Archive for the ‘CounterCurrents’ Category

Time to end the war on drugs

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

– This is from Richard Branson’s Blog.   That’s Richard Branson of Virgin fame.  I say, “Bravo” for what he’s written here.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Visited Portugal, as one of the Global Drug Commissioners, to congratulate them on the success of their drug policies over the last 10 years.

Ten years ago the Portuguese Government responded to widespread public concern over drugs by rejecting a “war on drugs” approach and instead decriminalized drug possession and use. It further rebuffed convention by placing the responsibility for decreasing drug demand as well as managing dependency under the Ministry of Health rather than the Ministry of Justice. With this, the official response towards drug-dependent persons shifted from viewing them as criminals to treating them as patients.

Now with a decade of experience Portugal provides a valuable case study which you can learn more of by reading this post of how decriminalization coupled with evidence-based strategies can reduce drug consumption, dependence, recidivism and HIV infection and create safer communities for all.

I will set out clearly what I learned from my visit to Portugal and would urge other countries to study this:

In 2001 Portugal became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines.

Jail time was replaced with offer of therapy. (The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is much more expensive than treatment).

Under Portugal’s new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker, and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.

Critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to “drug tourists” and exacerbate Portugal’s drug problem; the country has some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. The recently realised results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April 2011, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.

Compared to the European Union and the US, Portugal drug use numbers are impressive.

Following decriminalization, Portugal has the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the EU: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%, Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%. Drug use in older teens also declined.  Life time heroin use among 16-18 year olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8%.

New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003.

Death related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half.

The number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and the considerable money saved on enforcement allowed for increase funding of drug – free treatment as well.

Property theft has dropped dramatically (50% – 80% of all property theft worldwide is caused by drug users).

America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the EU (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the US, it also has less drug use. In America, sites like https://syntheticurinereview.com/how-to-keep-pee-warm/are very popular, people from all walks of life need to hide in plain sight from the prying eyes of big brother in order to keep their  jobs.

Current policy debate is that it’s based on “speculation and fear mongering”, rather than empirical evidence on the effect of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country’s number one public health problem.

Decriminalization does not result in increased drug use.

Portugal’s 10 year experiment shows clearly that enough is enough. It is time to end the war on drugs worldwide. We must stop criminalising drug users. Health and treatment should be offered to drug users – not prison. Bad drugs policies affect literally hundreds of thousands of individuals and communities across the world. We need to provide medical help to those that have problematic use – not criminal retribution.

By Richard Branson. Founder of Virgin Group

– To the original…

 

 

Why is it not good to use proprietary Software or Formats?

Monday, October 31st, 2011

Proprietary Software can include back doors – see Skype and Microsoft.

Proprietary formats can include metadata. This is data, which you can’t see but it can lead to your identity. They caught a Greek anonymous activist, because he uploaded a word document with his real name in the metadata.

If you are no computer expert don’t upload anything else then plain TXT files to the Internet. You can use copy and past as well to post it in web services. Even graphic formats like JPEG or TIFF can include data like GPS coordinates, the used camera, user and software name.

It’s very difficult for beginners to find this metadata. So if you are a good designer like the poor Greek one, send your PDF files to a computer expert. He can clean the metadata before the upload.

These programms can show you the metadata:

PDF – BeCyPDFMetaEdit
Viewer for many formats: http://regex.info/exif.cgi

[UPDATE]
The metadata can be useful to locate the author of a document in real life, if you have questions for example. Open source programs like Libre Office uses metadata too. The trick is not to fill in your real name during installation and don’t use your real name for login.

You can use a Linux live system (like TAILS) to produce anonymous documents.

Comments:

The UK government has its problems with PDF formats too:

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/04/17/0831204/MoDs-Error-Leaks-Secrets-of-UK-Nuclear-Submarine

“UK’s Ministry of Defence admitted that secret information about its nuclear powered submarines was leaked on the internet by mistake.

and

FOCA is a good program to show meta data for windows. You have to give an email adr. to dowload the program …

http://www.informatica64.com/DownloadFOCA/

– To the original…

 

Slaying The Jabberwock

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

By Clinton Callahan 

The Jabberwock, of course, is the modern capitalist / patriarchal / empire meme-virus that is infecting the global ethnosphere and, in addition to wiping out cultural diversity by putting a 7/11 and a Starbucks on every corner, is threatening to exterminate life on Earth. This article is a mini-handbook empowering global #OCCUPY teams to build nonlinear, interconnected, resilient, leaderless social systems that make the Jabberwock irrelevant.

