Round table "Meaning of Maghreb?" - Zizek, Habashi, Amin, Harvey, Bauman, 18th May 2011

"The meaning of Maghreb?" Round Table discussion featuring Slavoj Žižek, Mamdouh Habashi, Samir Amin, David Harvey, Zygmunt Bauman. Pt. 1 of 8.

Saudi troops sent to crush Bahrain protests 'had British training'

The Guardian 28 May 2011:

"...In response to questions made under the Freedom of Information Act, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed that British personnel regularly run courses for the national guard in "weapons, fieldcraft and general military skills training, as well as incident handling, bomb disposal, search, public order and sniper training". The courses are organised through the British Military Mission to the Saudi Arabian National Guard, an obscure unit that consists of 11 British army personnel under the command of a brigadier...."

The Telegraph May 25. 2011:

"...The Ministry of Defence has now admitted that members of the Saudi Arabian National Guard sent into Bahrain may have received military training from the British Armed Forces in Saudi Arabia.

The revelation is likely to renew allegations that the Coalition is sending mixed messages on democracy in the Middle East.

Despite British criticism of the Bahrainis' actions, David Cameron last week welcomed the Crown Prince of Bahrain to Downing Street, drawing criticism from human rights groups.

Britain keeps a large and secretive military training team in Saudi Arabia. British military personnel advise and teach the kingdom's forces in areas including crowd control

In a written parliamentary answer, Nick Harvey, the Armed Forces Minister, said the Government could not rule out the possibility that British-trained Saudis took part in the Bahraini operation.

He said: "The Ministry of Defence has extensive and wide-ranging bilateral engagement with Saudi Arabia in support of the Government's wider foreign policy goals. The Ministry of Defence's engagement with Saudi Arabia includes training provided to the Saudi Arabian National Guard, delivered through the British mission."

"It is possible that some members of the Saudi Arabian National Guard which were deployed in Bahrain may have undertaken some training provided by the British military mission." ..."

General Wesley Clark explains Libyan invasion planned years in advance.

Chomsky: The U.S. is desperate to stop middle east democracy movements.

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VKO-regimet, med Dansk Folkeparti i spidsen, ønsker nu at straffe kontantshjælpsmodtagere hårdt for udeblivelse fra de såkaldte “aktiveringstilbud.” Hvis man udebliver i blot en enkelt dag, uden at kunne begrunde det fyldestgørende, vil man fremover blive frataget halvdelen af sin kontanthjælp i et halvt år, hvilket svarer til at chefen konfiskerer en fjerdedel af ens årsløn hvis man tager en pjækkedag fra jobbet.

Begrundelsen fra Dansk Folkepartis Peter Skaarup er at ”det vil have en opdragende effekt” og Skaarup siger uddybende at ”vi er nødt til at skærpe sanktionerne for flere tusinde ledige på kontanthjælp og starthjælp afslår hvert år tilbud uden grund”. Beskæftigelsesminister Inger Støjberg mener også det er en god idé for som hun formulerer det:

”Som systemet er i dag kan kontanthjælpsmodtagere shoppe ind og ud af aktivering. Hvis der er noget, man ikke vil deltage i, mister man kun ydelsen i de f.eks. tre dage, man vælger at blive væk. Det gør det svært at skabe sammenhængende forløb, der kan bringe de ledige tilbage i job.”

Beskæftigelsesministeren antager altså at de mange aktiveringstilbud kan bringe de ledige tilbage i job, men desværre har det i de fleste tilfælde ikke ret meget at gøre med virkeligheden, idet antallet af ledige jobs blot udgør en ganske lille procentdel ift. antallet af ledige og det er derfor ikke unormalt at mange hundrede arbejdsløse søger den samme stilling, som eksempelvis tankpasser eller kassedame.

Det der kaldes et ”aktiveringstilbud” er i virkeligheden en eufemisme for tvangsaktivering for i modsætning til et tilbud, kan man ikke sige nej til at blive aktiveret. Denne tvangsaktivering kan indeholde alt ligefra kostvejledning over gymnastikundervisning til kognitiv gruppeterapi og bliver også ”tilbudt” til folk som ikke er hverken overvægtige, i dårlig form eller har ondt i psyken. At dømme ud fra disse aktiveringsforløb handler arbejdsløshedsproblemet altså åbenbart mere om, at folk ikke spiser rigtigt, ikke løber lange nok ture og ikke går rundt og har det godt nok med sig selv, end det handler om finanskrisen, eller om, at der ikke er kommet ret mange arbejdspladser ud af, at man har givet skattelettelser til de rige, selvom dette ellers iflg. teorien ville få en ”trickle-down effect,” hvilket kort sagt vil sige, at giver man de rige flere penge mellem hænderne, så kommer det i teorien os alle sammen til gode.

