sábado, 3 de agosto de 2013

Manning, Assange, Snowden, contra el neonazismo




Manning, Assange, Snowden, son los nuevos héroes por la verdad. De la misma manera que los nazis, los fascistas, los franquistas perseguían a quien levantaba la voz contra sus crímenes, estos son los últimos perseguidos públicamente para escarmiento de quien se atreva. Tras ellos y junto con ellos, hay muchas otras víctimas. Piense en golpes de estado, en invasiones, en guerras provocadas, en cárceles secretas y no secretas, como Guantánamo, siempre contra los Derechos Humanos, piense en la dominación internacional mediante gobiernos títeres y corruptos, juzgue usted a los responsables de tanto daño a la Humanidad.Manning, Assange, Snowden, son perseguidos por obama y sus banqueros, militares y agencias de espías, mercenarios y congresistas del FMI y los demás montajes antidemocráticos, enemigos de la libertad en general y de la libertad de expresión en particular. Sus gestores políticos, sus periódicos mercenarios, sus agentes colocados en los cargos de responsabilidad pública y oculta, infiltran en el cuerpo social advertencias, calificativos degradantes, acusaciones oscuras para introducir el rechazo social a quienes denuncien a los autores intelectuales y materiales de la terrible marcha criminal con la que fuerzan a todos los pueblos.
Manning, Assange, Snowden, el primero y el tercero son estadounidenses, salen de las tripas del imperio para hacer honor a la democracia y la libertad de expresión, para denunciar las aberraciones que oculta el neonazismo estadounidense, para enseñarnos cómo incumple las leyes democráticas y se fortalece en la injusticia en busca de la dominación mundial, cómo, jactándose de su atropello a la libertad y a los derechos, quiere meter en la cabeza de la gente que la injusticia es parte natural de la vida, que la injusticia no es mala, que es también ética porque es justo explotar a toda persona que se pueda explotar. Su práctica esta ahí para la historia de nuestros días. Conforme obama y los suyos hacen todo esto, al mismo tiempo habla de libertad, y habla y habla y habla. Dos caras, habla de libertad para el mundo y vigila a la población mundial, maniobra con los gobiernos a su servicio, falsifica la información sobre la realidad, prohíbe las voces que le descubren, y las persigue brutalmente.
Manning, Assange, Snowden, han hecho que se decanten los gobiernos que están bajo el régimen imperial neonazi, que se vean y escuchen en video sus acciones y sus palabras, que se lean sus documentos internos, han aportado las pruebas de su actividad criminal. Manning, Assange, Snowden, han conseguido una última cosa, que se conozca a los gobiernos que defienden la libertad de los pueblos frente al imperio.
La falta de ética de los obamas, su falta de moral, no tiene límites; hace tan sólo unos días estuvo obama visitando la cárcel desde la que se metían en barcos a los africanos capturados por los esclavistas europeos, barcos en donde morían el 60%, el 70% de los que llevaban secuestrados a América a trabajar como esclavos; a la vista de lo que han hecho con Branning, Assange, Snowden, es de pura lógica que obama desde aquella cárcel, sintiese el hilo que le llegaba de los esclavistas y, continuador, echase sus cuentas sobre lo que haría con los pueblos que denuncian sus atropellos y con los tres héroes de la libertad de expresión, qué haría con los tres que han hecho que se le vea el bigote hitleriano, en un momento como ese en que había ido a conocer una cárcel para hacer esclavos, qué haría con los tres que nos han enseñado cómo es un hitleriano de nuestro tiempo.
Aquí dejo dos escritos de otro estadounidense honesto y amigo de los pueblos en lucha por su libertad, Mark Twain (1835-1910), como verán trata las mismas cuestiones que han hecho ver al mundo, cien años después de la muerte del escritor, que el imperio, que pasa por ser la democracia por excelencia, no es más que puro cartón. Hoy, debido a las fuerzas de la tecnología la denuncia de los obamas se extiende con más facilidad. Pero leamos los textos de Mark Twain, en el primero de ellos habla de cómo son elegidos los obamas para el Parlamento:
“El sistema democrático”: “Noble sistema, verdaderamente, en el que un hombre como R.H.Dana no puede ser respaldado y en el que una persona como Jones, cuyo lugar apropiado es el de picapleitos en un tribunal de muertos, es enviado al Senado de los Estados Unidos; en el que resulta imposible recompensar con el honor de la presidencia a los ciudadanos más ilustres y mejor capacitados. Miren esta lista: Polk, Tyler, Pierce, etcétera, y casi Tilden, con el juicio pendiente por ocultación de ingresos. Media nación votó por él. Ese pordiosero Congreso de la ignorancia y el fraude. Banda de ladrones pagados.” El segundo texto nos ilustra sobre cómo practican en ese país la libertad de expresión y de conciencia, lo tituló “Libertad de Expresión y conciencia”: “Por bondad de Dios tenemos en nuestro país estas tres cosas indeciblemente preciosas: libertad de expresión, libertad de conciencia y prudencia para no ejercer jamás ninguna de las dos.” Los dos textos aparecen en “Mark Twain´s Notebook. Selección, A. B. Paine. Nueva York, Harper and Brothers, 1935.

Ramón Pedregal Casanova es miembro del Frente Cívico Somos Mayoría, y autor de “Dietario de crisis”, puedes bajártelo de Libros Libres, en rebelion.org, y es autor de “Siete Novelas de la Memoria Histórica. Posfacios”, editado por Fundación Domingo Malagón.
Rebelión ha publicado este artículo con el permiso del autor mediante una licencia de Creative Commons, respetando su libertad para publicarlo en otras fuentes.

