Kampuchea Crossings

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Wikileaks: the new journalism? the new threat to national security?

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I just saw the Apache airstrike footage that recently exploded around the web, thanks to Wikileaks, a non-profit organization that serves as  a repository for sensitive, classified or otherwise secret information from often anonymous tipsters.

While the video seems to reveal nothing newly horrific about the nature of war (those more familiar with military procedures and war crimes have been editorialising – rightly so – on that point eg Roger McShane of the Economist), it’s more the nature in which this story was broken that interests me. The tapes being classified, no traditional journalism organisations, including Reuters, has been able for three years to bring it to the public. Wikileaks did, and it is increasingly presenting a special sort of threat to governments and corporations around the world.

Foreign Policy on Wikileaks: Is this the future of Journalism?

At its best, the rise of Wikileaks represents the type of accountability journalism made famous in the 1970s by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of Watergate fame, and practiced today by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker and Eric Lichtblau and James Risen of the New York Times — and Seymour Hersh in both eras.

The New York Times on Wikileaks: Pentagon sees a threat from Online Muckrakers

To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.

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Perhaps the most amusing aspect of the Army’s report, to Mr. Assange, was its speculation that WikiLeaks is supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. “I only wish they would step forward with a check if that’s the case,” he said.

Good contest on health care reform

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I love this webzine. Good is having a contest to create an infographic about the new health care bill. It has a great roundup of links:

The piece from The New York Times helps sum up the major changes. This piece in the Washington Post shows how people in the House voted, and how much money they took from the health-care lobby. Here is a great bullet-pointed list from CBS. Here is the full text of the bill, and here is the Congressional Budget Office’s estimation of how much it costs. Feel free to supplement this with any data you find yourself. And please, help each other. No one will get extra credit for using special data, so if you find something cool or helpful, please post it in the comments.

FTAs and Big Ag’s equivalent of the “financial innovations”

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The China-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) went into effect this year amid much anxiety by ASEAN. Years of stalling due to fears of a massive influx of already cheap and now subsidised Chinese goods that ASEAN countries cannot compete against finally fell amid the sudden loss of Western markets for Southeast Asian exporters in the crash of 2008.

The fears haven’t gone away. Barely hitting the news -and finally at that- are concerns faced by India in its free trade agreements (FTA) with Australia and New Zealand, as well as with the European Union and Japan. At issue are intellectual property (IP) regimes that use these instruments to harmonise protections (of seed varieties patented by agricultural multinationals as in the piece below). India’s careful navigation through these agreements will likely have large impact on other developing South East Asian countries as well. According to DNAIndia:
..there is strong pressure on India to join the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) -1991, which would make Indian farmers pawns of multinational companies engaged in crop research. Joining UPOV-1991 would crush farmers’ privileges to share, exchange, and sell plant variety protection (PVP) seeds to other farmers

PVP guarantees IP protection to plant varieties developed by agricultural multinationals. The objective of UPOV is to protect new varieties of plants by IP. Harmonisation of PVP across the Asia Pacific region is the aim of developed economies through FTAs, say experts.

Why do we always aim for the high tech solutions? There is certainly value in drought-resistant and salt-tolerant varieties, but many local /native varieties can provide significant increases in yields with improved low-tech techniques. Preserving native varieties and not eradicating them in favor of frankenplants emerging from Big Ag’s R&D pipeline is just plain smart.

Now consider patenting seed varieties in this angle presented in the webzine Grist.com, Are GMOs the ‘financial innovations’ of agriculture?

In a sense, Big Ag — along with the Obama administration — is doubling down on the industrial system we have now: one that is already starting to show signs of stress, from the rise of superweeds along with the price of oil. Monsanto and Syngenta are claiming the ability to genetically engineer all the risk out of agriculture. But in narrowing farmers’ choices to a small set of patented seeds, seeds that must be bought by and distributed to every far-flung farm in the world every year (most of which lack basic infrastructure like, say, roads, and which must grow them according to strict protocols), these companies presume to have managed all the risks, just like the banks did a few years back. They are also presuming that the “Business as Usual” scenario, the world as it exists today, will continue indefinitely; that, in other words, there are no Black Swans hiding in the reeds.

As Salmon describes it for us so clearly, it’s a huge gamble. Only this time we’re not gambling with money — we’re being asked to gamble with our breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and farmers with their livelihoods. That is a bet that none of us should have to take.

The new new imperialisms, one after another, developing as fast as the speed of technology. Governments are now the instruments of protection for corporations rather than the population. That’s certainly the reality in the US given its recent Supreme Court decision giving corporations the same status as people. ASEAN has problems of its own and it won’t even know what hit it.

People really must find ways to organise outside of government solutions. But are citizen organisations fast enough? Time for the Do’s and Don’ts of 21st Century Strategy.

new dating site for finding submissive Asian ladies

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So there’s this new website pandering to all the stereotypes about Asian women. Ah, progress the modern way: to get dumb and dumber. No need to have any sense whatsoever or plain smarts anymore. Thinking is taboo; we will fight for the freedom to be ignorant as long as Wall Street, Big Ag, Big Pharma or any other alchemist with magic to peddle will simply spoon feed us our most basest desires. Heck, let ’em roll our economic reality into a black hole while our government deficit spends and bails these buffoons out for nonsensical wars so we can set the next one up and rule the world. No, really rule the world.

But I digress. Here’s a less grandiosely oversimplified commentary from Sociological Images:

[These Asian women] aren’t trying to use you to get to the U.S. (though, after stating these are women living in the U.S., they are always described as Asian, not Asian American). And the men who want to date them just love and respect “the Asian culture” (and, you know, there’s just one culture in all of Asia). And how do you show your appreciation for a culture? By marrying someone who personifies the elements of that culture you have romanticized.

Unlike “the average woman” (which presumably means White women in the U.S., since we’re the majority of women and all), Asian women haven’t become too competitive (just intelligent and independent! But that’s different!) and certainly aren’t “masculine.” Again we see the romanticizing of a certain stereotype of “Asian culture,” with Asian women having a “well-known cultural attitude of gentle and caring support” and “Eastern values,” which apparently involves being sweet and supportive. Though they’ve also “learned Western values,” which here is associated with being “outgoing…independent and fun…”. Thus, the West = independent, fun women, while the East = supportive, submissive ones.

Sigh.

when Asia’s per-capita income catches up to the West’s.. by Hans Rosling

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Check this video out. The Asian Century has never been more real, yet it’s still surreal for those of us used to a western-centric world. Presented so compellingly by Hans Rosling, the public health infographic brains behind the Gapminder, this modeling sends home a message that isn’t new but is quite amazing even for the rapidly changing times we live in.

Employment recession

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Quoted from Silicon Alley Insider, the chart above by Calculated Risk…

… shows the decline in jobs as a percentage of the work force at the peak.

To date in this recession, we’ve lost more than 8 million jobs.  The decline as a percentage of the workforce is the worst since the Great Depression, matching the sharp but short drop in 1948, as the war machine wound down.

Equally important, the duration of these job losses, as well as the lack of a sharp recovery (at least so far), suggests that the problem will be with us for a long while.  We’re now 24 months into this decline, and we’re still at the bottom.  By this point in most previous recessions, we had already recovered all of the lost jobs.

Wow.