Gen Dempsey said it was unclear the latest steps taken by EU leaders would be enough to hold the eurozone together, adding that a break-up could have consequences for the Pentagon.
Twenty-six of the 27 EU countries have agreed to forge a tighter fiscal union.
Only the UK refused to sign up to a new treaty, citing national interest.
Gen Dempsey, who is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an event hosted by the Atlantic Council, a Washington think-tank: "The eurozone is at great risk."
"I know that they've taken some measures here with the 17 members of the eurozone to try to better align... monetary and fiscal policy. But it's unclear, to me at least, that that will be the glue that actually holds it together."
Funding impact?
Gen Dempsey previously served as the Army's Chief of Staff and as a general in Iraq.
He suggested that part of his concern was that the US military could be exposed to any unravelling of the eurozone "because of the potential for civil unrest and the break-up of the union".
More...
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Euro crisis: US General Martin Dempsey warns of unrest
Umberto Eco in conversation with Paul Holdengräber
http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/umberto-eco
This conversation took place at Kensington Town Hall on 19th November 2011.
Speakers:
UMBERTO ECO: Italian semiotician, philosopher, literary critic and novelist
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Director of LIVE from the New York Public Library where he has interviewed and hosted President Clinton, Norman Mailer, Spike Lee and Jay-Z
Event info:
CONSPIRACY, PARANOIA & THE NOVEL
A Conversation with Umberto Eco.
* Writing fiction about the real
* Exploring the persistence of conspiracies
* Adapting "The Name of the Rose" for the internet generation
* Grasping the infinity of lists
* Exploring the future of books
* Losing yourself in a 50,000-volume library
These are some of the topics Umberto Eco will be discussing with Paul Holdengräber, Director of LIVE at the New York Public Library.
Their wide-ranging conversation will in part focus on Eco's latest work of fiction, The Prague Cemetery. The book is an historical pseudo-reconstruction set in a 19th-century Europe teeming with secret service forgeries, Jesuit plots, murders and conspiracies, and covering everything from the unification of Italy, the Paris Commune, the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It has been criticised by both the Vatican-backed newspaper the Osservatore Romano and the Chief Rabbi of Rome..
~ ~ ~
At a booksigning in New York City, November 2011. He was asked "why are you fascinated with conpiracy theories?" and he responded "I'm fascinated by the stupidity of the people who take them seriously..."
On Occupy Wall Street & the legacy of the Paris Commune
Excerpted from Commune plus one by James Panero:
Occupy Wall Street is but the latest revival of a spectacle that has been performed many times before—not necessarily in the Arab Spring, which saw regimes toppled through political means, but in certain incarnations of idealistic vision that emerged out of a seventy-two-day experiment in Paris nearly a century and a half ago. Before there were the Tompkins Square Park riots, the student takeovers of 1968, or Occupy Wall Street, there was the Paris Commune of 1871.
The Commune was born in a moment not unlike our own. After the extravagant Second Empire of Napoleon III came crashing down in the Franco-Prussian War, the establishment of the Third Republic left French radicals with unrealistic expectations for the new government. “A majority of the Republicans in the 1870s proved to be more conservative than they had been under the Liberal Empire, even less interested in social reform than before,” writes Roger L. Williams in his French Revolution of 1870–1871.
On March 18, two generals from the new government entered Paris and ascended Montmartre to recover cannon left over from the Prussian siege. A Parisian militia, along with some regular soldiers, turned on the generals and executed them. Local women desecrated their corpses. In The Terrible Year: The Paris Commune, 1871, Alistair Horne recounts how “maenads from the mob squatted and urinated upon them.” Many years later, the Sacré-Cœur basilica would memorialize their deaths and the thousands that followed, including the death of the Archbishop of Paris, murdered in cold blood.