En anden kendt variant indenfor tvangsaktivering er jobsøgningskurser hvor ledige bruger mange timer dagligt på at lære at skrive en ansøgning, for hvis man ikke kan finde sig et arbejde hænger det åbenbart mere sammen med, at man ikke er god nok til at sælge sig selv, end det handler om, at der simpelthen ikke er ret meget arbejde at få. Er man ikke blandt de heldige der er kommet ud på arbejdsmarkedet når kurset er slut, ja så bliver man selvfølgelig bare nødt til at tage kurset en gang til, for ens fortsatte ledighed må jo så åbenbart hænge sammen med, at man ikke har hørt godt nok efter på kurset.

Skulle man i blot en enkelt dag udeblive fra et af disse stærkt fornedrende, perspektivløse og stupide tvangsaktiveringsforløb er man iflg, mange borgerlige nok bare en forpulet nasserøv der i virkeligheden slet ikke ønsker at komme i arbejde. Det er derfor fuldstændig på sin plads, at udeblivelse nu skal straffes med en så voldsom indkomstforringelse, at det i praksis betyder, at de sandsynligvis mange bistandsmodtagere som dette kommer til at ramme, må vælge mellem enten at have tag over hovedet eller mad på bordet, for en indkomst på under 6000 kroner før skat rækker næppe for ret mange til begge dele.

Det er vanskeligt at være decideret chokeret over dette nye tiltag, for har man fulgt den politiske udvikling gennem de sidste mange år kommer det næppe som et chok, at man på den borgerlige fløj gladeligt svinger pisken og ydmyger ledige der i forvejen lever på trange kår, men jeg er alligevel lidt overrasket over graden af afsky for de ledige og den forstyrrende afstumpethed der ligger til grund for dette nye straftiltag. Man kan da håbe på at regningen falder ved det næste valg, for selv Dansk Folkepartis vælgere må da efterhånden kunne se, at al snakken fra DFs side om, at man kæmper den lille mands sag, ikke har ret meget med den førte politik og virkeligheden at gøre.

Police Brutality in Barcelona.

GMO Trilogy - Unnatural Selection.

Welcome to the Police State.

Taibbi: 'U.S. politics - reality show sponsored by Wall Street'

Chris Hedges: The World As It Is.

More GRITtv

Ken O'Keefe BBC Hardtalk Jan. 2003.

New Advances in Renewable Energy Technologies.

Splitting water to create renewable energy simpler than first thought?

(PhysOrg.com) -- An international team, of scientists, led by a team at Monash University has found the key to the hydrogen economy could come from a very simple mineral, commonly seen as a black stain on rocks.



New solar product captures up to 95 percent of light energy.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Efficiency is a problem with today's solar panels; they only collect about 20 percent of available light. Now, a University of Missouri engineer has developed a flexible solar sheet that captures more than 90 percent of available light, and he plans to make prototypes available to consumers within the next five years.

New omni-directional wind turbine can capture wind energy on building rooftops.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Katru Eco-Energy, headed by founder and inventor, Varan Sureshan, has developed a new kind of wind turbine meant to capture the winds that fly in all directions atop big buildings, and unlike conventional devices, the IMPLUX, as it’s called, can capture wind from any direction as it stands; meaning without having to be repositioned or pointed. The IMPLUX achieves this feat by means of horizontal turbine blades that sit atop a vertical axis and are turned by wind that is pushed up through what Sureshan calls a "fluid dynamic gate."

Chomsky: "There is Much More to Say."

Noam Chomsky expands upon his earlier comments regarding the assasination of Osama Bin Laden in Abottabad, Pakistan. Here is an excerpt:

"...It might be instructive to ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic (after proper burial rites, of course). Uncontroversially, he is not a “suspect” but the “decider” who gave the orders to invade Iraq -- that is, to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country and the national heritage, and the murderous sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region. Equally uncontroversially, these crimes vastly exceed anything attributed to bin Laden.

To say that all of this is uncontroversial, as it is, is not to imply that it is not denied. The existence of flat earthers does not change the fact that, uncontroversially, the earth is not flat. Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Stalin and Hitler were responsible for horrendous crimes, though loyalists deny it. All of this should, again, be too obvious for comment, and would be, except in an atmosphere of hysteria so extreme that it blocks rational thought.

Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Bush and associates did commit the “supreme international crime,” the crime of aggression, at least if we take the Nuremberg Tribunal seriously. The crime of aggression was defined clearly enough by Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States at Nuremberg, reiterated in an authoritative General Assembly resolution. An “aggressor,” Jackson proposed to the Tribunal in his opening statement, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as “Invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State….” No one, even the most extreme supporter of the aggression, denies that Bush and associates did just that.