Vigilancia, sousveillance y PRISM


ethanzuckerman.com

Traducido del inglés para Rebelión por Christine Lewis Carroll

Unos amigos de Die Zeit que me habían oído hablar sobre la omnipresencia de las cámaras de vigilancia en el foro Personal Democracy Forum me pidieron escribir un artículo para su periódico. Ésta es la versión en inglés que escribí justo antes de las protestas Restore the 4th [que buscan fortalecer la cuarta enmienda de la Constitución de los Estados Unidos y poner fin a los programas que la infringen] que se celebraron en Washington DC y otros lugares.Las revelaciones sobre la magnitud de la vigilancia del gobierno estadounidense de los medios electrónicos han desencadenado diversas reacciones en todo el mundo. Fuera de Estados Unidos los ciudadanos y sus gobiernos están con razón furiosos de que la Agencia de Seguridad Nacional monitorice sistemáticamente las comunicaciones de las plataformas más utilizadas del mundo. Que Estados Unidos espíe al parecer a sus aliados más allegados en los despachos de la Unión Europea sólo añade el insulto al agravio.
Las reacciones a estas revelaciones dentro de Estados Unidos han sido decepcionantemente tenues. Los libertarios y defensores civiles de la libertad de expresión en Internet luchan por encauzar su ira y proyectan celebrar una gran protesta en Washington DC el 4 de julio. Pero las respuestas más extendidas incluyen la aceptación de cualquier invasión de la privacidad a cambio de impedir la violencia terrorista y la insistencia cínica en que nadie debería sorprenderse de que tanto las corporaciones como los gobiernos monitorizan las redes electrónicas.
Como abogado frustrado de la libertad de expresión en Internet busco siempre maneras de ayudar a mis compatriotas en Estados Unidos a entender el significado de la vigilancia generalizada en Internet. A diferencia de Alemania, donde el recuerdo de la Stasi desencadena una resistencia instintiva al fenómeno de la observación, la vigilancia en Estados Unidos se ha centrado a menudo en los grupos políticos marginales, lo que hace que muchos estadounidenses crean que la vigilancia no va con ellos. Esta búsqueda de hacer visible la vigilancia me ha conducido al trabajo del doctor Steve Mann sobre la sousveillance.
Mann es profesor de la Universidad de Toronto e innovador en el mundo de los ordenadores que se pueden llevar en el cuerpo. En 1981, como estudiante del Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts, creó la primera generación de EyeTap, una cámara que se acopla delante de los ojos y que graba lo que ve el portador realzado por un ordenador. Más de 30 años antes de la creación de Google Glass, Mann empezó a vivir con una cámara a cuestas y registraba todo lo que veía, una experiencia que le ha proporcionado un gran conocimiento del hecho de la observación y que a uno lo observen.
Mann acuñó el término sousveillance -observar desde abajo- como alternativa a la surveillance [vigilancia] -observar desde arriba-. Con la vigilancia, los organismos poderosos controlan el comportamiento de las personas mediante la observación o la amenaza de observarlas, como es el caso del Panopticon [un edificio carcelario circular que permitía observar a los reos en todo momento] inventado por Jeremy Bentham. Con la sousveillance, las personas invierten el paradigma al apuntar las cámaras hacia los organismos, con la promesa de documentar y compartir los casos de la mala conducta con una audiencia potencialmente global mediante las redes electrónicas.
Uno de los efectos de la sousveillance es que se susciten debates sobre qué significa ser vigilado. Aun cuando la vigilancia sea visible -como es el caso de las cámaras de circuito cerrado (CCTV) que pueblan muchas calles de nuestras ciudades- la mayoría de nosotros tiende a ignorar a los observadores ocultos que nos monitorizan. Pero cuando alguien nos apunta con una cámara -sobre todo una montada en sus gafas- reaccionamos a menudo con ira o consternación. A Mann -que lleva su EyeTap permanentemente- lo agredieron los empleados de McDonalds en París, disgustados porque sacaba fotos, y quisieron obligarlo a retirarla.
Provocaciones similares pueden ser necesarias para desencadenar nuestras reacciones frente a la vigilancia en Internet. Creepy -un programa inventado por Ioannis Kakavas- sigue en un mapa los movimientos de una persona mediante su participación en las redes sociales. Mientras Creepy se ideó como un proyecto activista, los programas comerciales usan técnicas similares. Una aplicación controvertida de iPhone -Girls Around Me- proporciona datos en Foursquare a los hombres que buscan citas; identifica los lugares de la ciudad en que las mujeres se han registrado. Las reacciones encendidas a estos programas, junto con la existencia de bares que prohíben que sus clientes lleven Google Glass, sugieren que la idea de Mann de que la vigilancia sea tanto personal como visible puede ser el primer paso para suscitar un debate acerca de qué tipos de observación proceden y cuáles no.
Otro aspecto de la sousveillance que merece la pena explorar es la idea de que las personas pueden meter en cintura a los poderosos al documentar los casos de mala conducta. Aunque esta idea puede parecer desesperadamente ingenua ante sistemas tan masivos y generalizados como PRISM, hay casos en los que observar desde abajo ha ayudado a combatir los abusos de poder. El nombramiento de Morgan Tsvangirai como primer ministro de Zimbabwe en 2009 fue consecuencia directa de la táctica de su partido de fotografiar el recuento de votos en cada colegio electoral, lo que permitió una tabulación paralela de la votación. Al presentar la prueba de que Tsvangirai había vencido a Mugabe en la primera vuelta, el gobierno de Mugabe no pudo amañar las elecciones y se le obligó a aceptar un acuerdo para compartir el poder con Tsvangirai, el jefe de la oposición.
Los activistas del movimiento Occupy han utilizado más recientemente el streaming [transferencia continua] de video en directo como técnica para documentar sus protestas y la violencia policial ejercida contra los manifestantes. Docenas de cámaras captaron las imágenes del teniente John Pike mientras rociaba con spray de pimienta a los manifestantes sentados en una protesta pacífica deOccupy en la Universidad de California en Davis. El incidente -ampliamente difundido- llevó al cese del jefe de policía de Davis y dos agentes y al despido del teniente Pike, lo que dio lugar a una de las imágenes más poderosas de las asimetrías a las que el movimiento Occupy buscaba enfrentarse.
Las cámaras omnipresentes pueden documentar cómo funcionan ciertos organismos y los abusos de poder. El candidato presidencial republicano Mitt Romney tuvo un descalabro durante su campaña electoral cuando se difundió un video en que consideraba al 47% del electorado estadounidense como votantes improbables porque “se creían víctimas” y dependientes de los servicios gubernamentales. El video, grabado en secreto por Scott Prouty en un acto celebrado para conseguir fondos, se difundió ampliamente en Internet y los activistas lo consideraron una prueba de que Romney no estaba en contacto con el electorado.
Más recientemente la sousveillance ha demostrado su capacidad de documentar los movimientos de protesta en Turquía y Brasil que ignoraron inicialmente los medios de comunicación dominantes. En Turquía la CNN emitió un documental sobre pingüinos en vez de las imágenes de Gezi Park, lo que llevó a los manifestantes a colocar máscaras de gas a los pingüinos en protesta por el uso por parte del gobierno de gas lacrimógeno y el silencio de los medios acerca de las protestas. Frente a la falta de atención de los medios los manifestantes utilizaron su propia documentación para difundir las protestas del parque al público de Internet y que éste empezara a realizar sus propias protestas.
No parece que el gobierno de Obama vaya a cambiar de política con respecto a la vigilancia en Internet sin que se produzca una protesta generalizada sostenida y popular. A medida que los activistas buscan desencadenar dicha protesta, puede ser necesario que el fenómeno de la vigilancia se haga más visible, de manera que ésta sea mucho más controvertida.
1 Un programa de vigilancia electrónica de la Agencia de Seguridad Nacional estadounidense. [N. de la t.]
Fuente: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2013/07/10/surveillance-sousveillance-and-prism-an-op-ed-for-die-zeit/

