"If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand..."

"Two years before the Korean peninsula erupted in a civil war that saw the North and the South (and the U.S., the United Nations, the Soviet Union and China) engage in a conflict that shaped the post-World War II world, a short, brutal rebellion in the young Korean republic paved the way for the cataclysmic Korean War to come."


Read more on LIFE

Embrace moderate Islam..

"The leader of Egypt's Coptic Christians has accused the country's president of "negligence" following deadly clashes outside the main cathedral in Cairo."

Read more on the BBC.

"Even a sheet of paper is lighter when two people lift it.."

""No one should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gains," Mr Xi warned during a speech at the opening of the forum."

Read more on the BBC.

The dream intruders..

"It used to be that what happened in your dreams was your own little secret. But today scientists report for the first time that they’ve successfully decoded details of people’s dreams using brain scans."

Read more on WIRED.

Inverted is good..

"The British Embassy in Colombia made an embarrassing gaffe when it referred to the Falklands Islands using the Argentinian name 'Malvinas'."


Read more on the Daily Mail.

'All' Souls Day..

The Japanese behaved disgracefully during the second world war, this barbarity was specifically allowed free reign on one of the greatest cities of China, only the walls of the old city remain. Hundreds of thousands of civilians, mothers and children were purposely annihilated by Japanese occupying forces in 1937.

The commemoration of the Massacre of Nanjing this year occurs before the Qingming festival. This is a time for Chinese to remember their ancestors and honour those of previous generations by tending to their family tombs.

But with the remembering of those family members that died during a vicious war, is it not disproportionate to forget the many millions that died and disappeared under Mao and communism in peace time?

'Some' of us do...

"Kim Jong Un’s latest threats against the United States may be even more apocalyptic than Kim Jong Il’s. But the Obama administration still believes the young North Korean leader is reading from a page in his father’s playbook."

Read more on CNN.

You don't need a superpower to be a hero..

“Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment formed We Can Be Heroes in response to the crisis in the Horn of Africa where 8 million people are in need of life-saving food, clean water, healthcare and other services,” DC Entertainment Senior Vice President Amit Desai told Wired.

Read more on WIRED.

The White House Wishes You a Happy April..

Via TIME.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind.

U.S. Drone strike infographic via POPSCI

Virtual relations...

"A US congressman last week introduced a resolution that would establish a “virtual Congress” – a legislature in which lawmakers could work remotely and ‘telecommute’ to Washington using nothing more than a computer."

Read more on Russia Today.

A new type of International relations?

"Chinese President Xi Jinping on Saturday called for building a new type of international relations with win-win cooperation at the core.

Delivering a speech at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Xi expounded on China's view on the current international situation and its position on international relations."

Read more on CHINA DAILY.

'As I Am'

via TIME

How to share...

In the Arabian desert there sits a Palm Oasis. Its existence gives life not just to weary travelling wildlife but gives mankind a chance to prosper. Surrounded by desert this prosperity would cease to exist if it were not for the water that allows dates to grow for the wealth of harvest.

With water so scarce in such an arid environment, success depends upon an agreement to ration the water in order to prosper equally.

Who is the judge in a place where the competition and stakes are so high? With the help of the ancient court of time measured by the Sun, doses of water are orderly measured by a Sun dial and distributed accordingly.

Watch a comet race around the Sun..

"Comet Pan-STARRS is visible in many parts of the U.S. around sunset, and it was at its peak brightness a few days ago when it made its closest pass to the sun. As they approach our star and warm up, dirty cosmic snowballs like Pan-STARRS grow bright tails, or comas, which are made of dust and ice particles that reflect light."

Read more on POPSCI.

Quantum Democracy..

Russia has taken the baby steps towards a web elected democratic process. The beginning of the Russian metamorphosis?

"The bill allowing direct internet elections to the Public Chamber – Russia’s top consulting panel of national agencies and officials – has passed the first reading in the lower house."

Read more on Russia Today.

Evergreen..?

"Xi Jinping started his presidency promising to deliver a "Chinese dream" of national rejuvenation"

Read more on CHINA DAILY.

Mathematics...

"Three years ago, Stanley and his colleagues discovered the mathematics behind what he calls “the extreme fragility of interdependency.” In a system of interconnected networks like the economy, city infrastructure or the human body, their model indicates that a small outage in one network can cascade through the entire system, touching off a sudden, catastrophic failure."

Read more on WIRED.

Or Here

Why Iraq was fought for Big Oil?

"Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil."

Read more on CNN.

Who needs Oil?

"You might think that as one of the world's top oil producing nations, the United Arab Emirates would have little use for solar energy.