As the Republican government fled, the city created its own communal government. Rather than merely reestablish municipal services, the Commune attempted to inaugurate a “new political era, experimental, positive, scientific,” declared by manifesto: “It is the end of the old government and clerical world, of militarism, of monopolists, of privileges to which the proletariat owes its servitude, the Nation its miseries and disasters.”
The barricades went up, and the Commune set about becoming an idealistic autonomous body inside the French state with much to hope for and little that could actually be done. Among its few lackluster achievements was the suppression of pawnshops and the prohibition of night-baking, reducing “all Paris to stale bread.” As Lord Elton writes in The Revolutionary Idea in France: 1789–1871: “Upon one thing they were in substantial agreement—the principle of the Commune. The principle of the Commune was the indispensable preliminary to the new Revolution. . . . The Commune was revolutionary not because of what it did but because of what it claimed.”
The Neuroeconomics Revolution - Robert J. Shiller
The neuroeconomic revolution has passed some key milestones quite recently, notably the publication last year of neuroscientist Paul Glimcher’s book Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis – a pointed variation on the title of Paul Samuelson’s 1947 classic work, Foundations of Economic Analysis, which helped to launch an earlier revolution in economic theory. And Glimcher himself now holds an appointment at New York University’s economics department (he also works at NYU’s Center for Neural Science).
To most economists, however, Glimcher might as well have come from outer space. After all, his doctorate is from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine’s neuroscience department. Moreover, neuroeconomists like him conduct research that is well beyond their conventional colleagues’ intellectual comfort zone, for they seek to advance some of the core concepts of economics by linking them to specific brain structures.
Much of modern economic and financial theory is based on the assumption that people are rational, and thus that they systematically maximize their own happiness, or as economists call it, their “utility.” When Samuelson took on the subject in his 1947 book, he did not look into the brain, but relied instead on “revealed preference.” People’s objectives are revealed only by observing their economic activities. Under Samuelson’s guidance, generations of economists have based their research not on any physical structure underlying thought and behavior, but only on the assumption of rationality.
As a result, Glimcher is skeptical of prevailing economic theory, and is seeking a physical basis for it in the brain. He wants to transform “soft” utility theory into “hard” utility theory by discovering the brain mechanisms that underlie it.
In particular, Glimcher wants to identify brain structures that process key elements of utility theory when people face uncertainty: “(1) subjective value, (2) probability, (3) the product of subjective value and probability (expected subjective value), and (4) a neuro-computational mechanism that selects the element from the choice set that has the highest ‘expected subjective value’…”
While Glimcher and his colleagues have uncovered tantalizing evidence, they have yet to find most of the fundamental brain structures. Maybe that is because such structures simply do not exist, and the whole utility-maximization theory is wrong, or at least in need of fundamental revision. If so, that finding alone would shake economics to its foundations.
If You Pick Us, Do We Not Bleed?
In a room near Maida Vale, a journalist for The Nation wrote around 1914, an unfortunate creature is strapped to the table of an unlicensed vivisector. When the subject is pinched with a pair of forceps, it winces. It is so strapped that its electric shudder of pain pulls the long arm of a very delicate lever that actuates a tiny mirror. This casts a beam of light on the frieze at the other end of the room, and thus enormously exaggerates the tremor of the creature. A pinch near the right-hand tube sends the beam 7 or 8 feet to the right, and a stab near the other wire sends it as far to the left.
“Thus,” the journalist concluded, “can science reveal the feelings of even so stolid a vegetable as the carrot.”
Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, the aforementioned carrot vivisector, was a serious man of science. Born in what is today Bangladesh in 1858, Bose was a quintessential polymath: physicist, biologist, botanist, archaeologist. He was the first person from the Indian subcontinent to receive a U.S. patent, and is considered one of the fathers of radio science, alongside such notables as Tesla, Marconi, and Popov. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1920, becoming the first Indian to be honored by the Royal Society in the field of science. It’s clear that Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was a scientist of some weight. And, like many scientists of weight, he has become popularly known for his more controversial pursuits — in Bose’s case, his experiments in plant physiology.