NOTE 1: Most of what follows I extracted from an astonishing series of blogs and comments (with permission) penned by John Robb posted at http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ . John is the author of Brave New War.

NOTE 2: If you want to help document #OCCUPY strategies for others to copy, please add them to MiiU. http://www.miiu.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

AN OVERVIEW

#OCCUPY is not a legal conflict. It is political insurgency.

The bad news is: as the ruling system tries to suppress the insurgency it engages in low-intensity warfare. In other words, we are already at war. The good news is: states don’t know how to win this war. “No state has ever defeated an indigenous insurgency.”   – Jerry Boyle

The Jabberwock is a loose affiliation of psychopathic personalities using single-mind intelligence passing orders down through their hierarchies.

In comparison, #OCCUPY is open-source (leaderless), and uses many-mind (swarm) intelligence, which is nonlinear and which tends to generate an abundance of parallel (unpredictable/uncontrollable) actions. Therefore, if #OCCUPY persists, then the Jabberwock has no chance!

Persistence is enhanced through intelligent understanding of #OCCUPY strategies and technologies, thus, this mini-handbook, in which you will find the following sections:

  1. GENERAL #OCCUPY STRATEGIES
  2. WHAT #OCCUPY IS REALLY ABOUT
  3. SPECIFIC #OCCUPY STRATEGIES
  4. HOW TO DISARM A POLICE OFFICER
  5. AND HAST THOU SLAIN THE JABBERWOCK?
  6. HOW TO MANUFACTURE A TRIBE
  7. RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

 

1. GENERAL #OCCUPY STRATEGIES

Superempowerment – #OCCUPY increases the ability of individuals and small groups to accomplish tasks through rapid improvements in decentralized decision making, teamwork, nonlinear strategy, and the use of technology to access global networks. Many-to-many collaborations enable small groups to radically increase their productivity in protests. For example, if many small groups disrupt a system by attacking its weak points simultaneously in diverse modalities (such as walkouts, flashmobs, media campaigns, street theater pieces) this can multiply the effectiveness to achieve as much as a 1,400,000 percent return on investment. That is superempowerment.

Open-source warfare – #OCCUPY gains diverse intelligences by remaining leaderless so it can be sourced by the whole swarm rather than by individual leaders. Through self-organizing its nonviolent noncompliance with what-is-not-sustainable, #OCCUPY acts in parallel through a large collection of small, superempowered groups. These small groups can work together to take on much larger foes (usually hierarchies). Open-source organizing enables high rates of wildly diverse innovation, increased survivability among the participant groups, more frequent protests, and an ability to swarm targets.

How is #OCCUPY sourcing a long-term superempowered open-source insurgency? Two steps:

A)  MAKING A PLAUSIBLE PROMISE 

Establish an idea that holds the open-source insurgency together. The plausible promise is composed of:

An enemy . The enemy serves as the target of protests. This enemy can either be perceived or manufactured (any group or organization that can be depicted as a threat, in this case: the Jabberwock.). The enemy can be any group that currently holds and exerts power: invader, the government, a company, an ethnic group, or a private organization. It’s all the Jabberwock.

A goal . This goal animates the group. Because of the diversity of the groups and individuals that join together in an open-source insurgency, the only goal that works is one that is simple and extremely high level. More complex goal setting is impossible, since it will fracture or fork the insurgency.

A demonstration. A successful demonstration proves the viability of the insurgency. People see it is actually possible to win against the enemy. The demonstration deflates any aura of invincibility that the enemy may currently enjoy. The demonstration serves as a rallying cry for the insurgency.

B)   MANAGING ITS FOCO .

Every open-source insurgency is ignited by a small founding group, a foco in guerrilla parlance. The foco sets the original goal and conducts the operation that provides the insurgency with its demonstration of viability. It’s important to understand that in order to grow an open-source insurgency, the founding group or individuals must follow a simple path:

Relinquish. Give up any control over the insurgency gained during its early phases. In practice, this means giving up control of how the goal is achieved, who may participate, how to communicate, etc. The only control that remains is the power of example, the respect gained through effectively serving the goal. If ever a leader attempts to fork the protest by trying to lead it towards an agenda or policy or politics only they care about, they should be immediately ignored / rejected / blocked.