But that hasn't stopped the Middle East state from unveiling the largest concentrated solar power plant in operation anywhere in the world.

The 100-megawatt solar-thermal project in Abu Dhabi will power thousands of homes in the country and, it is hoped, displace approximately 175,000 tons of CO2 per year."

Read more on the Daily Mail.

"Victory is changing the hearts of your opponents by gentleness and kindness."

"US President Barack Obama has offered Iran a "practical solution" if it truly seeks peaceful nuclear capabilities rather than weapons.

In a video to the Iranian people, Mr Obama urged Iran to take "immediate and meaningful steps" to reduce tension with the international community."

Read more on the BBC.

Visualise this..

"Peer 1 Hosting has been trying to explain what the Internet looks like since 2011, when they created an infographic map of the Internet showing networks and routing connections across the world. Now they've visualized the web in a zoomable Map of the Internet app for iPhoneand Android that lets you explore connectivity in a more hands-on way." Check it out on POPSCI.

Greenland's government collapses...

"Greenland's government has fallen in the wake of an argument in the country over the extent to which foreign oil and mining countries should be allowed to operate in the Arctic.

The left-leaning government of the Prime Minister, Kuupik Kleist was rejected by voters in the Arctic country, which has a population of 56,000 that is 89 percent Inuit. The election was dominated by a debate over foreign investors working in Greenland."

Read more on WIRED.

http://dot2dotnews.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=greenland

Is it time to talk Assange...?

"An Ecuadorian minister said on Wednesday that Julian Assange was in "good spirits" after visiting the WikiLeaks founder inside Ecuador's embassy in London."

Read more on Globalpost.

99% democratic squatters...

"Argentine President Cristina Kirchner has compared the Falkland Islanders to ‘squatters’ after 99.8 per cent voted in favour of British sovereignty.

She described the referendum held by the Falklanders as being ‘a parody’ in a speech at the Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires yesterday.

‘It’s as if a bunch of squatters were to vote on whether or not to keep occupying a building illegally,’ she said."

Read more on the Daily Mail.

Sound familiar?

"Neanderthals had sharper eyesight and bigger bodies than our early ancestors, but these traits only contributed to their eventual downfall, new research suggests.

The brains of our now-extinct evolutionary cousins had too much to do managing their vision and the physical demands of their bodies to spare a thought for building communities."

Read more on the Daily Mail.

Butterfly effect...

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. 
During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence: >From bondage to spiritual faith; >From spiritual faith to great courage; >From courage to liberty; >From liberty to abundance; >From abundance to complacency; >From complacency to apathy; >From apathy to dependence; >From dependence back into bondage." 

For a democracy to succeed it must continually give the citizen more freedom, the liberties cannot compromise society in a way that demands an authoritarian override. Democracy is the incubator, a system of refinement that allows the metamorphosis of that particular people. Modern democracy is carried by technology, it's life extended, this extension coupled with the possible overview on history should enable both the citizens and government to maintain that cocoon. Government should provide the correct temperature and environment for democracy. The traditional cocoon is the transition to a refined system that is only attainable through the exploitation of technology.

“A bad wound heals but a bad word doesn't..."

"As the Cyrus Cylinder begins its US tour, BBC Persian's Khashayar Joneidi explores how the reputedly liberal monarch who gave his name to the ancient Persian artefact inspired US founding father Thomas Jefferson."

Read more on the BBC.

Infographic of Missions to Mars

Check it out on WIRED.

Life on Mars..

Via GIZMODO.
Life On Mars from Lukas Vojir on Vimeo.

.....think big!

"Asked on Morning Joe to name the issues the Republican Party needs to address, he replied, “We’re no longer socially mobile … It is so un-American.” I’m not sure what Bush’s solutions would be, but he did identify the single most vexing structural problem that we face going forward: the stagnation and decline of the great American middle class, the creation of a permanent American underclass and oligarchy. It is something we desperately need to be talking about; it may be as crucial to the future of the Republic as the slavery debate was in the 19th century."

Read more on TIME.

About time?

"Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been sentenced to one year in jail after a wiretap trial linked to a 2005 banking scandal."

Read more on Russia Today.

Everything is..

"What can technology learn from spirituality? For most Wired readers, the default answer is probably "nothing". But a conference called Wisdom 2.0 -- attended by Ford CEO Bill Ford and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams -- is trying to change that."

Read more on WIRED.

Not just the stuff of legend...

"For centuries, it has been a crystal of legend locked in the verses of Norse myth with little or no evidence that it was ever real. Now it seems scientists at last have grounds for believing that the Viking “sunstone” used to navigate the seas did indeed exist."

Read more on the Independent.

Who am I?