Perhaps it was his work in radio waves and electricity that inspired Bose’s investigations into what we might call the invisible world. Bose strongly felt that physics could go far beyond what was apparent to the naked eye. Around 1900, Bose began his investigations into the secret world of plants. He found that all plants, and all parts of plants, have a sensitive nervous system not unlike that of animals, and that their responses to external stimuli could be measured and recorded. Some plant reactions can be seen easily in sensitive plants like the Mimosa, which, when irritated, will react with the sudden shedding or shrinking of its leaves. But when Bose attached his magnifying device to plants from which it was more difficult to witness a response, such as vegetables, he was astounded to discover that they, too, became excited when vexed. All around us, Bose realized, the plants are communicating. We just don't notice it.
More...
R.I.P. Lynn Margulis, Biological Rebel
Lynn Margulis was among the most creative challengers of mainstream Darwinian thinking of the late 20th century. She challenged what she called “ultra-Darwinian orthodoxy” with several ideas. The first, and most successful, is the concept of symbiosis. Darwin and his heirs had always emphasized the role that competition between individuals and species played in evolution. In the 1960′s, however, Margulis began arguing that symbiosis had been an equally important factor–and perhaps more important–in the evolution of life.
More...
“Live Like a Poet! At Home in the Bateau Lavoir,” by Rosanna Warren
On April 13, 1904, Pablo Picasso and his friend the Catalan painter Sebastià Junyer Vidal travelled from Barcelona to Paris and installed themselves in Montmartre in the studio just vacated by the Basque ceramicist and sculptor Paco Durrio. Junyer Vidal paid the rent. Called “La Maison du Trappeur” (The Trapper’s House), later renamed Le Bateau Lavoir by its denizens, this ex-piano factory and ex-locksmith shop converted to a congeries of studios in 1889 could be entered on the first floor from the rue Ravignan, but plunged in the rear down three storeys to the rue Garreau. Various Spanish artists had preceded Picasso in the building, including his older friends Ricard Canals and Joaquim Sunyer. In the 1880s it had been a popular haunt for anarchists, Gauguin had visited often, and the poet-dramatic Paul Fort had lived there while directing his Symbolist Théâtre de l’Art across the square. Poet Max Jacob, who visited every day and later lived there for a while, evoked it often. In a lecture in 1937 he remembered: “Picasso returned with what the dealers have called the Blue Period paintings, vaguely imitative of El Greco. He led me to the crown of the Butte Montmartre. We scorned all previous art and all the schools, and in the evenings, to amuse ourselves, we improvised plays, without spectators, which we never wrote down and which concluded in wild bursts of laughter. He lived at 13 rue Ravignan, today called the Place Emile Goudeau, a sort of hangar made of ill-fitting boards, at once cellar and attic, poised on a kind of cliff Montmartre still hardly conceals with its huge new apartment houses. Our neighbors were quasi-laundresses (de vagues blanchisseuses) and a fruit and vegetable vendor, and those poor people complained of the noise Picasso’s bitch Frika made at night with her chain.”In a memoir from 1933, Jacob gave even more detail: “A real barn, that studio of Picasso’s, with exposed beams, walls made of ill-fitting boards, an unbelievable floor on which one couldn’t walk without waking the neighbors…The admirable Mme. Coudray, the concierge, knew how to be kind when the rent was due, and how to put up with noise. Ah! Those dear old days of poverty, work, friendship, and joy. Many of the studios were cellars, and the stairs were never swept. Everything was made of wood.”
