|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| 
Is the online digital media revolution facilitating global change?
Meet some cool, hip film-makers with a cause who want to make "World Peace" more than just a beauty pageant slogan.
Pangea Day (Starts 11:00 am PST, tomorrow May 10, 2008)
4 hours.
24 films.
A new way to see the world.
http://www.pangeaday.org
| | |
| I've been a great admirer of IJM, but I wasn't as knowledgable on the details of the problem that they combat. Last night I had the privilege to hear Gary Haugen, the founder and CEO of International Justice Mission, speak at the Seattle benefit dinner. What he spoke of is a hard issue, but a vital issue -- a matter of justice. The global inequity in the world today spans every aspect of life -- food, shelter, medicine, education. But the matter of intentional violence against the poor is very troublesome. How do we address human suffering when others choose to take away the freedom of others? Just as much as every person should have food, shelter, medicine, and education, people also need justice.
The hard facts are that 27 million people live as modern day slaves today. The hard fact is that sex trafficking is a $36 billion dollar business.
Founded in 1997, International Justice Mission (IJM) is a human rights
agency that rescues victims of violence, sexual exploitation, slavery,
and oppression. IJM exists to protect people from violent forms of
injustice by securing rescue and restoration for victims and
accountability for perpetrators, ensuring that public justice systems
work for the poor. IJM's four-fold purpose is: victim relief - relieve
the victim of abuse currently being committed; victim aftercare -
provide access to services to help victims transition to their new
lives and to encourage long-term success; perpetrator accountability -
bring accountability and just consequences under the law to the
specific perpetrator(s) of abuse; structural prevention - prevent the
abuse from being committed against others who are also at risk.
What did I learn coming away from this event? Things can change. Gary Haugen shared two secrets they've discovered in the fight for justice:
1.) The perpetrators of violence are not brave. They try to prey on those they think are vulnerable and unsuspecting.
2.) The perpetrators of violence are afraid of the truth. They need to cover up what they are doing because if the world knew, they know action would be taken against them.
Organizations like IJM are making a great impact in this fight. Seek justice.
| | |
| It is a common understanding that the premise of Al Gore's book, "The Assault on Reason", is generally known to us. We see its existence all over the place in our modern political context -- the distorted half-truths, political hyperbole and exaggerations, half-baked statistics, one-dimensional straw man arguments and positions, outright propaganda, and sophisticated, well-oiled political spin machines, with a complicit, biased, and corporate-controlled media.
In a nutshell the dissemination of political thought is a war zone today for the average American, what Thomas Jefferson would call, "the tyranny of the mind of man."
How do we tune out the noise and preserve what is essential to democracy? On the other side we have disillusionment and indifference. We have an uninformed electorate whose votes are now up for sale to the highest bidder. Capitalism has infiltrated and fused with representative government in a way that has completely distorted the notion of "the marketplace of ideas." Look at the way modern campaigns are run today (and the amount of media money it takes to pay for it), and you'll know without a shadow of a doubt, Walter Lippman's "the manufacture of consent" is alive and well in America.
The vital essence of a working democracy is the safeguarding of an informed and reasoning electorate. Without this, democracy cannot function. The public forum or public sphere was to be preserved as "the marketplace of ideas." It was to be marked by the following:
1. It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also to the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all.
2. The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent meritocracy of ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them.
3. The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a "conversation of democracy" is all about.
It's probably self-evident to us why the steady corrosion of the consciousness of the electorate is occurring. I guess the question is are there forces at work that are trying to reclaim it?
The internet has birthed our new political watchdogs, has given us tools to combat the tide of spin we need to cut through. Since 2003, FactCheck.org has been scrutinizing what politicians are saying with a novel idea -- the actual facts! Brooks Jackson, a veteran investigative journalist started the site. It is funded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and the site has NO advertising and NO backing from any politicial party. What a novel idea.
Go to the site and see who in the campaigns are spinning the most bunk. It is eye-opening how distorted the facts can get. FactCheck.org and now many others are giving the electorate something new, a refreshing meal of unbiased truth, ahhhhhh, can you taste it? With more and more sites continuously monitoring candidate credibility, there may never have been this much pressure on candidates to talk straight.
http://www.factcheck.org
| | |
| 
I warn you, watching TED talks online may inspire you to want to change the world. Since its inception around 1984, the TED conference has been described as a "group of remarkable people that gather to exchange ideas of
incalculable value." Its lectures cover a broad set of topics including
science, arts, politics, global issues, architecture, music and more. More recently, through the TED prize, TED has recognized some of the best thought leaders of our generation.