I am the heart of the Universe. I measure both birth and death. I define your civilisation, the more accurate I am, the more precise you become. I was with your ancestors, I am with you now. I dictate your decisions, yet I give you the freedom to decide. You believe that I belong to you. I can restrain you from doing all at once. Some dispute my presence, yet you call me by name. If you are left behind, I will not linger....

The Roman Revolution, and how it could compare to today..

THE ROMAN REVOLUTION (133BC)

"In order to explain the republic’s fall, it has seemed appropriate to ransack preceding 

generations for symptoms of decline and signposts for the future. The portrait is shaped 

to suit the result—a retrojected prophecy. Yet Cicero’s contemporaries did not know 

what was in store. Nor should their every action be treated as if it conspired to determine 

the outcome." - Eric Gruen.

Although the Roman revolution was not pre meditated, the republics demise was likely attributed to the failure of institutions and the ambitions of individuals. 

"Their focus on conspiracies blinded them to the dependence of a polity for its health upon an underlying conception of just social order, an order seen as an expression of humanity’s properly understood place in the cosmic scheme of existence."

THE SIGNPOSTS and SYMPTOMS

"The roots of the Roman revolution, I contend, lie in the changes in social conditions that 

crucially differentiate the revolutionary period from the time of relative political stability

that preceded it, and not in any paucity of rationalist principles with whose guidance the 

Romans would have been able to preserve their republican liberty. While the Roman 

constitution, grounded in tradition, had done its job for several centuries, that reliance on 

the mos maiorum began to lose its effectiveness in the face of the vast power and wealth 

that Rome’s expanding empire offered to anyone willing to ignore accepted practice, as 

well as the widening gulf separating the fortunes of the Roman elite, of which the Senate 

was the prime, formal representative, and the great majority of the citizens of the 

republic." 

The "Mos maiorum" was an unwritten set of honoured principles. This mos was a gentlemanly way of the elders that shunned bribery and corruption, it gave society a morally upright social behaviour pattern when it was pagan.

"As the historian Carl Richard argues, ‘the Romans’ rapid conquest of the 

Mediterranean basin helped destroy… the republic. By further increasing the vast 

inequalities of wealth between the rich and the poor, the new Roman expansion generated 

class warfare, which, in turn, produced the chaos and violence that paved the way for the 

emperors."

This could be compared to the expansion of the EU into both socially premature and financially unreliable nation states. 

POLITICAL and ECONOMIC ORDER

"The history of this period illustrates Voegelin’s thesis, which noted that to flourish, a political order must represent the people’s understanding of their role in the cosmos. Once the Roman government was no longer representative in Voegelin’s sense, it was only a question of when, not if, it would be replaced by a new order that was representative." 

 What is representative? The economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) argued for an economic and political order that promoted individualism. 

"While the theory of individualism has thus a definite contribution to make to the technique of constructing a suitable legal framework and of improving the institutions which have grown up spontaneously, its emphasis, of course, is on the fact that the part of our social order which can or ought to be made a conscious product of human reason is only a small part of all the forces of society. In other words, that the state, the embodiment of deliberately organised and consciously directed power, ought to be only a small part of the much richer organism which we call "society," and that the former ought to provide merely a framework within which free (and therefore not "consciously directed") collaboration of men has the maximum of scope. This entails certain corollaries on which true individualism once more stands in sharp opposition to the false individualism of the rationalistic type." 

"The first is that the deliberately organized state on the one side, and the individual on the other, far from being regarded as the only realities, while all the intermediate formations and associations are to be deliberately suppressed, as was the aim of the French Revolution, the noncompulsory conventions of social intercourse are considered as essential factors in preserving the orderly working of human society."

"The second is that the individual, in participating in the social processes, must be ready and willing to adjust himself to changes and to submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instance may not be recognisable, and which to him will often appear unintelligible and irrational."

Read more of Hayek's work here.

CORPORATE ARISTOCRACY and THE GRAVY TRAIN

"Having valued their own desire for personal aggrandisement over the liberty of others, the Roman aristocrats inevitably lost the passion for liberty necessary to defend their own political freedom against the depredations of the most ambitious of their fellows. When the aristocracy ceased to display ‘certain standards of conduct’, it lost its source of authority vis-a-vis the masses, and the Roman social compact fell apart."

This could be compared to the exclusive lobbying by corporations and the relationship politicians therefore have with the public.

THE DANGER and OPPORTUNITIES of POPULARISM

"Populist leaders, whether they were sincerely motivated by the plight of the commoners or merely exploiting the grievances of the masses to enhance their own power, could use the leverage provided by large-scale discontent to break down, piece by piece, the edifice of tradition that had shaped Roman politics throughout most of the republican era."