Bradley Manning: condenado no "país da liberdade" por suas convicções



Democracy Now!


“La guerra es una estructura peligrosa, que puede desmoronarse fácilmente y sepultarnos entre sus
escombros”, escribió Carl von Clausewitz, el general y teórico militar prusiano del siglo XIX en su texto “De la guerra”, hace casi 200 años. Esta cita fue tomada del capítulo “La información en la guerra”, un tema que resuena fuertemente en la actualidad desde lugares tan disímiles como Fort Meade, Maryland, donde un tribunal militar acaba de hallar culpable al soldado Bradley Manning de espionaje; hasta la Embajada de Ecuador en Londres, donde el fundador de WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, vive desde hace más de un año, tras haber recibido asilo político para evitar ser procesado en Estados Unidos; pasando por Rusia, donde el informante de la Agencia de Seguridad Nacional Edward Snowden recibió asilo temporal.
La condena de Manning suscitó un interés momentáneo entre los miembros de los medios dominantes de Estados Unidos, que dedicaron muy poca atención al consejo de guerra que se desarrolló a lo largo de dos meses, apenas unos kilómetros al norte de Washington D.C. Los seguidores de Manning expresaron alivio de que fuera absuelto de la acusación más grave presentada en su contra: colaborar con el enemigo, algo que le hubiera significado una condena a cadena perpetua. Sin embargo, fue hallado culpable de 20 de los 22 delitos que se le imputaron, y podría ser condenado a hasta 136 años en prisión. El tribunal se pronunciará acerca de la condena en las próximas semanas.
“Bradley Manning es un mártir ahora. Todo el mundo entiende que Bradley Manning le brindó información a los medios acerca de crímenes de guerra y de la política en torno a la guerra, y alguna de esa información se publicó en los medios. No se lo acusa de haber trabajado para intereses extranjeros, ni de haberse beneficiado personalmente con las revelaciones. Han puesto a Bradley Manning en una situación injusta, en la que afronta una pena de hasta 136 años de prisión. Eso desprestigia al Gobierno de Estados Unidos y a la justicia de ese país”, afirmó Julian Assange desde la embajada de Ecuador en Londres. “El veredicto es claramente un intento de quebrantar a los informantes, pero no lo lograrán”.
Cabe resaltar que el ex Secretario de Defensa de Estados Unidos Robert Gates le envío una carta al senador Carl Levin en 2010, en la que escribió acerca de las filtraciones: “Hasta el momento, la investigación no ha revelado que la filtración haya puesto en peligro ninguna fuente ni método de información”.
Bradley Manning realizó una declaración al inicio del Consejo de Guerra, en la que asumió la responsabilidad de las filtraciones, pero, lo que es más importante, expresó su motivación para hacerlo. Manning habló específicamente del video de la masacre de una docena de civiles en Bagdad el 12 de julio de 2007, registrado por el propio helicóptero Apache que les estaba disparando. Dos de las víctimas mortales trabajaban para la agencia de noticias Reuters: el camarógrafo Namir Noor-Eldeen, de 22 años, y su chofer, Saeed Chmagh, que tenía cuatro hijos.
Podemos escuchar las propias palabras de Manning, gracias a una grabación de audio no autorizada de su declaración, que se filtró en forma anónima. Manning afirmó: “Sin embargo, el aspecto más aterrador del video para mí fue la masacre perpetrada aparentemente con placer por el grupo de armas aéreas. Deshumanizaron a las personas a las que disparaban y no parecían valorar para nada la vida humana. Se referían a ellos como 'malditos muertos', y se felicitaban entre ellos por la capacidad de matar a muchas personas a la vez. En un momento del video se puede ver a una persona en el suelo intentando arrastrarse hasta un lugar seguro. Estaba gravemente herida. En lugar de llamar a una ambulancia, un miembro del equipo de armas aéreas solicitó a la persona herida que tomara sus armas para tener motivo para dispararle. …Para mí, esto se parece mucho a un niño que tortura hormigas con una lupa”.
Una de las acusaciones de las que Manning fue hallado culpable fue la de “publicación arbitraria”. Es una acusación sin precedentes en el derecho militar. El abogado de Manning dijo que se trata de un delito inventado. El verdadero delito, del que nadie fue acusado, es la arbitraria falta de respeto por la vida humana que Manning denunció.
La filtración de Bradley Manning les dio a Reuters y al mundo una imagen clara del horror de la guerra moderna y de la muerte violenta de dos trabajadores de los medios en el cumplimiento de su deber.
Como afirmó el joven soldado en su elocuente declaración: “Pensaba que si el público en general, en particular el público estadounidense, tenía acceso a la información que contenían [las filtraciones], se podría suscitar un debate nacional sobre el papel de las fuerzas armadas y de nuestra política exterior en general, con relación a Irak y Afganistán”.
De hecho, Bradley Manning suscitó el debate. La última ola de filtraciones, la de Edward Snowden, ayudó a intensificarlo, y hasta generó una inusual alianza en el Congreso entre legisladores demócratas y republicanos que tiene como objetivo restringir el alcance de lo que muchos consideran un Estado de seguridad nacional exacerbado. Si bien la semana pasada la propuesta de enmienda presentada por el representante republicano Justin Amash y el demócrata John Conyers fue rechazada en la Cámara Baja por una diferencia mínima de votos, ambos redactaron un proyecto de ley aparte denominado H.R. 2399 con el mismo objetivo.
Carl von Clausewitz escribió: “La gran incertidumbre que rodea los datos disponibles en la guerra constituye una dificultad característica, porque, hasta cierto punto, la acción debe ser dirigida prácticamente a oscuras”. Bradley Manning realizó actos muy valientes para publicar información, atravesar la barrera de ocultamiento de la guerra y hacer públicos los perversos mecanismos del tipo de guerra estadounidense moderna. Edward Snowden ha revelado la sofisticación y el alcance extraordinario del Estado de vigilancia en Estados Unidos, que reprime a quienes se atreven a revelar información importante. Mientras tanto, Julian Assange permanece encerrado entre las cuatro paredes de la embajada, perseguido por el crimen de publicar información. Sin embargo, quienes planificaron las guerras, quienes cometieron los crímenes de guerra y quienes realizan el espionaje ilegal están, por el momento, en libertad.

Denis Moynihan colaboró en la producción periodística de esta columna.
© 2013 Amy Goodman
Texto en inglés traducido por Mercedes Camps. Edición: María Eva Blotta y Democracy Now! en español, spanish@democracynow.org
 Fuente: http://www.democracynow.org/es/blog/2013/8/2/bradley_manning_condenado_por_sus_convicciones

Living in America will drive you insane — literally

Living in America will drive you insane — literally

Two Faux Democracies That Threaten the World

Planning for Nuclear War?


