That’s what Jock Gill calls “global climate change,” ne� “global warming.”

Good phrase.

[Tags: climate jock_gill global_climate_change al_gore marketing ]

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Global Voices has produced a great intro to citizen’s media, under the guidance of David Sasaki. It’s clear, friendly, and full of heart. And, needless to say, it’s not US-centric. It’s available in English, Spanish, and Bengali, with more on the way.

Well done, David and team. [Tags: gv global_voices citizen_media david_sasaki journalism ]

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Andy Olmsted was the first American soldier killed in Iraq this year. He blogged at Obsidian Wings as G’Kar. The site has posted a message Andy wanted published if he were killed.

[Tags: andy_olmsted iraq ]

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I was quite pleased when I read in a posting to a mailing list that the British government was no longer going to use the phrase “war on terror.” [SPOILER ALERT: The posting was wrong.] The post pointed to an article in the Daily Mail quoted at length by Military.com). It said:

The words “war on terror” will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country’s chief prosecutor said Dec. 27.

Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless “death cult.”

The Director of Public Prosecutions said: ‘We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language.”

London is not a battlefield, he said.

“The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,” Macdonald said. “They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.”

His remarks signal a change in emphasis across Whitehall, where the “war on terror” language has officially been ditched.

Ah, someone speaking sense! Except it seemed odd to me that the Director of Public Prosecutions would get to decide how the British government is going to characterize issues of defense. So, I checked the Daily Mail site and the best I could come up with was an article from last January in which Sir Ken talked about the language he thinks the government should use, not a decision by the government about the language that it will use.

If you can come up with an actual source for this, I’d be very happy to be acknowledge your superior googling skills and celebrate this one small step towards a sensible approach to peace and security.

(BTW, I think the Military.com article got to posted to the mailing list I’m on via Dave Farber’s high-visibility mailing list.) [Tags: war_on_terror ken_macdonald uk politics marketing blogs journalism citizen_journalism berkman ]

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Let’s educate nine million refugee children by 2010. [Tags: ninemillion ]

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I went to the Peace Prize concert last night. What a rich experience. Not unmixed, but certainly rich.

You should know two facts about me for context: 1. As I have failed to hide, I am a huge Al Gore fan. I wish he were running for president. I wish he had been allowed to take office when we elected him. 2. As far as musical tastes go, I find I’m quite binary. I can admire and respect a musician while being completely unmoved. If I’m moved at all, I’m moved to tears. Weird. In between, there’s hardly anything beyond the occasional toe tap. Also, I’m getting to be a grumpy old man.

I got to go to the concert because I spoke at a Cisco Public Services Summit in Stockholm. Cisco then put 450 of us on a couple of trains and rolled us to Oslo for the concert, of which Cisco is one of the sponsors. As a result, we were seated in the orchestra; I was about twenty rows back, seated among people who have dedicated themselves to public service.

The concert hall looks like a hockey stadium cut in half the long way, with steep seats climbing the gorge-like sides. In the long front was a curving stage with performance areas to the right and left. In center were the evening’s hosts, Kevin Spacey and Uma Thurman. Spacey — a man who looks great in a suite — was hilarious and a confident enough performer that he put the audience at ease. We didn’t have to worry if he as going to flub his lines or say something embarrassing. I am a long-time Uma fan, but let’s just say that she’s much taller than Spacey.

The truth is that I can’t make sense of the concert. It is a celebration of peace and, in this case, of environmental activism. Why this set of performers make? Some were fantastic. Some are activists. But Kylie Minogue? Did we really need to see her in her leather outfit and her skimpily clad female band? Is this what Al Gore is about? It was a tawdry and demeaning way to open the concert. And, given that you could pull in just about any of the world’s musicians, why no one from Africa? Why no classical music? I think I’m missing the point.

[Grumpy Alert:] I know I’m missing the point when it comes to musicians who clap their hands over their heads to tell you that you should clap along, and especially ones who — like Earth Wind and Fire — explicitly tell you to stand up and dance. I think all but two bands did the clapping-over-their-heads thing, and, frankly, it just irks me. If I want to clap along, I’ll decide on my own. And if I don’t want to stand when they tell me to, well, I will anyway, but I’ll resent it. Damn you and your forced funky enthusiasm, Earth, Wind and Fire!

Melissa Etheride rocked the ecosystem. She’s got all of her in her voice. And Alicia Keyes filled the hall. Yet, while admiring her voice and performance — wow! — I totally didn’t care about the songs. I was the only one who felt that way, apparently. People also loved Annie Lenox, although I’ve never liked her voice; although I admire her personally. I’m not recommending my views; I’m pointing out my inadequacy

Rajendra Pachauri and Gore came out towards the end to say a few words. Pachauri, who says people should call him “Patchy,” spoke lightly at first, and then said the expected words about the importance ofthe cause and the honor of the evening.

Gore moved me, but I’m a sucker for political rhetoric. The course of his talk was: Climate change isn’t a political problem, it’s a moral one. As a moral problem, we should consider the rest of the moral changes before us. These problems require us to respond as a united species. Therefore, we should embrace this challenge as an occasion for joy. (Yes, I choked up as he talked. I’m like that.)