Resist (resist your hidden temptations). This means: stay small. Don’t grow the foco to a size that makes the original group easy for the enemy to target (allow very few new members in the first group). Further, don’t establish a formal collection of groups, a hierarchy of control, or set forth a complex agenda. This will only serve to alienate and fragment the insurgency. In some cases, it will make the foco a target of the insurgency itself. It will also slow any advancement on the objective since it limits potential pathways of innovation that naturally emerge from a large, loose network of self-organized superempowered groups.

Share. Rapidly give away your best resources, ideas, information, knowledge, recruits, etc. to other groups that join the insurgency. Share everything possible that doesn’t directly compromise the foco’s integrity (its operational security or viability). Expect sharing in return.

2. WHAT #OCCUPY IS REALLY ABOUT

#OCCUPY is comparable to what we are seeing in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, etc. Remember, these are actions that have already toppled governments.

The big difference between #OCCUPY and those other protests is that #OCCUPY is not directed at governments. It is aimed at companies, but not just any companies. It’s aimed at the banks that own and run the global economy. #OCCUPY is replacing the heart of the global Capitalist system with a new human agenda on the planet.

#OCCUPY ignores governments and standard political processes because:

  • Governments are much weaker than the global economy (they are bankrupt hollow shells of what they were at the end of the Cold War).
  • Governments are too ineffectual and/or corrupt to change anything even if they are coerced (see the US, Ireland and Greece for recent examples).
  • Too little will change even if the government changes parties (see the US for how lame politics and politicians have become).

What’s the real goal of #OCCUPY? It’s a recognition that the center of world power doesn’t reside in Washington or London or Moscow or Beijing anymore. It’s in the executive suites and luxury resorts behind the global corporate hegemony. This protest dispenses with the middle men (governments) and goes straight after the real power to divest it of whatever credibility it still tries to claim.

The reason we are seeing this movement right now is because Capitalism, the last great ideological system, is in crisis. This isn’t merely a crisis of outcomes (economic depression, financial panic, etc.). It’s a crisis of BELIEF. While people generally believe in the idea of capitalism, a critical mass of people now think that the global capitalist system we currently have is so badly run, so corrupt, so terrible at delivering results that it needs either A) a complete overhaul or B) to be replaced with something new (which equates to the same thing, because the Jabberwock cannot be overhauled. Don’t fool yourself! A Japperwock cannot become anything other than a Jabberwock.).

3. SPECIFIC #OCCUPY STRATEGIES

There is no difference between a person and their absolute responsibility for the consequences of their actions. The concept that a person’s responsibility is subsumed by the corporation they work for (corporate personhood) or the government they serve (national laws, or the customs of the bureaucracy) is a false paradigm. Believing in this false paradigm leads to global suicide.

How do you know you are thinking in the false paradigm? You can catch yourself if you are:

  1. Assuming you must ignore social and environmental consequences in your decisions because they seem too expensive to consider.
  2. Strategizing ways to externalize costs so that the general public, future generations, or third world countries pay to deal with your toxic wastes.
  3. Thinking you can manufacture a product without including its recycle costs in your manufacturing and pricing.
  4. Thinking you can cut old growth forests in Borneo, make products in China, and sell them through Ikea or Walmart.
  5. Thinking that you can follow orders from a superior and kill people with robot planes in Afghanistan.
  6. Thinking you can manufacture, sell, transport, or fire depleted uranium weapons.
  7. Thinking that it does not matter if you consume false-paradigm products. (If most people stopped using Shell Oil or McDonald’s hamburgers for two weeks these firms would be bankrupt.)
  8. Thinking you can be pissed off at your neighbor without changing yourself.
  9. Thinking you can order someone else to stop a third party from creating a better world and not face the personal consequences…

For example, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg thought he could have the owners of Zuccotti Park –Brookfield Properties – shut down #OccupyWallStreet early in the morning of 14 October using the ruse of “cleaning the park.” He thought he could avoid the personal consequences of this decision. He was thinking inside the false paradigm.

#OCCUPY perceived the cleaning order as:

– Bloomberg vs. #OCCUPY.

   – One Mind vs. Many Minds.