by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Amitai Etzioni has raised an important question: “Who authorized preparations for war with China?”  Etzioni says that the war plan is not the sort of contingency plan that might be on hand for an improbable event.  Etzioni also reports that the Pentagon’s war plan was not ordered by, and has not been reviewed by, US civilian authorities. We are confronted with a neoconized US military out of control endangering Americans and the rest of the world.
Etzioni is correct that this is a momentous decision made by a neoconized military. China is obviously aware that Washington is preparing for war with China. If the Yale Journal knows it, China knows it. If the Chinese government is realistic, the government is aware that Washington is planning a pre-emptive nuclear attack against China.  No other kind of war makes any sense from Washington’s standpoint. The “superpower” was never able to occupy Baghdad, and after 11 years of war has been defeated in Afghanistan by a few thousand lightly armed Taliban.  It would be curtains for Washington to get into a conventional war with China.
When China was a primitive third world country, it fought the US military to a stalemate in Korea.  Today China has the world’s second largest economy and is rapidly overtaking the failing US economy destroyed by jobs offshoring, bankster fraud, and corporate and congressional treason.
The Pentagon’s war plan for China is called “AirSea Battle.” The plan describes itself as “interoperable air and naval forces that can execute networked, integrated attacks-in-depth to disrupt, destroy, and defeat enemy anti-access area denial capabilities.”
Yes, what does that mean?  It means many billions of dollars of more profits for the military/security complex while the 99 percent are ground under the boot. It is also clear that this nonsensical jargon cannot defeat a Chinese army.  But this kind of saber-rattling can lead to war, and if the Washington morons get a war going, the only way Washington can prevail is with nuclear weapons. The radiation, of course, will kill Americans as well.
Nuclear war is on Washington’s agenda. The rise of the Neocon Nazis has negated the nuclear disarmament agreements that Reagan and Gorbachev made.  The extraordinary, mainly truthful 2012 book, The Untold howeconHistory of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, describes the post-Reagan breakout of preemptive nuclear attack as Washington’s first option.
During the Cold War nuclear weapons had a defensive purpose. The purpose was to prevent nuclear war by the US and USSR each having sufficient retaliatory power to ensure “mutually assured destruction.” MAD, as it was known, meant that nuclear weapons had no offensive advantage for either side.
The Soviet collapse and China’s focus on its economy instead of its military have resulted in Washington’s advantage in nuclear weaponry that, according to two US Dr. Strangeglove characters, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, gives Washington first-strike capability. Lieber and Press write that the “precipitous decline of Russia’s arsenal, and the glacial pace of modernization of China’s nuclear forces,” have created a situation in which neither Russia nor China could retaliate to Washington’s first strike.
The Pentagon’s “AirSea Battle” and Lieber and Press’ article in Foreign Affairs have informed China and Russia that Washington is contemplating pre-emptive nuclear attack on both countries. To ensure Russia’s inability to retaliate, Washington is placing anti-ballistic missiles on Russia’s borders in violation of the US-USSR agreement.
Because the American press is a corrupt government propaganda ministry, the American people have no idea that neoconized Washington is planning nuclear war. Americans are no more aware of this than they are of former President Jimmy Carter’s recent statement, reported only in Germany, that the United States no longer has a functioning democracy.
The possibility that the United States would initiate nuclear war was given reality eleven years ago when President George W. Bush, at the urging of Dick Cheney and the neocons that dominated his regime, signed off on the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review.
This neocon document, signed off on by America’s most moronic president, resulted in consternation and condemnation from the rest of the world and launched a new arms race. Russian President Putin immediately announced that Russia would spend all necessary sums to maintain Russia’s retaliatory nuclear capability. The Chinese displayed their prowess by knocking a satellite out of space with a missile. The mayor of  Hiroshima, recipient city of a vast American war crime, stated: “The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the central international agreement guiding the elimination of nuclear weapons, is on the verge of collapse. The chief cause is US nuclear policy that, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear first strike and calling for resumed research into mini-nukes and other so-called ‘useable nuclear weapons,’ appears to worship nuclear weapons as God.”
Polls from all over the world consistently show that Israel and the US are regarded as the two greatest threats to peace and to life on earth. Yet, these two utterly lawless governments prance around pretending to be the “world’s greatest democracies.”  Neither government accepts any accountability whatsoever to international law, to human rights, to the Geneva Conventions, or to their own statutory law. The US and Israel are rogue governments, throwbacks to the Hitler and Stalin era.
The post World War II wars originate in Washington and Israel.  No other country has imperial expansionary ambitions. The Chinese government has not seized Taiwan, which China could do at will. The Russian government has not seized former constituent parts of Russia, such as Georgia, which, provoked by Washington to launch an attack, was instantly overwhelmed by the Russian Army.  Putin could have hung Washington’s Georgian puppet and reincorporated Georgia into Russia, where it resided for several centuries and where many believe it belongs.
For the past 68 years, most military aggression can be sourced to the US and Israel.
Yet, these two originators of wars pretend to be the victims of aggression. It is Israel that has a nuclear arsenal that is illegal, unacknowledged, and unaccountable. It is Washington that has drafted a war plan based on nuclear first strike.  The rest of the world is correct to view these two rogue unaccountable governments as direct threats to life on earth.
Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format.