After the concert, I went back to the hotel where Cisco was holding a party featuring Earth, Wind, Fire and an extended band that included Water, Smoke, Iridium, Porridge and Velour. So, when I spotted Gore going into an interview room downstairs, I left the party and stood outside until he came out, by himself, and was waiting for Pachauri. I said “Thank you,” and he shook my hand. Yes, the very hand I’m typing this with.

I went upstairs to the Cisco party for a few minutes, and who should come in to say a few words and pose for some photos than Pachauri. As he was leaving and Earth, Wind and Fire was starting up, he paused a few feet from me. I thanked him as well, and he shook my very hand.

Two Peace Prize winners in one night!! And neither one was Henry Kissinger!

The concert was a bit weird. The situation is predictably surreal. But I am very very glad to have been there.

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Hoder is asking his social network to publicize the lawsuit that threatens to bankrupt him. Ethan Zuckerman has posted about this with his usual cogency and moral insight. You don’t have to agree with Hoder to see the suit against him as an attempt to shut out a voice and ideas. You don’t have to agree with Hoder to support him in this.

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I’m at the Veerstichting conference in charming, delightful, beautiful Leiden..

I had to surrender my laptop to the AV squad — I would have been the only one taking notes on one anyway — so I could only scribble a few notes on a piece of paper, and even then I only heard the first two speakers all the way through.

Jan Willem Duyvendak is the author of the book on human herds and identity. Since the theme of the conference is the power of the herd, he was a natural beginning. He talked about the Dutch believe that they are a diverse society when in fact there is much commonality among them. “We are a herd of individualists,” he said. He spoke in the context of the current Dutch debate over immigration and national identity.

Next, Shashi Tharoor, an author and once high enough at the UN to be consider for the secretary general post, gave a beautiful and delightful talk about the Indian national identity. After listing some of that country’s amazing diversity (23 official languages, for example), he said “The singular thing about India is you can only talk about it in the plural.” Indian national identity, he says, works in practice but could not work in theory. It is a nationalism of the idea that people can disagree, so long as they agree on the ground rules.

Domitila Mukantaganzwa, the Executive Secretary of National Service of Gacaca Courts in Rwanda, went through in some detail the process of trying almost 900,000 people for crimes of genocide. The magnitude of the legal process implicitly showed the extent of the suffering. She was asked why the South African peace and reconciliation process forgave those who acknowledged their crimes, while the Rwandans are punishing those convicted. She said the severity of the crimes were different. And the Rwandans, she said, need to develop a culture of accountability. The survivors need to see the guilty punished. They also need, she says, to have the guilty tell them where they committed their crimes so parents can find and bury their children with dignity. This is a story beyond comment.

Finally, after rewriting and rewriting the talk I’d prepared on the challenge of the implicit in forming groups (summarized here), I at the last moment decided not to switch. So I gave the one on the implicit. I have no idea how it went over. [Tags: veerstichting crowds india rwanda leiden ]

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John Edwards has bought air time to respond to Pres. Bush tonight. (Disclosure: I advise (for free) the campaign on Net policy.)

I don’t envy any of the candidates. There’s no way forward and no way backward. It’s what we call a “quagmire.” Most of the candidates — Biden excepted — have provided process plans, not actual pictures of what the country should and could look like. I don’t want to hear that we’ll involve the countries that have a stake in Iraq’s future, even though I think that’s important to do. I want to hear that Iraq is going to end up as three federated regions and here’s how they’re going to split the oil revenues, and here’s how we’re going to prevent a war when one of the sub-nations gets greedy…or whatever. I want a plan with a vision, not a plan with a process to get to a vision.

I am, of course, asking too much. That’s how badly the Bush regime has screwed up. And how many more Americans and Iraqis will die for it? [Tags: iraq politics john_edwards]

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“Should we be telling the American people we will be there five, seven, 10 years?” Biden asked.

Crocker didn’t answer, arguing that it wasn’t possible to know what the situation would be next summer.

“In the past we have set expectations that cannot be met,” Crocker said. [LA Times]

Ryan Crocker is an ambassador. David Petraeus is a general in the Army. They owe us the truth. Of course they do. Yet, when they are asked one of the most basic questions, they refuse to answer. They pretend the Senators are asking for a precise date. They are afraid they’ll be wrong.

The ambassador and the general may not know if it’s going to take 8.25 years or 8.5 years, but they know it’s going to take more than two. They must have some plan, some idea, some conjecture. We are sophisticated enough to understand what they mean if they were to say, “Of course, there can be no certainty about this, and events may intervene, but the earliest I can see Iraq becoming stable enough for all but a maintenance force to leave is ____.”

Two years? Ten years? Five years? Twenty years? Our experts and our leaders owe us an answer. How can we decide if we should stay the course if we’re not being told to expect the course to be a 100 yard dash, a 5K run, or a double marathon with a triathalon at the end?

This lack of candor ought not be acceptable to us, much less the norm. [Tags: politics iraq petraeus]

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