   – Linear Thinking vs. Nonlinear Thinking.

From the very beginning Bloomberg had no chance. (This is true for whatever authority figure tries to subdue or suppress the people united. Meshwork meeting technologies far outpower hierarchical intelligence. )

How did #OCCUPY do it? #OCCUPY took immediate actions to delegitimize Bloomberg’s complaint that the park was dirty and unsafe. #OCCUPY reorganized itself and brought in power-washers, brooms, and mops. They deep-cleaned Liberty Square. They hired their own dump truck. They even offered to let cleaners into the square to clean 1/3 of it at a time!

With the Mayor’s complaint de-legitimized, #OCCUPY went on the offensive. It personalized the eviction move. It located Bloomberg. He was at a gala dinner at Ciprianis (a Wall Street restaurant!). They surrounded the restaurant and tried to enter it to deliver a petition with 310,000 signatures. Bloomberg hid, departed from the rear. In short order the deputy mayor announced that the eviction was cancelled!

Remember, every situation is unique, but general group intelligence strategies apply.

Here are some guidelines:

Go straight for the man . Maximize the taint of an authority’s actions on his personal brand. Blame him personally. Pierce his shield of bureaucratic impersonality. For example, #OCCUPY branded the park eviction with the name: BLOOMBERG. This is a global stage. Let’s use it. The reputation of the president /mayor /CEO /general /police chief may not matter much to you, but it certainly matters to him.

Confuse him . Respond to his attack with lots and lots of flashmobs. Go for non-violent system disruption. Shut down bridges and major streets. Overwhelm the system with actions of unprecedented speed and unpredictable volume. As soon as the police arrive in force, disperse and reassemble at new locations. Bikes plus Kids. Disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. More flashmobs equals more disruption. As long as you are under attack in one place, keep the city tied up in knots at other places. NOTE: If they lock down your area, flashmobs are the best way to participate. (Plus, as an added benefit, in running from location to location you get some needed exercise!)

Connect with more people than him . Best way to do this: Eyes in the sky. Get cameras above your action, for example. Stream the feed. The better the quality the more impact it will have. It will play across the world. Think about how important AJs video feed over Tahrirwas when things got hot. Better yet, get AJ to cover it and stream it.

Success story. The flashmob tactic was tried in Panama a couple of years ago by the SUNTRACS construction workers union. With very small groups pre-planted all over the city they drove the police absolutely crazy. Police would show up at location A, the mob would disperse immediately, two text messages and then flashmobs would simultaneously block streets at locations B and C. This worked very well and with much fewer people than #OCCUPY has available. Encourage multiple #OCCUPY flashmob teams to self-organize and operate in parallel!

Continue to exist. Logistics are important. Think ahead. Cold weather is coming fast freezing food, water, everything in a few weeks. #OCCUPY will get tough, impossible with snow blowing. Instead of slowly giving it up and going home with frostbite, consider abandoning the parks. Why not do the “very small groups pre-planted all over the city for flashmobs” all winter long from warm apartments? Print an apartment hospitality directory, or put it online, like the Mennonite Your Way Directory www.mennoniteyourway.com/ It’s time for tribal living.

Become Lady Randomfactor. Many random events that are out of control will wear down and use up the Jabberwock’s resources.  With such a disproportionate cost ratio between your actions and the Jabberwock’s reactions, the Jabberwock is nonviolently bleeding itself to death.

Then become Lord Critical Mass. Except, instead of every Friday, pick one random, unpredictable day (or a couple days) each week to #OCCUPY with a critical mass of people (meaning, enough people to attract attention and cause an impact). Five hundred police come out on Monday expecting the crowd from Sunday to still be there, but people have mysteriously vanished and downtown looks like a Police State. By Wednesday there are only fifty police left, and then suddenly thousands of #OCCUPYers show up there, warm, fed, showered, shaved, and feeling quite chipper, even in the middle of winter.

4. HOW TO DISARM A POLICE OFFICER

These are notes from a video taken October 11, 2011, featuring Chicago lawyer Jerry Boyle of National Lawyers Guild giving a street workshop to #OCCUPYCHICAGO. It contains valuable legal and strategic information for protesters everywhere. It’s an hour long, but completely engaging and well worth watching. It is posted at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17807926by Linda Ross.