This could be compared to the Italian populist Beppe Grillo and the British populist Nigel Farage.

EROSION of the CORE

"A crucial factor increasing the power of the populares, as the revolutionary politicians 

were then designated, was the gradual disappearance of the yeoman farmer, the ideal type 

of the Roman citizen, whose sturdy, agrarian virtues and austere outlook on life had been 

the foundation of Rome’s unprecedented rise."

"The spoils of Rome’s conquests, which flowed chiefly to the aristocratic officers given credit for any victory, enabled those aristocrats to steadily enlarge their latifundia — vast agricultural estates, which were able to produce foodstuffs at a lower cost than their yeoman competitors, as the owners of the latifundia could exploit the forced labor of the multitudes of the defeated enslaved by Roman armies. The small farmers had little choice but to abandon their holdings and see them absorbed into some aristocrat’s estate, and then to seek their sustenance by becoming a faithful political supporter, of one or another of their former officers. Thus, there arose a growing population of dispossessed, disgruntled, and involuntarily idle citizens, readily available to serve as an angry mob or a band of thugs advancing some demagogue’s quest for power."  

SPIRITUALITY and RELIGION

"The final influence sapping the strength of the republic that we will note, one again 

intimately intertwined with the failure of the social compact, and one which also was not 

amenable to treatment by a written constitution, was the gradual fading away of Roman 

paganism’s ability to provide a viable understanding for its adherents of their relationship 

with the cosmos." 

Replace the Roman Republics depreciation of the Pagan 'Mos maiorum' with todays shunning of Christianity.

"Voegelin points out that the pagan religion of Rome, with its civic focus, was the foundation upon which Roman political life rested. However, as the Romans exported their armies and their rule to more and more of the known world, they, willingly or not, imported the ideas of the people they had conquered back to Rome. In particular, the Roman’s encounters with Greek philosophy and the novel religions they met in their eastern provinces, most notably that of the Hebrews, gradually eroded their confidence in the superiority of their indigenous mythology."

"A perceptive Roman leader such as Augustus Ceasar clearly understood the debilitating effects of this loss of religious conviction on Rome’s civic health, and sought to revive traditional beliefs through measures aimed to turn back ‘widespread scepticism and rationalism’ but such policies proved to offer not cures but temporary palliatives. It was not until the ascendancy of Christianity, several centuries later, that the Roman world finally re-discovered a cosmological basis upon which a coherent civil order could be erected. How could the hypothetical existence of a written constitution have succeeded in animating a political body whose soul was fading from the world?" 

As R.E. Smith would have it, ‘Thus concludes our study of the Republic's failure, a failure of the spirit, not of government." 

Read the full essay on the Roman Revolution here.

"The friends of our friends are our friends"

"It is now more than 20 years since pro-democracy grassroots organizations led struggles that eventually resulted in the overthrow of long-serving authoritarian regimes in many countries in Africa."

Read more on CNN.

"As far as we are concerned, we Syria have not changed"

"The opposition Syrian National Coalition (SNC) has pulled out of a series of international meetings in protest at what it said was the "shameful" failure to stop violence."

Read more on the BBC.

Capitalism 2.0

"When big companies fail, it’s often not because they do something wrong but because they do everything right. Successful businesses, Christensen explained, are trained to focus on what he calls sustaining innovations—innovations at the profitable, high end of the market, making things incrementally bigger, more powerful, and more efficient."

Read more on WIRED.

The genius within...

"Derek Amato stood above the shallow end of the swimming pool and called for his buddy in the Jacuzzi to toss him the football. Then he launched himself through the air, head first, arms outstretched. He figured he could roll onto one shoulder as he snagged the ball, then slide across the water. It was a grave miscalculation."

Read more on POPSCI.

A good excuse to work together..

"Moscow believes an operable national defense against threats from outer space can be built within 10 years’ time. The 500-kiloton explosion of a space bolide above the Urals region has sped-up allocation of some $2 billion to prevent future threats."

Read more on Russia Today.

Good idea..

"In Brazil, a former presidential candidate and environment minister has launched a new political party, Sustainability Network, ahead of next year's presidential elections.

In a speech to hundreds of supporters in the capital, Brasilia, Marina Silva stressed the party's green credentials."

Read more on the BBC.

One man's trash is another man's treasure..

"A conservative icon in a hall crammed with college kids is a powder keg awaiting a spark, and cops had been summoned to defuse any eruptions. But the commonwealth’s attorney general disarmed his audience by citing the “fascinating experiment” underway in Colorado and Washington, states where voters legalized marijuana in landmark referendums last fall."

Read more on TIME.