Junyer Vidal returned soon to Barcelona, so during Picasso’s first six weeks at the Bateau Lavoir the crowd was reduced to Jacob, a theatrical thief named Manolo, and a Gypsy guitarist, Fabián de Castro, who slept on the floor. Jacob visited every day. The complex tone of their friendship, tinged with Jacob’s adoration, irony, and self-abasement, can be gleaned from this memoir the poet composed in 1931:
It’s 1904, Picasso is already strong but his visitors are still only the picturesque Manolo and a poor little Jew (that’s what Vollard called him) who doesn’t believe he’s a poet. I lived at Barbès. I arrived at 13 rue Ravignan early in the morning. To my own bare bed, and my dark little work table, I preferred this doorway that had pretensions to grandeur a hundred years earlier, and Picasso’s narrow door decorated with bits of practical advice. It was at the end of a catwalk corridor, above the invisible cliffs of Montmartre geology, at the end of a cliff of stairs.
I called out his name. Hardly awake, Picasso opened the door. I had arrived across all the stone steps of Montmartre and oceanic Paris seen from on high.
[ ... ]
Picasso plays the role, in this narrative, of liberating genius. Jacob told the memoirist Robert Guiette, “Picasso had come back from Spain and found Max desperate over the loss of his job. ‘What kind of life is that?’ Picasso asked. ‘Live like the poets!’ ” The liberation, the imperative to follow a life of art, extended even to physical appearance. Jacob told Maurice Martin du Gard in 1920, “It’s Picasso who changed my life…It was he who told me, ‘Shave off your beard.’ He who told me, ‘Take off your pince-nez, wear a monocle. Don’t be time-puncher. Live like a poet.’ ”
More...
Anonymous : Open Letter to the World's Journalists
Greetings,
This is an open letter to all journalists of the free world. We encourage you to stand forth in solidarity with your fellow journalists who have been arrested in Turkey. Currently the count is now up to one hundred and seventeen members of the press and mainstream media. This is an attack on free speech and democracy not only for the citizens of Turkey but also for the world.
We ask the world's media and journalists to investigate and dig into the cult leader Fethulah Gulen and into his cult followers who have been placed around the world to open schools and business. Gulen and cult members are trying to dominate the world's education systems and raking billions of dollars annually with no regard for law, safety and equal rights in any country that they have infiltrated, it is now time to hold them accountable. Gulen has tremendous political clout in Turkey and his cult members abuses the privileges to serve the public by labeling those who stand against them or to write about them by calling them terrorists for which they arrested for.
Gulen has had already over one thousand lawsuits filed against private citizens in his home country for insulting him or his agenda. They abuse the democracy to ensure fear and scare tactics against anyone who wishes to challenge them. This should never be tolerated and we should all fight back. He told his followers to do the same through his own private media outlet, the Today's Zaman. However in free and a true democratic country Gulen has no power to control the media. We will not be silenced. We stand with the protestors of Turkey and to news writers worldwide.
Gulen, recently in one of his weekly video broadcasts to cult members favors the idea of censoring the internet, to cease the flow of information and journalistic creativity. He approves of filtering, censoring websites and government controlled monitoring systems to spy on the common citizen.
We ask the journalists from around the world to research further and to write about the Fethullah Gulen cult and their objectives in every free country around the world. We ask for solidarity in that you the world media and demand the journalists to be released. We ask for radio, television, newspaper, bloggers and tweeters to get behind us and to share this message to as many media outlets as possible.
Anonymous will always stand for the free flow of information around the world, for human rights, for free speech and democracy around the globe. It is time to prove that the pen to become mightier the sword. We stand with you journalists of the internet and the entire free world. We ask that you protest with us and expose the corrupt Gulen Movement and for what they really stand for. We ask to raise global awareness. We ask that you help protect our children from the misinformed. We ask that you help hold those accountable the corrupt enablers in the public view. Fellow Anonymous members will continue to help spread this message to as many media outlets as well.
"We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."
The Siberian Shamanism Origins of Santa Claus: Reindeer, Pine Trees, and.. Mushrooms?
Many of the traditions we see across the world that are tied to the Christmas holidays have a suprising similarity to the ancient traditions of Siberian Shamans. Through the description below, you can easily see the role of Santa Claus being filled by the local shaman. His gift to everyone on Chistmas (Winter Solsitice)... dried out mushrooms that were hung by the fire with care.