Police are trained to think within five legal definitions of force:

  1. Physical presence — a show of force is equal to the use of force.
  2. Verbal direction — instructions and commands.
  3. Empty hand control — no weapons. Physical contact.
  4. Intermediate weapons systems — pepper spray, baton.
  5. Lethal force.

In an interaction with police, you have the power to determine to what degree of force the situation escalates. For example, if an officer speaks to you and you ignore him, you force him to escalate his force. He must speak louder or get angry to get your attention.

Therefore, in non-violent #OCCUPY actions, you can de-escalate force by looking police officers directly in the eyes. Most police officers already sympathize with the goals of #OCCUPY. You can demonstrate compliance with their physical presence and verbal direction by acknowledging them, listening to what they say, and repeating back what you understood. You do not necessarily have to do what they say, but if you stay in relationship with them, acknowledging them, listening and speaking with them (perhaps even being kind to them) then there is a good chance the force can be kept at the verbal level.

You can also determine whether or not you will be arrested. If you do not wish to be arrested then create it so interactions stay within the first two levels of force. By the time an officer goes to empty hand control and grabs you by the arm, you are being arrested.

Police may be tired, angry, scared, or overwhelmed. They may regard dealing with street protests as a distraction from their true work of dealing with criminals. Being frustrated, they may (unconsciously) wish to escalate the level of force in an interaction so that if they do go to the trouble of arresting you, you will be charged with a higher crime. For example, police are trained in pain points. If an angry police officer grabs you he may intentionally apply pressure at a pain point causing you to automatically flail about, which on a video would be hard to distinguish from resisting arrest or attacking the officer, an automatic felony charge for you. Your flailing is also a good excuse for him to use pepper spray, a knee, or his club on you.

Some people recommend that if you are grabbed you should go limp, but if you do, you will likely be trampled or dragged around and might get hurt. If you already know a police officer might grab you in a pain point you can prepare yourself to not react aggressively no matter what. Often, these days, to avoid escalation of force, white shirt police do the actual arresting, with blue-shirt police as their backups.

To disarm a police officer, use the first three levels of force on him before he uses them on you.

For example, at level one: physical presence, to maximize the apparent show of force at a scene, the police may be outfitted in riot gear, head to toe armor, shields, batons, helmets, etc. This is the police officer’s power costume.

Well, you can wear a power costume too.

Consider this, if you wear a suit and tie, the police will have a very difficult time hitting you because blue-shirt police take their orders from people wearing a suit and tie. If you wear a pink bunny suit, it will look very bad on TV seeing a police officer beating on girls dressed in pink bunny suits. If you wear a V mask with your suit and tie they don’t know what you are. This is powerful.

Using the first three levels of force (presence of force, verbal direction, and empty hand control) on a police officer before he uses it on you disarms him. It can look like this: When the police arrive, you scan the group and locate the highest ranking officer. Then, in your suit and tie you smile professionally, make eye contact, hold out your open hands, walk enthusiastically up to the him, shake hands and introduce yourself, “My name is David Applebee. I am a possibility manager. If there are any problems here, let me know what I can do for you. I’ll be right over there.” Physical presence, verbal direction, empty hand control. Sweet.

5. AND HAST THOU SLAIN THE JABBERWOCK?

There’s no question that the #OCCUPY groups have done a great job with constructing a foundation for resilient communities in the heart of many of our most dense urban areas.

People are already considerate with each other, despite personal discomforts. They pitch in to work. Food gets served. The area gets cleaned. There is entertainment. There’s innovation (circle meetings, improvised tech solutions, creative workarounds). There is education (lots of seminars being taught). There is open, leaderless, participatory governance with consensus decision making. There is s treaming media 24x7x365 (interviews, opeds, confrontation scenes, theater pieces). There is legal support for dealing with the complexities of congregating and living in an urban, public space.

A permanent camp in each location means that there is a gathering point for HUGE protests in the near future (quick responses to shocks/events/etc.). These are seed crystals for protests that span hundreds or thousands of cities simultaneously.

All of this is great and this experience will definitely pay off over the next decade as the global economy deteriorates, panics, and dissolves. It will make building resilient communities easier (there are lots of ways to build a resilient community, we’re trying todocument all of the ways how on MiiU).

