Nafeez Ahmed, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: The first question you might ask yourself is: why isn't any of this in the American media? Why is this story appearing in the Guardian? And you might ask yourself if you were a non-American reading this story somewhere in Europe, what would you think of the U.S.? And, finally, as you read this think of the militarization of American law enforcement, police that look more like a SEAL team in a war op than American police patrolling an American city. This is not a good trend.
The Pentagon is funding social science research to model risks of “social contagions” that could damage US strategic interests.
Credit: Jason Reed/Reuters
A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term “warfighter-relevant insights” for senior officials and decision makers in “the defense policy community,” and to inform policy implemented by “combatant commands.”
Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD ‘Minerva Research Initiative’ partners with universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”
Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a […]
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Mattathias Schwartz, - The Intercept
Stephan: That this article is even plausible shows both the level of corruption and the true nature of wealth inequity we have reached in the U.S.
Two billion dollars, the estimated cost of this year’s presidential election, is big money, but it is not huge money. Two billion is one-tenth of NASA’s annual budget, one-twentieth of the Harvard endowment, one-thirtieth of the personal wealth of Warren Buffett. Buffett is number two on the 2015 Forbes list of 106 Americans who hold personal fortunes of $5 billion or more, the Club of 106. These billionaires are rich enough to pay for the campaigns of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and still have $3 billion left over.
A lot of the money in Club 106 is family money. The Club includes two Kochs, four Waltons, three Marses, two Newhouses, and three Ziffs. Donald Trump was also born into big money. With a supposed net worth of $4.5 billion, he is brushing up against the velvet rope outside of Club 106. The Clintons, both born to families with ordinary incomes, are now worth around $110 million, which puts them way off from Club 106 and pretty far from you and me as well. In the political off-season the Clintons have borrowed private jets from friends and relied on book advances […]
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Robert Macfarlane , - The New Yorker
Stephan: Our culture screams at us that we have dominion over the earth, it can be exploited as we like. The truth is exactly contrary, as this report explains. Our willful ignorance on this matter is the source of many of our problems, and the cause of climate change.
This lovely article about this interconnectedness and interdependence of life in Epping Forest in the matrix of life that is the biosphere is built around the research of Merlin Sheldrake, whom I have known since he was a boy, the son of biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who popularized the idea of morphogenic fields and his wife Jill Purce.
Epping Forest outside of London Credit: visitlondon.com
Epping Forest is a heavily regulated place. First designated as a royal hunting ground by Henry II in the twelfth century, with severe penalties imposed on commoners for poaching, it has since 1878 been managed by the City of London Corporation, which governs behavior within its bounds using forty-eight bylaws. The forest is today almost completely contained within the M25, the notorious orbital motorway that encircles outer London. Minor roads crisscross it, and it is rarely more than four kilometres wide. Several of its hundred or so lakes and ponds are former blast holes of the V1 “doodlebug” rockets flung at London in 1944. Yet the miraculous fact of Epping’s existence remains: almost six thousand acres of trees, heath, pasture, and waterways, just outside the city limits, its grassland still grazed by the cattle of local commoners, and adders still basking in its glades. Despite its mixed-amenity use—from golf to mountain biking—it retains a greenwood magic.
Earlier this summer I spent two days there, wandering […]
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Jim Rogers, - Business Insider
Stephan: I am seeing more and more economic assessments that don't look good. This report is an example of what I mean. I don't entirely agree with this assessment, but I don't think that is the point to focus on. It is the number of these pieces, and the publications in which they are appearing that is the relevant point, because it describes the trend. It suggests to me that one of the first things President Hillary Clinton may face is an economic crisis. I believe it is therefore imperative that those of us who want wellness to be our social priority must press where we can for sticking with the Democratic platform agenda.
Republican trickle down, supply side, austerity, privatization, whatever you want to call it social policies have proven a failure, except from the perspective of Neo-feudalism.
These policies as one can easily see are excellent at transferring wealth to the few, but failures in every other way. At the state level, at the national level, at the international level, the Republican approach to governance has proven on the basis of outcome data to be inferior, more expensive, less efficient, less productive, and less pleasant to live under.
Crisis will offer the opportunity to take a completely different path, just as Roosevelt began the New Deal. Seen from this perspective Bernie Sanders may not have won personally, but he has won politically if we all press the Clinton Administration to adher to the platform.
A Federal Reserve police officer keeps watch while posted outside the Federal Reserve headquarters in Washington September 16, 2015.
Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque
The last two months alone have seen Britain leaving the European Union, terror attacks, cop killings, Deutsche Bank nearly collapsing, the German long term interest rates set at negative, to name a few.
But over the next couple of years, it’s going to get a whole lot worse. As economies worsen, there will be more social unrest, more angry people, and crazier politicians. Somebody will try to come along on a white horse to save us all, but she usually makes it worse.
Are we at a point right now where it feels like it’s accelerating. People all over are very unhappy about what’s going on. If you read history, there are a lot of similarities between now and the 1920s and ’30s. That’s when fascism and communism broke out […]
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John Vidal, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is some lovely good news from the U.K. which gives me confidence that not everyone is driven by short term greed. As I read this story I was continually reminded of West Virginia, a state controlled by the coal elite that has been trashed by the coal industry and as things now stand will be paying the true price of coal for generations -- long after the coal millionaires have taken their money and run. There may be hope if the population of West Virginia, now on track to vote for Trump, can awaken from their Theocratic Rightist stupor and vote their own self-interest. I wouldn't bet on it, but it is possible. And here's what could happen.
Hicks Lodge in Leicestershire was left scarred by opencast mining
Credit: National Forest
Twenty-five years ago, the Midlands villages of Moira, Donisthorpe and Overseal overlooked a gruesome landscape. The communities were surrounded by opencast mines, old clay quarries, spoil heaps, derelict coal workings, polluted waterways and all the other ecological wreckage of heavy industry.
The air smelt and tasted unpleasant and the land was poisoned. There were next to no trees, not many jobs and little wildlife. Following the closure of the pits, people were deserting the area for Midlands cities such as Birmingham, Derby and Leicester. The future looked bleak.
Today, a pastoral renaissance is taking place. Around dozens of former mining and industrial communities, in what was the broken heart of the old Midlands coalfield, a vast, splendid forest of native oak, ash and birch trees is emerging, attracting cyclists, walkers, birdwatchers, canoeists, campers and horse-riders.
Britain’s trees have come under increasing attack from exotic diseases, and the grants for […]
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