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Phi Beta Iota:  Kudos to Christopher B. Bedford for his many contributions, this one in particular is most timely now as a global movement for redirecting the manner in which land (and water) are “owned.”  As with our native forebearers, land can no longer be owned by individuals–community land trusts are the essential way forward.  This is the practice in many countries.  This 37 minute DVD is revolutionary.

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See Also:

E. F. Schumacher Society

Small Is Beautiful, 25th Anniversary Edition: Economics As If People Mattered: 25 Years Later . . . With Commentaries

Obama says ‘Drill, baby, drill.’ Will new oil policy ease gas prices?

President Obama used his weekly address to announce steps to promote greater domestic oil production and reduce the burden of high gas prices. Republicans say it’s not enough.

Big Oil’s Political Ploy

Whatever else we might say about Big Oil in the United States, we have to give the industry credit for one thing: it has mastered the art of scamming us with a perfectly straight face.

Freshmen challenge energy subsidies

Pompeo and Labrador were joined by Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Mike Needham of Heritage Action Fund. The two organizations joined a coalition of conservative groups in March, including Americans for Prosoperity, in a letter calling for an end to energy subsidies.

 

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Phi Beta Iota: US politicians have substituted ideology for intelligence (decision-support) and borrowing for thinking.  There is nothing intelligent in US energy policy, because there is no policy–just a long string of subsidies and hand-outs and tax exemptions.  The oil drilling decisions are an example of doing the wrong thing righter, instead of the right thing (Russell Ackoff).  The “policy” decisions are also hypocritical because nothing being decided today will have substantive effect in less than ten years.  Here’s what an intelligent government would use to think about energy futures…and everything else, all together.

Cheery Waves Recommends....

Digging Deeper, Seeing Farther: Supercomputers Alter Science

By JOHN MARKOFF

New York Times, April 25, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO — Inside a darkened theater a viewer floats in a redwood forest displayed with Imax-like clarity on a cavernous overhead screen.

The hovering sensation gives way to vertigo as the camera dives deeper into the forest, approaches a branch of a giant redwood tree, and then plunges first into a single leaf and then into an individual cell. Inside the cell the scene is evocative of the 1966 science fiction movie “Fantastic Voyage,” in which Lilliputian humans in a minuscule capsule take a medical journey through a human body.

There is an important difference — “Life: A Cosmic Journey,” a multimedia presentation now showing at the new Morrison Planetarium here at the California Academy of Sciences, relies not just on computer animation techniques, but on a wealth of digitized scientific data as well.

Read balance of article….

Comment and Seven Graphics Below the Line…

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Venessa Miemis

Is there an App for that? Sustainability & Corporate Social Responsibility as Virtual Currency

Venessa Miemis | April 18, 2011 at 8:10 pm | Tags: corporate social responsibility, currency, sustainability | Categories: future of the web, projects | URL: http://wp.me/pswMe-ss

I came across a few cool projects today that made me wonder when we’ll have a currency for sustainability. I’ve written a bunch about how our conceptualization of “money” and “currency” is being expanded as we find new ways to measure and make transparent aspects of wealth that were previously hidden. For example, services like PeerIndex and Klout seek to measure influence, authority, trust, and how well your message resonates with an audience, hence establishing online reputation currencies.

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167 Page PDF

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PDF (15 Pages)

See Also:

Integrity Emergent: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs

2011 Cyber-Command or IO 21 + IO Roots

Harvestmark offers a mobile phone application and website that allows consumers to trace their food back to the farmers who grew it.  How much do we know about what is on our plate, and how easy is it to trace its source?

Source BBC

Phi Beta Iota: This is HUGE because it enables “true cost” information for each individual product to be posted on the web and instantly available to the smart phone user (the billion that buy most of the toxic products).  In many ways, this one capability marks the beginning of the integration of the Internet of people, the Internet of things, and the Internet of facts.

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Related:

True Cost Wiki

Sourcemap.org

Chuck Spinney Recommends....