The Logical (and Coming) End to the US Empire

The Consequences of Hubris


by ROBERT P. ABELE
There are numerous legal and ethical arguments that can and have been made in opposition to U.S. foreign policy of raw aggression. For an example of the illegalities of U.S. Empire, examine the Geneva Conventions, all four of which directly proscribe what they each call “outrages” to human dignity, “in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” (I, 1, 3). The “outrages” are named specifically as torture, mutilation, cruel treatment, taking hostages, murder, biological experimentation, and passing sentences on prisoners without benefit of “a regularly constituted court.”
Additionally, the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 both underscore the Geneva Conventions and expand the traditional ethical concerns to rights and duties of neutral states by banning the use of poison gases or arms, destroying or seizing enemy private property, attacking towns and cities that are undefended, pillaging, collective punishment, servility of enemy citizens, and bullets made to wreak havoc once inside the human body. Prescriptions to limit the conduct of war include the requirements to warn towns of impending attacks, to protect cultural, religious, and health institutions, and to insure public order and safety.
For an example of the ethical problems of empire, think about the completely unjustifiable attacks on civilians done by the U.S. in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and most prominently in Pakistan and Yemen, especially done by drones. Or consider U.S. use of torture, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay. As everyone knows by now, ethical and humanitarian appeals have been completely and categorically rejected by U.S. leaders, not beginning with 9-11, certainly rejected with greater vigor since then.
But there is another, often overlooked, analysis of U.S. actions, that is the logical result of engaging in the actions of Empire, and that concerns the logical consequence of using massive amounts of resources to attempt to control the resources being used (the second use of the term “resources” here includes citizens; the people of a city or nation). As the economic, logistic, and humanitarian costs all rise in direct proportion to Empire’s actions, the sustaining of the Empire becomes impossible, on the basis of its own internal logic.
In whatever historical epoch you choose, if you take your compass and draw a circle around any given tribe, you can see the desired extent of their territorial claims for resource control. One thus can see that particular group’s 1) resource consumption; and 2) circle of desired resource control. But when two further historical developments are added, such as 3) technologically-driven consumption (e.g. fossil-fuel guzzling appliances and cars, etc.); and 4) now necessary desires forglobal resources needed to feed that group’s consumption habits—then the situation expands sufficiently to become one of using extensive amounts of the very resources one is attempting to control (in the U.S. case, oil and money) for the sake of controlling the resources over which one needs to exert control! This circular logic cannot be maintained when it meets 5) a scarcity of resources; and 6) the natural-institutional-logical antinomy of using resources in massive amounts to control the resources you are using for control. In other words, the empire based on this pattern must end when it runs headlong into resource scarcity, and/or natural-logical contradictions involving its own internal (economic and resource) limitations. This argument against U.S. Empire is not based on ethical or legal grounds (although those remain the best arguments in favor of voluntarily ending empire and regaining our citizenship [civil rights] and humanness)—since those arguments have been put asunder by the U.S. administrators of empire. Rather, the institutional-logical analysis argues that an empire such as the U.S. has constructed exhausts itself by being unable to expand fast enough to control everything it seeks in order to continue its dominance. When the issue of blowback is added—i.e. that other nations and peoples are unlikely to cooperate willingly in having their resources, humanity, and very lives removed from them—the end result, Empire’s fall, could be hastened, and is certainly assured. We can now predict not only how it will happen, but also its imminent coming. Here’s how.
First, the heaviest resource consumers of fossil fuels, in order, are the U.S. military, U.S. citizens, China, and India. The Department of Defense per capita energy consumption is 10 times more than per capita energy consumption in China, or 30 times more than that of Africa. Oil accounts for more than three-fourths of DoD’s total energy consumption. The Post Carbon Institute estimates that abroad alone, the U.S. military consumes about 150,000 barrels per day. In 2006, for example, the Air Force consumed 2.6 billion gallons of jet-fuel, which is the same amount of fuel U.S. airplanes consumed during all of WWII (between December 1941 and August 1945) (from The Resilience Group of the Post Carbon Institute, www.resilience.org ).
Second, concerning the global dimension of resource control, one needs only to understand the preferred method that U.S. Empire acolytes use to justify their actions abroad: the “state of emergency” that was declared after 9/11 has continued unabated since then, due to the “ongoing threat” of “terrorism” (see Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, for the latest detailed instances of this process.). The domestic equivalent to his “war” has been well underway since 9-11. (For detail on the domestic front, see also Trevor Aaronson, Terror Factory, regarding FBI domestic use of the “ongoing threat of terrorism” to deny basic civil rights to citizens).