However, is this experience building a next-culture tribal identity? A global #OCCUPY tribe? Something that can go beyond protest and build something new? A tribe that is woven tightly enough to create new resilient economic and social networks that step into the breach as the current models fail?

6. HOW TO MANUFACTURE A TRIBE

How do we manufacture a resilient community that protects, defends and advances the interests of its members? We build a tribe. Tribal organization is the most survivable of all organizational types, being the dominant cultural form for 99.99% of human history. Like a cockroach, it has proved it can withstand the onslaught of the harshest of environments. Global depression? No problem. (for more, see: Tribes!)

To build a tribal #OCCUPY identity, we will need to manufacture fictive kinship amongst ourselves, that is, we will need to tell each other and the world the story of who we are together. That kinship is built through the following (see Ronfeldt’s paper for some background on this):

  • Story telling. Shared histories and historical narratives.
  • Rites of passage to authentic adulthood (not just a driver’s license and the right to drink and vote) (for more on this see Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Somé, and Secrets of the Talking Jaguar by Martin Prechtel). There are rituals of membership and life transitions. Membership is earned, not given due to the geographic location of your birth, or who your parents happen to be.
  • Obligations. Rules of conduct and honor. The ultimate penalty being expulsion.
  • Egalitarian and often leaderless organization. Sharing is prized.
  • Multi-skilled. Segmental organization (lots of redundancy among parts).
  • Two-way loyalty. The tribe protects the members and the members protect the tribe. If this isn’t implemented, you don’t have a tribe, you have a Kiwanis club.

As the #OCCUPY tribe we seem to be building a stable and recognizable identity. We are experiencing in certain moments the bondedness fictive kinship. Our relationships and commitments to each other, and to our future together, are deepening. As the 99% we are regaining our individual and tribal voices. We are taking back our authority after 6,000 years of patriarchal servitude.

Going to an occupy location and helping out is a rite of passage. There are rules of conduct (growing from a shame culture to an appreciation and personal development culture). #OCCUPY is definitely egalitarian and leaderless. It’s spread out over different geographies. Given the efforts put in to keep the #OCCUPY locations intact, it appears that people have become loyal to the tribe. The only question is whether the tribe truly protects the members. Is the loyalty two way?

How to slay the Jabberwock? Use your innersword of clarity to establish and live within a set of distinctions that are not contained inside the Jabberwock. Then the Jabberwock dies of attrition.

Deeply enjoy the benefits of the #OCCUPY culture. Keep sharing your new distinctions and the ways you got them. Soon you become a bridge to sustainable culture that other people can also cross. We can only go there together.

7. RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

Self Observation by Red Hawk

Tribes! by Seth Godin

Creating by Robert Fritz

Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings by Clinton Callahan

Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez

And articles by Paul Chefurka, especially World Energy and Population

www.nextculture.org

Clinton Callahan, originator of Possibility Management and Expand The Box trainings, author of Radiant Joy Brilliant Love and Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings, founder of Next Culture Research & Training Center in Germany, committed to (more…)

EU bans pre-ticked website boxes to aid consumers

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

– This makes such deep sense to me.   It is only the business types who want to ‘force’ their advertising on us and to maximize their profits with no regard for people’s right not to be manipulated and tricked into purchasing things – they are the only ones that want this sort of thing to be legal.

– Aren’t our societies suppose to exist to maximize the quality of life for all their citizens?   This sort of legislation does just that.

Bravo for the EU.

-Dennis

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

“Pre-ticked” boxes on shopping websites will be banned in European Union states under newly approved legislation.

EU ministers meeting in Luxembourg have passed a set of rules aimed at strengthening consumer rights, which the EU parliament backed in June.

They mean online traders will have to disclose the total cost of a product – including fees – and customers will have to actively opt-in to extras.

Member countries will have two years to implement the rules nationally.

‘Cooling off’ period

Announcing the legislation had been passed, the European Commission cited the example of buying airline tickets online, when customers may have needed to actively decline optional extras such as travel insurance.

“With the new directive, pre-ticked boxes will be banned across the European Union,” it said in a statement.

Customers will also be exempt from any costs of which they were not “properly informed” before placing an order and will be given a 14-day “cooling off” period for withdrawing from a sales contract. The EU’s current mandatory period is seven days.

Traders will not be allowed to make a profit from the charge levied on customers for using a credit card; those with telephone hotlines will only be allowed to charge customers basic call rates.