Advocates of humanitarian intervention like to use Kosovo as an example of a “good” war to distinguish it from Bush’s bad war in Iraq and the Bush/Obama bungles in Afghanistan.  But Kosovo was a template for bungling and blowback in the wars of empire that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The below article is outlines some of the reasons why this is so.

Chuck Spinney
The Blaster

Wrong choice in Kosovo

By GREGORY CLARK,  Japan Times, 1 March 2011

A recent Council of Europe report says that during and after the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict, militia leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) tortured and killed hundreds of Serbs and political rivals in secret Albanian hideouts, removed their organs for sale and dumped their bodies in local rivers.

The report added that these people were also heavily involved in drug, sex and illegal immigrant trafficking across Europe. Yet while all this was going on, the NATO powers had decreed that Serbia should be bombed into accepting the KLA as Kosovo’s legitimate rulers — rather than the more popular Democratic League of Kosovo headed by the nationalist intellectual Ibrahim Rugova advocating nonviolent independence.

Recent years have not been kind to Western policymakers. They have shown an almost unerring ability to choose the wrong people for the wrong policies. Think back to the procession of incompetents chosen to rescue Indochina from the communist enemy. Does anyone even remember their names today? Yet at the time they were supposed to be nation-savers.  Read more….

Phi Beta Iota: It is now known that the World Wars were enabled by bankers intent on empowering the evil side with loans so as to force the good side to borrow heavily.  Bankers–and corporate mercenary interests with zero respect for “the public interest,” have created a world of grostesque inquality instead of a prosperous world at peace.  Revolution 2.0 is connecting the public–that is phase one–to be followed by phase two, an informed public that will not brook corruption.

It’s not just bad harvests and climate change – it’s also speculators that are behind record prices. And it’s the planet’s poorest who pay
John Vidal Sunday 23 January 2011

article

Just under three years ago, people in the village of Gumbi in western Malawi went unexpectedly hungry. Not like Europeans do if they miss a meal or two, but that deep, gnawing hunger that prevents sleep and dulls the senses when there has been no food for weeks.

Oddly, there had been no drought, the usual cause of malnutrition and hunger in southern Africa, and there was plenty of food in the markets. For no obvious reason the price of staple foods such as maize and rice nearly doubled in a few months. Unusually, too, there was no evidence that the local merchants were hoarding food. It was the same story in 100 other developing countries. There were food riots in more than 20 countries and governments had to ban food exports and subsidise staples heavily.

The explanation offered by the UN and food experts was that a “perfect storm” of natural and human factors had combined to hyper-inflate prices. US farmers, UN agencies said, had taken millions of acres of land out of production to grow biofuels for vehicles, oil and fertiliser prices had risen steeply, the Chinese were shifting to meat-eating from a vegetarian diet, and climate-change linked droughts were affecting major crop-growing areas. The UN said that an extra 75m people became malnourished because of the price rises.

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GOOD magazine article

Although snuffing out dissent and cutting citizens off from the world aren’t actions generally associated with the American ideal, two U.S. companies are helping the Egyptian government do just that as populist protests continue shaking the African nation.

The tear gas and smoke grenade manufacturer Combined Systems, Inc. is based out of Jamestown, Pennsylvania. But its wares have been showing up all over the Middle East as of late. On January 20, a photographer with the Eurpean PressPhoto agency was killed when a CSI tear gas canister struck him in the head at a protest in Tunisia. And throughout yesterday and today, CSI smoke bombs and tear gas have clogged the air and lungs in Cairo.

A less visible but possibly more important American-Egyptian partnership is that between the tech company Narus and the Mubarak autocracy. A subsidiary of Boeing, Narus sells hyper-complex, slightly creepy mass surveillance equipment. Its most famous creation is Narus Insight, “a supercomputer system which is allegedly used by the National Security Agency and other entities to perform mass surveillance and monitoring of public and corporate Internet communications in real time.”

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