This allows U.S. government administrators to maintain a “state of exception” to the rule of law. Georgio Agamben, in his book States of Exception, defines this phrase as extraordinary governmental actions resulting from distinctively political crises. As such, the actions of such administrators are in-between normal political operations and legal ones. This “no man’s land” of government policy is not only difficult to define, but brings in its wake a “suspension of the entire existing juridical order.” Thus, states of exception are those in which a government in fact suspends the rule of law for itself, while attempting to maintain some semblance of legal order, for the purpose of consolidating its power and control (see Georgio Agamben, States of Exception, Chapter Two).
Regarding the scarcity of resources issue, none other than the World Bank produced a detailed study of demand and supply projections for the immediate future. The study projects that, on the basis of current consumption and immediately precedent rises in it, the demand for food will rise by 50% by 2030, for meat by 85%, for oil by 20 million barrels a day, and for water by 32%, all by the same year. This is met by alarming statistics and predictions from the supply side. In their report, they state that global food growth rates fell by 1.1% over the past decade, and are continuing to fall, while global food consumption outstripped production in seven of the eight years between 2000 and 2008. Further, the Food and Agricultural Organization and the UN Environment Program estimate that 16% of the arable land used now is degraded. Intensifying competition between different land uses is likely to emerge in future, including food crops, livestock, etc., and the world’s expanding cities. Current rates of water extraction from rivers, groundwater and other sources are already unsustainable in many parts of the world. Over one billion people live in water basins in which the physical scarcity of water is absolute; by 2025, the figure is projected to rise two billion, with up to two thirds of the world’s population living in water-stressed conditions (mainly in non-OECD countries). On oil, the International Energy Agency has warned consistently that there is a significant risk of a new “supply crunch” as the global economy “recovers.” Additionally, the IEA’s chief economist argues that peak production could take place by 2020 (from the “World Development Report 2011, Background Paper: Resource Scarcity, Climate Change and the Risk of Violent Conflict,”www.worldbank.org ).
The conclusion from all of these points is nearly obvious: if resources are even relatively scarce, and the habits of and desires for consumption continue to rise among nations, and especially among the citizens of Empire (as has been documented in part above), and if control over those resources is the goal of Empire, but if the Empire consumes more resources than it can logistically or economically control due to natural limitations of those resources themselves, and/or to the consumption of more resources than is either available to it or that it needs to survive, then the power of the Empire will naturally-logically end in a sharp decline, and soon (For applicable details on this, see Richard Heinberg, “The Brief, Tragic Reign of Consumerism—and the Birth of a Happy Alternative,” www.postcarbon.org ).
With all indicators predicting that the contradictions of Empire’s resource consumption, circle of desired resource control, scarcity of resources, and contradiction in resource use and control, are all about to collide in a few years, not decades, it is time to start planning for a post-Empire future. To that end, any psychologist reading this analysis will recognize themes of “realistic conflict theory,” which is a theory which explains how intergroup hostility can arise as a result of conflicting goals and competition over limited resources The key point in bringing this psychological theory into the discussion is that in this theory, it is concluded that friction between groups can be reduced only in the presence of superordinate goals that promote united, cooperative action (see Wikipedia on “Realistic Conflict Theory” for a good overview, summarized here. https://en.wikipedia.org ). Note the agreement of the ethical, legal, and psychological analyses of Empire’s oppression: the most effective resolution to oppression, (empire) dominance, and conflict is united, cooperative action, not the attempt to control or destroy people and nations who stand in the way of our control.
We have seen that progressives have had available to them a standard two-pronged argument against empire—American or any other. Progressives have for good reason appealed consistently to the ethical and the legal arguments available to help stem the desires for world and resource domination. This essays suggests that these two solid arguments should now be combined with an institutional-logical analysis to demonstrate not only the intrinsic, natural limits to empire, but to show reasons how and why empire must and will ultimately disintegrate due to the hubris of ignoring natural limitations of unbridled consumption coupled with attempts at singular control over others’ resources and peoples.
Dr. Robert P. Abele holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Marquette University He is the author of three books: A User’s Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act (2005); The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq (2009); Democracy Gone: A Chronicle of the Last Chapters of the Great American Democratic Experiment (2009). He contributed eleven chapters to the Encyclopedia of Global Justice, from The Hague: Springer Press (October, 2011). Dr. Abele is a professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, located in Pleasant Hill, California in the San Francisco Bay area.