It all begins with a mushroom. Yes. A mushroom. Did you expect it to begin with something man made? Then you’re not thinking far back enough. Humanity’s first interactions were with earthly things.
The name of the mushroom is Amanita muscaria, also called Fly Agaric. Muscaria is a psychotropic, causing visions and altered states. It is also toxic, and must be handled in a particular manner so as to get the psychedelic effects without the toxic ones. You may have heard of the word “shaman”, which is a word from the Tungus-speaking people of Siberia, to connote a religious specialist.(1) The Tungusic are Russian indigenous people who live in the arctic circle (north pole) and they are reindeer herders. A shaman dealt with the mushrooms, as both a safety practice and as part of the spirituality of the people.
-----
The shaman would collect the mushrooms in a bag and deliver them to families, who would then often hang them in socks around the fireplace to dry – the mushrooms would be ready to share their revelatory gifts in the morning of the solstice.
Amanita Muscaria grows only beneath a Christmas tree (coniferous/pine tree) in a symbiotic, non-parasitic relationship with the roots of the tree. (6) It used to be thought to be the fruit of the tree.
More...REVOLUTION has BEGUN (OCCUPY MOVEMENT)
Occupy Movement set to song entitled NOW by MICHAEL JAMES DORRIS.
Occupy Wall St - The Revolution Is Love
"Love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says 'more for you is less for me.' But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too. If you love somebody their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. This shift of consciousness is universal in everybody, 99% and 1%." ~ Charles Eisenstein
*NAMED ONE OF TOP 10 MUST-WATCH OCCUPY WALL ST VIDEOS*
This short film was Directed by Ian MacKenzie http://ianmack.com
Co-produced with Velcrow Ripper http://www.velcrowripper.com
Camera: Ian Mackenzie and Velcrow Ripper
Editing: Ian Mackenzie
Interview by: Velcrow Ripper
Watch video with English/Spanish/French/Greek and many more subtitles
http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/06HYpGK1jhTJ/info/
CHARLES EISENSTEIN is a teacher, speaker, and writer focusing on themes of civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution.
READ CHARLES BOOK
Visit http://sacred-economics.com to learn more about his ideas for a new economy.
Transcript:
"This movement isn't about the 99% defeating or toppling the 1%. You know the next chapter of that story, which is that the 99% create a new 1%. That's not what it's about.
What we want to create is the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible. A sacred world. A world that works for everybody. A world that is healing. A world of peace.
You can't just say "We demand a world of peace. Demands have to be specific. Anything that people can articulate can only be articulated within the language of the current political discourse. And that entire political discourse is already too small. And that's why making explicit demands reduces the movement, and takes the heart out of it. So it's a real paradox, and I think the movement understands that.
The system isn't working for the 1% either. You know if you were a CEO, you would be making the same choices they do. The institutions have their own logic. Life is pretty bleak at the top too - and all the baubles of the rich are this phoney compensation for the loss of what's really important. The loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy. The loss of meaning.
Everybody wants to live a life of meaning. And today, we live in a money economy where we don't really depend on the gifts of anybody. But we buy everything. Therefore we don't really need anybody, because whoever grew my food, or made my clothes, or built by house, well if they die, or if I alienate them, or if they don't like me, that's okay because I can just pay someone else to do it.
And it's really hard to create community if the underlying knowledge is "we don't need each other." So people kind of get together and act nice, or maybe they consume together. But joint consumption doesn't create intimacy. Only joint creativity and gifts create intimacy and connection.
You have such gifts, that are important. Just as every species has an important gift to give to an ecosystem, and the extinction of any species hurts everybody. The same is true of each person, that you have a necessary and important gift to give.