I've been a great fan of TED (one of my favorites was Jeff Skoll's, the former ebay mogul). Recently, I caught Chris Anderson's (the "curator of TED") interview with Charlie Rose a few days ago, in which he described a trend happening with how enabling technologies such as the internet have opened new incentives for, of all things, teaching. We all know our country is in a teaching crisis, both economically and culturally. Our modern culture does not show value for teaching (nor provides the economic incentives). But Chris Anderson argues that enabling technologies such as the internet are now leveling many barriers for those who want to pursue teaching. Why? Simply said to reach people across the world with a revolutionary idea normally costed about $2 per person a few years ago (as an example of distribution cost, you literally had to press some teachings onto a cd, the defacto medium, and distribute it). Now that cost has been brought down to like 1 penny per person with the internet and the online media revolution, and is basically free because sponsors are now willing to pay for the miniscule costs. The information age is indeed changing the acceleration of ideas.
A legendary, socialistic, Canadian politician was once asked who he thought were the greatest among us? He answered, teachers. Because the teachers are those who have shaped the landscape of human progression. They give birth to ideas, that then reach the people, who then respond in, what we call in history, movements. Teachers give birth to movements that change the world.
Teachers have a greater potential than ever before to reach millions of people with revolutionary ideas. Those on the fringe, who would never dream of reaching a global audience are finding exactly that through forums such as TED and others. Which brings me to an incredible phenomenon behind a little known swedish professor of public health who, through TED, has reached over 1.5 million people online. His presentation on TED connected him with the likes of the Google co-founders, who then bought his foundation's incredible statistical modeling software. His name is Hans Gosling.
Years ago, you would never believe something as boring as statistical modeling could come to vibrant life until now. If you ever valued how technology innovation can revolutionize the way we understand information, you MUST watch these presentations. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this.
Hans Gosling is increasing our understanding of social and economic development with the remarkable trend-revealing software he created. Simply, awesome.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/view/id/90
| | |
| I am at times completely overwhelmed with an utter sense of helplessness when it comes to addressing a personal worldview (Christian or not) around the concept of war. If we are to look back in history, I think there is no greater challenge to everything we hold dear to in our ideals and beliefs than understanding and addressing the dilemma of war. If as an individual, you must acknowledge that we do not live in a vacuum, that we cannot pretend to be in some kind of microcosm of our own capitalistic, utopian existence with no external forces, then we must say we have a "global citizenship" that entails global consequences and a global perspective for a global society at large.
It's strange how adamantly fixated we are as Americans on numbers,... when it comes to dollars and cents, our ears begin to perk up. Today, I'm hearing in current polls that the number one issue on American minds is the economy. Huh? [scratching head] Yes, we have market crashes with poor oversight in the sub-prime market and aftershocks in the product of a mortgage crisis. Yes, there are skirmishes amongst economists about a pending recession, and tax rebate checks in the mail (remember those rebate checks we got from the last recession in 2001? Predictable response by our government?). Yes, for the past decade we've had the government running up massive IOU's and deficit spending which you'd think logically would ultimately lead to such a predicament.
And we're rattled,... us,... Americans,... the wealthiest nation known to man is ranking our estimated $300-trillion-dollar-producing-over-the-next-15-years-GDP-economic-juggernaut as higher in concern than the war in Iraq, terrorism, healthcare, and our crumbling education system. And how about poverty too? Hmm,... I guess when it comes to the greenbacks in our wallets, money talks and everything else walks. You might also recall that just like a few months ago the country was in absolute shell shock from the news in Iraq, that we were engaged in our personal, generational, and national responsibility to our actions in pre-emptive war. It's sad but generations are defined by war, in many cases completely consumed by them. Look at the Civil War, WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, and now Iraq. I feel like I'm getting whiplash from our flip-flopping on national concerns.
What I have been hearing lately though is a national outcry at the cost of the Iraq war. We're ready to tear down the White House with the estimate coming in for the war to exceed $1 trillion dollars. The question really is, is this a lot of money for our country or not? It's bizarre, even utterly grotesque and unfathomable, to think that we have to conduct a cost-benefit analysis for war. But, if we must, we must. The former White House Chief Economist under Bush in 2002, Lawrence Lindsey, has come out with a "tell-all" in Fortune magazine about the estimate he gave to Bush and his advisers on the cost of going to war in Iraq. He predicted at the time between $100 - 200 billion dollars that sent the administration into sticker shock. Less than three months later he was out of the White House. He did say before his ousting that the war might cost between 1% to 2% of GDP and that it would not be economically damaging. As it turns out, he was partly right. The war has not been economically ruinous. But the war in Iraq over the past five years is now approaching $400 billion. Mind boggling numbers for us to understand. But we have to frame this with our historicals:
- The liberation of Kuwait in 1991 cost the equivalent of 1% of the GDP of the time, or about $80 billion in today's dollars.