Colônias de bacterias produzem arte psicodélica - muito lindo

August 2, 2013

Colonies of Growing Bacteria Make Psychedelic Art

Bacterial Dragon (Paenibacillus dendritiformis), by Eshel Ben-Jacob.
In the early 1990s, Eshel Ben-Jacob, a biological physicist at Tel Aviv University, and his colleagues discovered two new species of bacteria—Paenibacillus dendritiformis and Paenibacillus vortex. Both strains of soil bacteria, the species live near the roots of plants.
Each bacterium is only a few microns in size, and they divide every 20 minutes, ultimately forming large colonies consisting of billions of microorganisms. “The entire colony can be thought of as a big brain, a super brain, that receives signals, processes information and then makes decisions about where to send bacteria and where to continue to expand,” says Ben-Jacob.
P. vortex exposed to a chemotherapy substance, by Eshel Ben-Jacob.
In his lab, Ben-Jacob grew the bacteria in petri dishes and exposed them to different conditions—like temperature swings, for instance—in an attempt to imitate some of the variability in the natural environments where the bacteria grow. “The idea was very simple,” he explains.”If you want to see their capabilities, you have to expose them to some challenges.” The physicist could see how the colony responded to the stress of different variables.
As opposed to letting the bacteria grow in uniform conditions, for scientific purposes, he might let them grow at one temperature in an incubator, take them out, expose them and then put them back in the incubator. He also, at times, added antibiotics and other treatments to the petri dishes in order to incite a physical response. The bacteria, it turned out, communicated with one another in response to these stressors; they secreted lubricants, allowing them to move, and formed elaborate patterns with dots and vine-like branches.
From the first instant he saw a colony, Ben-Jacob called it bacteria art. ”Without knowing anything, you’ll feel the sense that there is drama going on,” he says.
A close look at P. dendritiformis, by Eshel Ben-Jacob.
In time, Ben-Jacob came to understand the behaviors of the bacteria. And, he says, “If you understand how they grow, then you can use it as a material for doing art.” Having some say in the pattern the colony takes just requires some manipulation on the scientist’s part. “In order to let the bacteria express their art, you have to learn to speak the bacteria’s language,” Ben-Jacob adds.
Vortex Blue (P. vortex), by Eshel Ben-Jacob.
The bacteria are naturally colorless. To make them visible, Ben-Jacob uses a stain called Coomassie blue to dye the microorganisms. The bacteria take on different shades of blue depending on each individual bacterium’s density. Then, working with photographs of the colonies in Photoshop, the scientist translates the blues into a spectrum of any color of his choosing.
“If you take the same object and you change the lights and the colors, it triggers different perception in our brain,” says Ben-Jacob. “In some cases, just coloring it [the bacteria colony] and looking at it helped me to realize a few things, some clues that we could then use in order to understand how they develop the patterns.” The images have helped him see how bacteria cooperate to meet challenges—bacteria in one part of a colony can sense something in the local environment and send messages to bacteria in other parts of the colony. The bacteria might encounter food, for example, and manage to communicate to other members of the colony that it is present, so that it can be digested. In other words, the science informs the art which sometimes then informs the science again.
P. vortex, by Eshel Ben-Jacob.
The patterns in Ben-Jacob’s bacteria art are eye-catching and evocative—without knowing how they formed, the brain leaps to the familiar seaweeds, corals, sphagnum moss, feathers—fractal displays that border on the psychedelic. A large part of the series’ visual appeal comes from the push-pull of order and disorder in the images, the scientist-artist claims.
“The bacteria have to maintain order, but they also have to maintain flexibility, so that when conditions change they can better adapt to the environment,” says Ben-Jacob. “We have an affinity for things that have the combination of the two, order and disorder. If you analyze classical music, it is the same thing. The things that we really like and are captivated by are things that have this mixture.”



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Why Are Finland's Schools Successful?