And that for a long time our minds have told us that maybe we're crazy, that maybe we're imagining things, that's its crazy to live according to what you want to give. But I think now, as more and more people wake up to the truth, that we're here to give, and wake up to that desire, and wake up to the fact that other way isn't working anyway - the more reinforcement we have from people around us that this isn't crazy. This is makes sense. This is how to live.
And as we get that reinforcement, then our minds and our logic no longer have to fight against the logic of the heart which wants us to be of service. This shift of consciousness that inspires such things is universal, 99% and the 1% and it's awakening in different people in different ways.
I think love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says 'more for you is less for me.' But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too. If you love somebody their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings.
That's love, love is the expansion of the self to include the other. And that's a different kind of revolution. There's no one to fight. There's no evil to fight. There's no other in this revolution.
Everybody has a unique calling and it's really time to listen to that. That's what the future is going to be. It's time to get ready for it, and contribute to it, and help make it happen.
War on Syria Cover-Up Update: Who is Breaking the Blackout?
Sibel Edmonds reports:
18 days ago, on November 21, here at Boiling Frogs Post, I reported on the ongoing joint US-NATO secret training camp in the US air force base in Incirlik, Turkey, which began operations in April- May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria. I had received the information for that story from multiple sources including highly credible insiders in Turkey and government insiders here in the US. You can read the story here.
My follow up piece on December 3 included the intentional blackout of this multiple-sourced and well-documented exposé. Here are a few excerpts from that story:
I immediately started checking our infamous US mainstream media sites- still nothing on this significant information. I then contacted one of my high-level sources and asked why he had come to me with his documented report instead of going directly to the big guys. With several credible insiders as his corroborators and a high-level official in Turkey, he would have no problem getting their attention. And his response? Well here it is minus a few expletives:
More...Who said we didn’t go to MSM first? We got them the info back in October. First they were interested and drooling. At least the reporters. Then, they disappeared. We sat and waited for a few weeks, and no one followed up. It is Turkey. It is NATO. It is our CIA guys. The media hot shots would not touch those cases without State Department sanction attached…
The insane wealth of Walmart’s founding family
There’s been a constant stream of headlines about the widening gap between rich and poor for months now, but this is pretty remarkable: Just six members of the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune, possess wealth equal to that of the entire bottom 30 percent of Americans.
That’s according to a new analysis by Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley’s Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics.
Military officials hold “Off the Record” press briefing on Bradley Manning
An anonymous source has revealed to representatives of the Bradley Manning Support Network that military officials conducted a non-publicized press briefing this morning for selected journalists, to outline restrictions that will be placed on members of the media at the upcoming hearings for the accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower.
“The military is attempting to apply an embedded journalist framework to these proceedings,” said Jeff Paterson, an organizer with the Bradley Manning Support Network. “As in combat zones, these reporters receive special access to information in return for favorable coverage. Meanwhile, independently minded journalists are left out. It’s indefensible for the Army to apply this to a court martial process that by law is open to both the media and public.”
The source, who was familiar with the details of today’s private briefing, noted that fewer than ten seats are expected to be made available to journalists and members of the public in the courtroom. Although a closed-circuit viewing area may be made available to additional reporters, the television feed will most likely be cut for large segments of the trial, he said. The source added that military officials intend to invoke unspecified threats to national security in order to control the flow of information to the public.
Tahrir Square: Behind the Scene
Photos and story here.
~ ~ ~
Discussion thread on Occupy strategy and ideology: How do we best stick it to the Man? 
International human rights day 2011: 179 jailed journalists, free media under threat
Thomas Hammarberg, below, launched the publication Human rights and a changing media landscape at a press conference in London, hosted by Article 19, on 8 December.
Impunity encourages further murders
“Journalists are murdered or threatened with violence, state authorities seek to control broadcast media and prevent access to government information. At the same time we have seen that unrestrained commercial ambitions can encourage a culture of illegal and unethical activity in the newsroom – as the News of the World phone hacking scandal demonstrated with shocking clarity”, added Hammarberg.