- The Vietnam War cost between 1.5% - 2% of GDP each year during the eight years of major American commitment, or about $600 billion. At its peak we had more than 500,000 soldiers in Vietnam.
It's for future historians to evaluate what marked us in our generation and our time in how we responded to war. I am a gen-Xer, a generation once described as a medicine bottle with a label of a skull and cross bones. We were noted as the disillusioned generation, highly-educated but without purpose due to the vacuous vision we inherited from the decade of greed, the 80's. Doesn't sound too charming. Do we define our response to war in dollars and cents? Did the generations before us think similarly? Well, it cost the WWII generation about 140% of GDP. Would F.D.R have thought, "well that's too expensive, forget it." The Civil War dwarfs all other wars combined in the number of dead, but Lincoln certainly never put together a cost-benefit analysis. John F. Kennedy stated, "We will pay any price, bear any burden... to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
Have we fundamentally shifted in our order of concern? Is our outrage placed in the right context based on dollars and cents? Has consumer socialism taken over? How do we in our generations respond and take responsibility for the horror of modern war? How do we understand the meaning of sacrifice like the generations before us? How do I, as a Christian, serve, pray, and sacrifice for those who paid the ultimate price for freedom, and those who are still in harms way? How do we understand human cost, nearly 4,000 dead and 30,000 wounded, along with Iraqi deaths in the tens of thousands. When the documentary, "No End in Sight" came out in theaters, I had to watch it. It left me physically ill. War is hell.
But I couldn't stop there. There were more ugly truths about war, not in some history book gathering dust, but for us, our generation, today. How do we hold onto our humanity when we are utterly assaulted by the raw, sickening visuals of war itself. As a coping mechanism to prevent total catastrophic failure of our own humanity, we come up with dehumanizing euphemisms to deal with measurements of undesirable outcomes. In economics, we use the term "externalities" to describe the social harm and "passing of the buck" by large corporate entities onto society to maximize their profits. In war, we use the term "collateral damage" to describe the inadvertent casualties of innocents and destruction in civilian areas. Are human lives about cold, hard math? What generally happens in war is those who profit from it (war profiteers, who if caught generally get executed for war crimes) and those who lose (the countless killings of innocents, the voiceless, the powerless, the ones who get jacked). Someone I admire greatly declared there is no just war, because innocents will always lose.
We have to face facts about whether we truly want to have a global perspective or not. War like most things on this earth is about the Have's and the Have nots. For us, global income distribution tells the story: 94% of the total world income goes to 40% of the people, while the other 60% must live on only 6% of the total world income. You and I are living on 94% of the world's income. Do we really need a cheaper barrel of oil? At what cost? I have two stories to share what this war is beginning to mean to me:
Story #1
-----------
Awhile back I saw a show on PBS interviewing who you would describe as middle class Iraqis who used every dime and penny they had to escape war-torn Iraq. Basically, if you were educated and had enough money, you could buy your way out of war. For some of them though, refugee status was revoked in the neighboring countries and/or they ran out of money, so they had to return to the war zone. A lower-income class Iraqi described how his brother was blown up right across the street from where he runs his vending business. He can't leave because he doesn't have enough money.
Story #2
-----------
I recently read an article that floored me even more than Halliburton and Blackwater combined. It was about third-country nationals from Sierre Leone who were paid 45 cents an hour to "work" with American forces in Iraq. How does this work, and what in God's name would push someone to go to a war zone for 45 cents an hour????!!!! With Globalization in full swing, the magic wonders of free trade and open borders have revolutionized how we mechanize modern war. To be sure, there have always been real and significant political costs - both financial and human - to going to war. The use of third-country nationals to fight our wars reduces those costs: when one of them dies, their family doesn't get a phone call from "a grateful nation" and a folded stars and stripes flag. The Pentagon is using subcontractors like ESS, a british corporation, to muster up invisible, foreign, cheap labor. Sierra Leone is, by some measures, the poorest country in the world. So thousands of men from this country lined up in March of 2005 when ESS announced that it would pay $150 per month for manual labor in Iraq (for the grand Pentagon reconstruction effort). This floors me, these people are so desperate they will risk getting blown up by an IED for about $5 bucks a day. Poverty is without choice.
I'm at best, ashamed.
the price of "freedom", the cost of war,... the poor get jacked
| | |
|