– more…

 

$30B wasted in Iraq, Afghanistan?

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

– And people wonder why some of us American citizens resent our taxes?

– They collect all these taxes and gift them to the big Wall Street firms that caused the current financial mess and they spend it on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan….   And they waste HUGE amounts of it like we have an endless supply.

– But just let the average citizen get behind on his annual Federal Income Taxes and the entire might of the government comes down on that citizen.

– Well I, for one, have small patience with their desire to collect my taxes when I know that the main thing that is going to be done with them is to make the rich richer and to waste them on foreign adventures.   While in the American homeland the highways and bridges deteriorate, social programs are being cut, unemployment is growing, wages are shrinking and things are generally going to HELL.

– And they really need my taxes.   Yeah, I bet they do.

-dennis

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More than $30 billion — one in every six dollars of U.S. spending in Iraq and Afghanistan — has been wasted, according to a bipartisan commission on wartime contracting.

“Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted through poor planning, vague and shifting requirements, inadequate competition, substandard contract management and oversight, lax accountability, weak interagency coordination, and subpar performance or outright misconduct by some contractors and federal employees,” the report’s co-authors wrote in a Washington Post editorial on Sunday.

The full findings of the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan will be submitted to Congress on Wednesday. The report was written by Christopher Shays, a former Republican congressman from Connecticut, and Mark Thibault, a former deputy director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency.

Examples of wasteful projects abound: the authors note that U.S. taxpayers spent $40 million on a prison that the Iraqi government did not want, and in any case was never finished. Another $300 million was spent on a power plant in Afghanistan that requires technical expertise beyond the Afghan government’s capabilities.

The number of contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq has sometimes exceeded the number of U.S. military forces on the ground, with the ratio usually being held at roughly one to one over the years according to the report.

The report will include 15 recommendations on how to reduce waste, including the recommendation that there be an official that can serve in both the Office of Management and Budget and the National Security Council in order to coordinate the many agencies involved in contracts.

– To the original…

 

Arctic ‘tipping point’ may not be reached

Saturday, September 10th, 2011

Scientists say current concerns over a tipping point in the disappearance of Arctic sea ice may be misplaced.

Danish researchers analysed ancient pieces of driftwood in north Greenland which they say is an accurate way to measure the extent of ancient ice loss.

Writing in the journal Science, the team found evidence that ice levels were about 50% lower 5,000 years ago.

They say changes to wind systems can slow down the rate of melting.

They argue, therefore, that a tipping point under current scenarios is unlikely.

While modern observations by ship and by satellite give us a very accurate picture of the recent state of the ice, historic information is limited. The ice comes and goes without leaving a permanent record.

But a Danish team believes it has found an indirect method that gives a clear picture of the ice loss dating back 11,000 years.

Dr Svend Funder from the Natural History Museum of Denmark led several expeditions to inhospitable regions of Northern Greenland. On these frozen shores the Danish team noticed several pieces of ancient driftwood. They concluded that it could be an important method of unlocking the secrets of the ancient ice.

“Driftwood cannot float across the water, it has to be ferried across the ocean on ice, and this voyage takes several years, which means that driftwood is actually a signal of multi-year sea ice in the ocean and it is this ice that is at risk at the moment” said Dr Funder.

Carbon dating was used to determine the age of the wood. And figuring out its origins also yielded important information.

“It’s so lovely that drift wood from Siberia is mainly larch and from North America is mainly spruce. So if we see there was more larch or spruce we can see that the wind system had changed and in some periods there was little spruce and in other periods there was lots,” he said.

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What men can learn from women about leadership in the 21st century

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

A new Northwestern University meta-analysis, an integration of a large number of studies addressing the same question, shows that leadership continues to be viewed as culturally masculine. The studies found that women experience two primary forms of prejudice: They are viewed as less qualified or natural than men in most leadership roles, and when women do adopt culturally masculine behaviors often required by these roles, they may be viewed as inappropriate or presumptuous.

When generalizing about any population segment, especially such large and diverse segments as male and female leaders, there is bound to be a degree of inaccuracy and stereotyping. Still, research finds that predominantly communal qualities, such as being nice or compassionate, are more associated with women; and predominantly agentic qualities, such as being assertive or competitive, are more associated with men.