He highlighted the role media plays in exposing human rights violations and in offering an arena for different voices to be heard in public discourse.
Hammarberg argued that public service broadcasting is important to ensure media pluralism and counteract monopolies. He also underlined that every case of violence or threats against a journalist must be promptly and seriously investigated – impunity encourages further murders and has a chilling effect on public debate.
More...Also see:
Nobel Laureates in support of Liu Xiaobo, imprisoned for 11 years
PEN International Press Release for International Human Rights Day
The Revolutionary Poets Brigade at Occupy San Francisco
November, 20th, 2011, the evening after the police raid at the Federal Reserve building, occupiers crowded together to close down the block of 101 Market Street. Daniel Ellsberg spoke to the crowd.
Then the Revolutionary Poets Brigade appeared and gave this spirited reading.
Video by: Danielle Peterson
Occupy DC/K Street - #D7 The revolution is real, the people are showing their power. Resist!
Each and every protester you see laying here gets arrested.
Footage courtesy of: http://ustream.tv/channel/occupy-d-c-coverage
Krishnamurti - The Real Revolution
This 30-minute documentary is the first from an original series of eight made for television in 1966. They were the earliest sound-films of Krishnamurti speaking to audiences.
Briton witnesses torture in Syrian jail
Undercover filmmaker Sean McAllister was detained by Syrian security forces in Damascus for five days. He describes what he witnessed.
Occupy Wall Street - The Biggest Revolution in Modern Times?
To say "the biggest revolution in modern times" is quite loaded, but let's look beyond the sensational clashes with cops and look at the deep underlying themes. We have a global community technologically connected in ways never before possible around vital issues that impact all of us. If you're not in that tiny sliver of power, no matter what background you may have there is a shared frustration with the flaws in our current way of doing business, the excessive corruption, greed, and lack of humanity in the structuring of our countries. That shared frustration, and yearning for something new, combined with the power of social media opens the door for new societal changes that were never before conceivable.
Occupy Wall Street - The Biggest Revolution in Modern Times?
To say "the biggest revolution in modern times" is quite loaded, but let's look beyond the sensational clashes with cops and look at the deep underlying themes. We have a global community technologically connected in ways never before possible around vital issues that impact all of us. If you're not in that tiny sliver of power, no matter what background you may have there is a shared frustration with the flaws in our current way of doing business, the excessive corruption, greed, and lack of humanity in the structuring of our countries. That shared frustration, and yearning for something new, combined with the power of social media opens the door for new societal changes that were never before conceivable.
‘Digital Revolution’ to Occupy Cyberspace
There is no sweaty crowd, no yelling, no police, and certainly no pepper spray. In Tiago Barros' and Ana Cravinho's "Digital Revolution" there's only 3-D holograms "occupying" a digital plaza and a community of passionate bloggers.
This isn't sci-fi. In fact, it may be a glimpse into the future of global protest movements.
The pair recently submitted the design proposal for the International Ideas Competition "Strategies for Public Occupation: A Call for Ideas."
[ ... ]
The project searches for a new vision for the future of protests around the world while recognizing that these demonstrations are a highly important part of disseminating opinions.
"Occupy Movements are, of course, in the media agenda thanks too many merits like questioning common people about their role in society," Barros told the International Business Times. "For all these reasons, we find the challenge launched by this prestigious architecture institution very pertinent and actual, so we decided to take an active role doing what we do best, as architects: thinking space and its interaction with people."
"Digital Revolution" removes the physical destination from the protest equation, proposing instead a paradigm shift made possible by a virtual interface available to all who care to join.
In essence, a 3-D hologram of each participant would be projected in a specific virtual plaza using data collected and transmitted by the interface. The plaza would amalgamate familiar urban spaces with an altogether virtual world - a world that would also transmit sound and time slots for podium speeches, mirroring a typical rally.
image from http://www.spitting-image.net