We might also do well to recall Jackson’s eloquent words at Nuremberg on the principle of universality: “If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.” And elsewhere: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”...."

Read the rest here.

On Human Networks & Living Biosystems.

On Human Networks & Living Biosystems.

By Chris Arkenberg.

Increasingly, we live in a world defined by flat networks. Folks like Clay Shirky, Ben Hammersley, and others have observed in great detail how the design patterns of the internet are challenging and changing the landscape of human civilization. So many of our institutions have been built as hierarchical pyramids designed to exert the maximum degree of control over their domains. These top-down management structures have come to define business, government, the military, medicine, education, the family, and knowledge itself. Leaders rise to the top as centralized governors dictating down the chain how things should be, while workers march in step towards execution of their appointed tasks. Such structures were modeled after the clockworks & steam engines of classical mechanics, designed to be precise, rigid, and durable, capable of lasting hundreds of years. These structures informed the defining metaphors of our entire industrialized society.

Computer architecture recapitulated the mechanical metaphor by designating a central processor that assigned & managed tasks bussed out to sub-processors and specialized functional components. In this way the computer became more of a powerful extension of the industrial age rather than a stake in the ground of a new paradigm. While the mechanical metaphor gradually evolved into the computational metaphor which has defined the last two decades, it wasn’t until computers began to follow the model of telecom and began connecting with each other across flat networks that the seed of a biological metaphor began to take hold.

Nature, it seems, does not create very many rigid, top-down control systems. Those are too stiff and inflexible for the dynamics of life. Rather, nature evolves vast horizontal networks that assemble into specialized functions within their environment. For example, the messiest, most distributed organizational structure known - the human brain - does not have a top-tier manager or CPU. There is no executive function within the brain or its mind, though we typically like to think there is. Instead, the brain is a vast & mostly flat hierarchy that is bundled into loosely vertical functional bodies. These functional bodies are themselves existing across a mostly flat horizontal network of interactions. The thalamus receives all inputs and routes them up to higher cortical processing and lower hindbrain autonomic structures, into the amygdala for emotional content and across the hippocampus for memory, then down throughout the body. The processing chain is massively parallel, interconnected, and marked by complex feedback pathways. Mind arises off of these processes in a very ad hoc manner, always shifting, always flexible, and always derived from a mass summation across the network.

Mycelial networks offer another example. When we see mushrooms scattered across a forest floor we're not seeing individuals. Each mushroom growing from the soil is a fruiting body rising from the underground web-work of mycelia - the skeletal framework of the colony. Some mycelial colonies have been found to have areas extending over 2000 acres making them some of the largest superorganisms on the planet. The pattern suggests mushrooms as terminal nodes and mycelia as the network backbone.

In ecosystems, large predators constitute a form of top-down management but they themselves are part of the predator-prey relationship - a dynamic that must always seek relative equilibrium with the broader network in which it is embedded. Predators do not have a choice to over-consume prey or stockpile & re-sell it to others. Large ocean gyres also suggest a high degree of top-down control by seasonally establishing the engines of hemispheric weather. The North Pacific gyre becomes more active in the Winter of the northern hemisphere, driving the scale & frequency of storms hitting the pacific northwest of the United States. But the North Pacific gyre is an emergent structure that is itself built upon the properties of a nearly-infinite set of factors. It is not a regulatory structure or a governor by intent or design and there is no top-level group of components that determine its next move. It is a super-system derived from innumerable sub-systems.

Most importantly, all biological systems are guided not by top-down governors or control mechanisms but by feedback from the networks in which they are embedded. This is how nature regulates, preserves, and evolves itself towards greater adaptability. There is no fallible ruler driven to resource over-reach and myopic certainty. There is only the ongoing trial & error of embedded growth tempered by continuous communication between & within organisms.

As computers began to connect across the ARPANET, and with the dawning of the visual internet, the CPU evolved away from being specifically a central control system to become a node within a distributed network. This initial shift quickly challenged the established domains of publishing, content creation, intellectual property, and knowledge management while inviting the crowd into a shared virtual space of increasingly global identity & transaction. The advent of social networks established an organizational structure for connecting the human capital of virtuality, making it easier for like-minded people to connect & share & collaborate non-locally, subtly undermining the very notions of borders, statehood, family, and allegiance. Soon after, the mobile revolution has tipped everything on its side and bundled it into a portable device bringing instantaneous global communication & information access to most people on the planet.