For a long time, these agentic qualities have been culturally associated with successful leadership. But the 21st century is seeing the combination of new employees, new technologies and new global business realities add up to one word: collaboration. New workers are demanding it, advances in technology are enabling it, and the borderless organization of the future is dictating that future productivity gains can only be achieved by creating teams that are networked to span corporate and national boundaries.

These new business realities usher in the need for a new leadership model, one that replaces command and control with transparency and inclusion. This will increasingly highlight the value of a more feminine approach. Where in the past communal behaviors naturally favored by women may have been obstacles to leadership success, in a collaborative future they may well become an edge.

Women employ a more participative leadership style, are more likely to share information and power, and have strong relational skills that make them seem empathic to their staffs. In both laboratory studies and observations of real leaders, the opposite was often found with men. Male leaders tend to be more transactional in their business dealings, favor a more hierarchical and directive approach, and appear more typically to convey formal authority.

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Stop Coddling the Super-Rich

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

– From the New York Times – an Op-Ed by Warren Buffett.

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OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

The taxes I refer to here include only federal income tax, but you can be sure that any payroll tax for the 400 was inconsequential compared to income. In fact, 88 of the 400 in 2008 reported no wages at all, though every one of them reported capital gains. Some of my brethren may shun work but they all like to invest. (I can relate to that.)

I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.

Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances. They’ve been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.

Job one for the 12 is to pare down some future promises that even a rich America can’t fulfill. Big money must be saved here. The 12 should then turn to the issue of revenues. I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.

But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

– Research thanks to Rolf A.

Truthout

Monday, August 15th, 2011

– I like what Truthout is about.  Sometimes, they deluge me with so much stuff I just have to step away for a bit but I always find what they’ve got to say interesting and closely aligned to my own view of the world.

– This morning, I made a donation to their organization because they sent me a message summarizing what they are about and what the big issues are, globally, and I found I really resonated with what they had to say.

– Below , is the text of their  message:

– dennis

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We’re deep in the battle over the fate of the United States. Will we solidify our government as a plutocracy – a late-stage empire that can serve only the interests of the super-rich? Will we continue to pursue policies around the globe that destroy the environment in pursuit of profits? Or will we retrench, and work to heal our bleeding political system before it’s too late?

The rest of the world is rising up against the cult of unrestrained free-market capitalism and money-power. From Tunisia to Egypt to Spain to Portugal to France to Germany to Greece to Israel to Chile to the UK, anti-austerity movements are on the rise, and the fight is playing out in chaotic, unpredictable and often tragic ways.

Everyone is asking why such a revolt isn’t happening here in the US.

One answer is simple – the US has invested billions of dollars in institutions that promote and protect consumerism-as-culture, both here and abroad. But activists around the country – whose hopes for change were dismantled over the past three years – are reuniting. The fight is coming here; it’s just a matter of time.

Our country is the epicenter of backwards, self-destructive, consumption-driven thinking. But it’s also the birthplace of amazing transformative struggles that have changed the world. Which side are you on?

– If you want to donate…

Telex to help defeat web censors

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

Developed by US computer scientists the software, called Telex, hides data from banned websites inside traffic from sites deemed safe.

The software draws on well-known encryption techniques to conceal data making it hard to decipher.

So far, Telex is only a prototype but in tests it has been able to defeat Chinese web filters.

Outside in

Telex was developed to get around the problem that stops other anti-censorship technologies being more effective, said Dr Alex Halderman, one of the four-strong team that has worked on Telex since early 2010.

Many existing anti-censorship systems involve connecting to a server or network outside the country in which a user lives.

This approach relies on spreading information about these servers and networks widely enough that citizens hear about them but not so much that censors can find out and block them.

Telex turns this approach on its head, said Dr Halderman.

“Instead of having some server outside the network that’s participating we are doing it in the core of the network,” he said.

Telex exploits the fact that few net-censoring nations block all access and most are happy to let citizens visit a select number of sites regarded as safe.

When a user wants to visit a banned site they initially point their web browser at a safe site. As they connect, Telex software installed on their PC puts a tag or marker on the datastream being sent to that safe destination.

Net routers outside the country recognise that the datastream has been marked and re-direct a request to a banned site. Data from censored webpages is piped back to the user in a datastream disguised to resemble that from safe sites.

– More…