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Guardian: Snapshots of the Occupy Everywhere Protesters Views

 

This Guardian photo slideshow depicts how the Occupy Everywhere movement is growing globally. The protesters talk about what is motivating them.  In generzl, they are talking about how their governments have failed to provide the fundamentals of resilience to their generation.  They intend to take these matters into their own hands. 

 

Occupy protests: Rita Maestre, Madrid

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2011/oct/23/protests-around-the-world-in-pictures

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Occupy Sydney

In Sydney, as well as Melbourne, the police have been very aggressive against the Occupy Syndney demonstrators.

Many arrests have been made.

 

http://www.theage.com.au/nsw/police-deny-excessive-force-used-in-occupy-sydney-raid-20111023-1me59.html

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Strong Communities Are Necessary

by John McKnight
Co-Director of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute and Director of Community Studies of the Institute of Policy Researh, Northwestern University.


There is a new worldwide movement developing, made up of people with a different vision for their local communities. They know that movements are not organizations, institutions or systems. Movements have no CEO, central office, or plan. Instead, they happen when thousands and thousands of people discover together new possibilities for their lives. They have a calling. They are called. And together they call upon themselves.

In many nations local people have been called to come together to pursue a common calling. It would be a mistake to label that calling ABCD, or Community Building. Those are just names. They are inadequate words for groups of local people who have the courage to discover their own way—to create a culture made by their own vision. It is a handmade, homemade vision. And, wherever we look, it is a culture that starts the same way:

First, we see what we have—individually, as neighbors and in this place of ours.

Cheap Power: An Overnight Revolution (Also Documentary Introduction Video - 39:28)

by Mark Gibbs - networkworld.com - October 14, 2011

Every now and then along comes a technology that is revolutionary and changes everything. But a very few of these new technologies cause fast change. Mostly they seep out of the lab, into the arms of early adopters, and then ooze out into the world in general.

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Climate Change 'Grave Threat' to Security and Health

submitted by Nguyen Huu Ninh, friend of The Global Resilience System, lead author of 2007 IPCC report

by Richard Black - BBC News - October 17, 2011

                  

Food security was interwoven with the climate issue, speakers told the conference

Climate change poses "an immediate, growing and grave threat" to health and security around the world, according to an expert conference in London.

Officers in the UK military warned that the price of goods such as fuel is likely to rise as conflict provoked by climate change increases.

A statement from the meeting adds that humanitarian disasters will put more and more strain on military resources.

It asks governments to adopt ambitious targets for curbing greenhouse gases.

The annual UN climate conference opens in about six weeks' time, and the doctors, academics and military experts represented at the meeting (held in the British Medical Association's (BMA) headquarters) argue that developed and developing countries alike need to raise their game.

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Challenges Loom as World Population Hits 7 Billion

submitted by Samuel Bendett

by David Crary - Associated Press - October 17, 2011

She's a 40-year-old mother of eight, with a ninth child due soon. The family homestead in a Burundi village is too small to provide enough food, and three of the children have quit school for lack of money to pay required fees.

"I regret to have made all those children," says Godelive Ndageramiwe. "If I were to start over, I would only make two or three."

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RN Volunteer Opportunities for First Aid Support in Cities Across America

    nationalnursesunited.org - RN Response Network - October 13, 2011

As a past volunteer for the Registered Nurse Response Network (RNRN), we wish to thank you again for your desire to help people and communities in need.

Now we are asking for your help again, to join our first aid efforts in cities across the U.S. where Americans are rallying for real solutions to our national economic emergency.

You were there when we dispatched volunteers to assist with the recovery effort following a tsunami in South Asia, a hurricane on the Gulf Coast, Southern California wildfires, the earthquake in Haiti, and with contributions following this spring’s disaster in Japan.

RN volunteers have made a difference on each occasion, even when we have faced huge hurdles, including substantial governmental impediments, for example, to placing volunteers on the ground in Haiti. Yet on each occasion, RNRN did act, and sent as many volunteers as possible in these heroic humanitarian efforts.

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Crowdsourcing Democracy Through Social Media

submitted by Tim Siftar

Georgia Tech

ATLANTA – Oct. 11, 2011 – Today the citizens of Liberia will participate in just their second presidential election since the country emerged from a brutal civil war in 2003, and in such an environment the specter of violence or other unrest is never far away. But what if social media, a Georgia Tech professor is asking, could identify and even help prevent dangerous situations from occurring?

When nearly 40 million Nigerians took to the polls last April to elect a new president, many of them went online to share comments about their chosen candidates on blogs, Twitter or other social media platforms. They also used these new media tools to report what they saw. “Listening” to much of it was Georgia Tech Associate Professor Michael Best, which just might have saved a few lives.

During the election, Best provided technical support for a Nigerian group that wanted to use social media as a means for tracking the election process and identifying any problems that cropped up. Best and his team of researchers designed a social media aggregator tool that could pull content from about 20 different sources (including Twitter) and analyze the data in real time using keywords.

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Opinion - Off the Pedestal: Creating a New Vision of Economic Growth

by James Gustave Speth - e360.yale.edu - May 31, 2011

The idea of economic growth as an unquestioned force for good is ingrained in the American psyche. But a longtime environmental leader argues it’s time for the U.S. to reinvent its economy into one that focuses on sustaining communities, family life, and the natural world.

Is anything in America more faithfully followed than economic growth? Its movements are constantly watched, measured to the decimal place, deplored or praised, diagnosed as weak or judged healthy and vigorous. Newspapers, magazines, and cable channels report endlessly on it. Promoting growth may be the most widely shared and robust cause in the United States today.

If the growth imperative dominates U.S. political and economic life, what happens when growth hits some serious stumbling blocks?

When I was in school in England, the dean of my college told us when we first arrived that we could walk on the grass in the courtyard — but not across it. That helped me love the English and their language. Here is another creative use of prepositions: there are limits to growth, and there are limits of growth.

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