The framework was laid for new forms of emergent, non-hierarchical, distributed collaboration & innovation, to both productive & destructive ends. Groups could now form and coordinate around affiliations, interest, and goals in ways that directly challenged the institutional structures monetizing our production & consumption and regulating our behaviors. It has become vastly easier for small organizations to take on multinational interests, whether in business & innovation or in power & politics. The conflicts we see across the world today are, in large part, a symptom of the younger generations leveraging flat network technologies to rise up against the older generations who long ago settled into their legacy hierarchical power structures. To paraphrase Ben Hammersley, the people who are running the world, who are entrusted with our future, are not able to understand the present. They lack the cognitive tools that are a basic part of the Generation C toolkit - the digital natives who grew up with a mobile in their hands and the internet at their fingertips, embedded in specialized networks that span borders and extend identity into the virtual.

The global disruptions that seem to characterize modernity constitute a civilizational correction driven by natural law. The DotCom bubble went through a correction, shedding excess value and pruning the garden of exuberant innovation to favor only the most fit. It was a good thing, if not painful. We witnessed the correction in the housing bubble and will likely see similar corrections in credit & commodities, as well as a painfully positive correction in energy, subsidized and under-valued for so long. The impacts of climate change are a correction imposed upon the legacy model of industrialization & growth by nature itself - the super-system in which all human endeavor is embedded and to which we are ultimately accountable.

The civilization correction is an emergent regulatory mechanism embedded within natural systems forcing our legacy human systems to progressively modify the unsustainable design patterns of our past. The mechanical metaphor & the computational metaphor are necessarily opening to include the biological metaphor. We can see this in every aspect of technology and it is equally emergent across human behavior & social systems. Nanosystems emulate biosystems. Computation & robotics are integrating with neurology & physiology. Individuals are finding agency & empowerment in leaderless multi-cellular collaborations. The built environment is becoming sensory-aware, communicating with itself through discrete feedback mechanisms. It can be argued that the emergence of the internet and of ubiquitous mobile communication & computation is an expression of our natural instincts to move into closer alignment with our environment; to follow the adaptive design patterns of nature in order to find a more sustainable & equitable posture for our species; a thermodynamic need to seek maximum efficiency in energy expenses. And to express a direct intervention programmed by nature itself to nudge the Anthropocene back towards equilibrium.

Such lofty ponderings aside, our world is undoubtedly approaching an inflection point. Everything appears to be upending and it’s all spread out in glorious detail for everyone to see. The feedback loop between humanity and it’s creations - the biological & cybernetic communication among individuals & groups & cultures & organisms & ecosystems - is tightening and getting more & more dense every day, feeding on itself and forcing exceptional degrees of novelty into becoming. It’s frightening & awesome and the Old Guard can barely see it happening right in front of their eyes. The shift may be apocalyptic, a sudden phase change, or an accelerated-but-managed transition... Probably it will be all of these things in differing degrees & locales. However it happens, the emerging paradigm is much more about networks, messaging, feedback, and biology rather than hierarchy, control, power, and mechanization. Nature is the super-system, the ultimate controller enforcing the laws of physics and prescribing the design templates for fitness & adaptation. If we are, as Kevin Kelley suggests, the sex organs of technology, then our technology is born from the natural imperatives coded deeply into our DNA.

Via spacecollective.org

Dagens Citat: Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. on the purpose of education:

"It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life.

Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one's self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals."

From the speech "The Purpose of Education" by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

David Korten: "Living Buildings, Living Economies, and a Living Future."

In another excellent piece by Dr. David Korten, former professor of economy at Harvard Business School, he states that:

We humans, in a fit of adolescent hubris, have sought to liberate ourselves from the responsibilities of life in community. We are in denial of our fundamental nature as living beings—forgetting that because of the way life manages energy, living beings exist only in active relationships to other living beings.

We have so confused individual autonomy with personal liberty that we have created economies that reduce caring human relationships to soulless financial exchange and structured our physical space around buildings and auto-dependent transportation systems that wall us off from one another and nature. In isolation from nature we have sought to dominate and control rather than work with nature’s natural generative processes. We have paid a terrible price.

As we restructure our physical and economic relationships to achieve true economic efficiency and reduce the human burden on the biosphere, we will see even more clearly our interdependence with one another and the place we live. We will know where our food, water, and energy come from. We will know where our wastes go. And most of all we will be constantly reminded of the extent to which our happiness and well-being depend on our active engagement with the generative living community of which we are a part.

The challenges we face in making the transition are enormous. But so too is the opportunity to create and secure a living future for ourselves and our children for generations to come.

Read all of it here.

Dokumentar: The End of Poverty?

We're Not Broke, Just Twisted: Extreme Wealth Inequality in America.

Dagens Citat: John Stuart Mill.

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

Why Privacy Matters.

Daniel J. Solove, professor of law at George Washington University, has a highly recommendable essay on The Chronicle of Higher Education's website in which he refutes the most common argument against privacy, namely "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."