragraph: President Obama has the right team in place to begin this strategic downsizing of the defense budget. Gates has been an outspoken advocate of cutting programs we can't afford, and he has strong backing from Adm. Mike Mullen and Gen. James Cartwright, the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military brass knows the country won't be secure if it's broke.
Phi Beta Iota: This article is corrupt on so many levels, from moral to intellectual to financial, it simply epitomizes all that is wrong with Washington.
‘The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities…Not only was an influential sector of American business aware of the nature of Naziism, but for its own purposes aided Naziism wherever possible (and profitable) – with full knowledge that the probable outcome would be war involving Europe and the United States'. Penetrating a cloak of falsehood, deception and duplicity, Professor Antony C. Sutton reveals one of the most remarkable but unreported facts of the Second World War: that key Wall Street banks and American businesses supported Hitler's rise to power by financing and trading with Nazi Germany. Carefully tracing this closely guarded secret through original documents and eyewitness accounts, Sutton comes to the unsavoury conclusion that the catastrophic Second World War was extremely profitable for a select group of financial insiders. He presents a thoroughly documented account of the role played by J.P. Morgan, T.W. Lamont, the Rockefeller interests, General Electric Company, Standard Oil, National City Bank, Chase and Manhattan banks, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, General Motors, the Ford Motor Company, and scores of others in helping to prepare the bloodiest, most destructive war in history. This classic study, first published in 1976 – the third volume of a trilogy – is reproduced here in its original form. The other volumes in the series study the 1917 Lenin-Trotsky Revolution in Russia and the 1933 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States.
Phi Beta Iota: Secular corruption is now facing off against digital populism. The latter will win in the end, but the next decade is going to be very ugly–between 44 dictators and a dirty dozen faux democracies in which all of the politicians are the “best of the servant class” to the extreme wealthy, this is going to be a fight. The good news is that in combination, angry connected young people, and increasingly angry, informed and eventually connected poor people (five billion) are a force that cannot be denied. The meek will indeed inherit the Earth. Religions are going to have to decide if they wish to continue blessing the corrupt, or actually confront Satan here on Earth in the form of secular corruption.
The emotional roller coaster captured on Twitter can predict the ups and downs of the stock market, a new study finds. Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 percent.
“We were pretty astonished that this actually worked,” said computational social scientist Johan Bollen of Indiana University-Bloomington. The new results appear in a paper on the arXiv.org preprint server.
Bollen and grad student Huina Mao stumbled on this computational crystal ball almost by accident. Earlier studies had found that blogs can be used to gauge public mood, and that tweets about movies can predict box office sales. An open source mood-tracking tool called OpenFinder sorts tweets into positive and negative bins based on emotionally charged words.
But Bollen wanted to build a more nuanced emotional barometer. He used a standard psychology tool called the Profile of Mood States, a quick questionnaire that is used frequently in pharmaceutical research or sports medicine.
The original questionnaire asks people to rate how closely their feelings match 72 different adjectives, including “friendly,” “peeved,” “active,” “on edge” and “panicky,” and uses the responses to measure mood along six dimensions: calmness, alertness, sureness, vitality, kindness and happiness.
Animation with narration: Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.
Sometimes when this work seems too hard, someone will send me a video link… and I'll suddenly find myself bathed in one more reason why it is worth pouring so much of life into creating a decent, joyful, healthy society.
There is so much going on in the world that is worth preserving, so much worth celebrating, so much worth nurturing. And, of course, most of it is not on videos.
But a lot of it is…
I thought I'd take a moment to share some of my favorites. Most of them are 2-10 minutes long. I've marked the longer ones.