The country's achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework

  • Photographs by Stuart Conway
  • Smithsonian magazine, September 2011, Subscribe
Kirkkojarvi School
"This is what we do every day," says Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School principal Kari Louhivuori, "prepare kids for life." (Stuart Conway)
It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.
Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.
“I took Besart on that year as my private student,” Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles “Yellow Submarine” poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet. When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori’s desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn.
Years later, a 20-year-old Besart showed up at Kirkkojarvi’s Christmas party with a bottle of Cognac and a big grin. “You helped me,” he told his former teacher. Besart had opened his own car repair firm and a cleaning company. “No big fuss,” Louhivuori told me. “This is what we do every day, prepare kids for life.”
This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for the tiny Nordic nation’s staggering record of education success, a phenomenon that has inspired, baffled and even irked many of America’s parents and educators. Finnish schooling became an unlikely hot topic after the 2010 documentary film Waiting for “Superman” contrasted it with America’s troubled public schools.
“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else. They seem to relish the challenges. Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school. The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity, more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations. “Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling. “We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”
The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide. “I’m still surprised,” said Arjariita Heikkinen, principal of a Helsinki comprehensive school. “I didn’t realize we were that good.”
In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on compe­tition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”
There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.
Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.
Still, there is a distinct absence of chest-thumping among the famously reticent Finns. They are eager to celebrate their recent world hockey championship, but PISA scores, not so much. “We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test,” said Pasi Sahlberg, a former math and physics teacher who is now in Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture. “We are not much interested in PISA. It’s not what we are about.”
Maija Rintola stood before her chattering class of twenty-three 7- and 8-year-olds one late April day in Kirkkojarven Koulu. A tangle of multicolored threads topped her copper hair like a painted wig. The 20-year teacher was trying out her look for Vappu, the day teachers and children come to school in riotous costumes to celebrate May Day. The morning sun poured through the slate and lemon linen shades onto containers of Easter grass growing on the wooden sills. Rintola smiled and held up her open hand at a slant—her time-tested “silent giraffe,” which signaled the kids to be quiet. Little hats, coats, shoes stowed in their cubbies, the children wiggled next to their desks in their stocking feet, waiting for a turn to tell their tale from the playground. They had just returned from their regular 15 minutes of playtime outdoors between lessons. “Play is important at this age,” Rintola would later say. “We value play.”
With their wiggles unwound, the students took from their desks little bags of buttons, beans and laminated cards numbered 1 through 20. A teacher’s aide passed around yellow strips representing units of ten. At a smart board at the front of the room, Rintola ushered the class through the principles of base ten. One girl wore cat ears on her head, for no apparent reason. Another kept a stuffed mouse on her desk to remind her of home. Rintola roamed the room helping each child grasp the concepts. Those who finished early played an advanced “nut puzzle” game. After 40 minutes it was time for a hot lunch in the cathedral-like cafeteria.
Teachers in Finland spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in classrooms than American teachers. Teachers use the extra time to build curriculums and assess their students. Children spend far more time playing outside, even in the depths of winter. Homework is minimal. Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”
It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless. Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all 5-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socializing. In addition, the state subsidizes parents, paying them around 150 euros per month for every child until he or she turns 17. Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschool, where children begin some academics. Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.
Even so, Rintola said her children arrived last August miles apart in reading and language levels. By April, nearly every child in the class was reading, and most were writing. Boys had been coaxed into literature with books like Kapteeni Kalsarin (“Captain Underpants”). The school’s special education teacher teamed up with Rintola to teach five children with a variety of behavioral and learning problems. The national goal for the past five years has been to mainstream all children. The only time Rintola’s children are pulled out is for Finnish as a Second Language classes, taught by a teacher with 30 years’ experience and graduate school training.
There are exceptions, though, however rare. One first-grade girl was not in Rintola’s class. The wispy 7-year-old had recently arrived from Thailand speaking not a word of Finnish. She was studying math down the hall in a special “preparing class” taught by an expert in multicultural learning. It is designed to help children keep up with their subjects while they conquer the language. Kirkkojarvi’s teachers have learned to deal with their unusually large number of immigrant students. The city of Espoo helps them out with an extra 82,000 euros a year in “positive discrimination” funds to pay for things like special resource teachers, counselors and six special needs classes.
Rintola will teach the same children next year and possibly the next five years, depending on the needs of the school. “It’s a good system. I can make strong connections with the children,” said Rintola, who was handpicked by Louhivuori 20 years ago. “I understand who they are.” Besides Finnish, math and science, the first graders take music, art, sports, religion and textile handcrafts. English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth. By fifth grade the children have added biology, geography, history, physics and chemistry.
Not until sixth grade will kids have the option to sit for a district-wide exam, and then only if the classroom teacher agrees to participate. Most do, out of curiosity. Results are not publicized. Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests. “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts,” Louhivuori teased, as he rummaged through his closet looking for past years’ results. “Looks like we did better than average two years ago,” he said after he found the reports. “It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”
I had come to Kirkkojarvi to see how the Finnish approach works with students who are not stereotypically blond, blue-eyed and Lutheran. But I wondered if Kirkkojarvi’s success against the odds might be a fluke. Some of the more vocal conservative reformers in America have grown weary of the “We-Love-Finland crowd” or so-called Finnish Envy. They argue that the United States has little to learn from a country of only 5.4 million people—4 percent of them foreign born. Yet the Finns seem to be onto something. Neighboring Norway, a country of similar size, embraces education policies similar to those in the United States. It employs standardized exams and teachers without master’s degrees. And like America, Norway’s PISA scores have been stalled in the middle ranges for the better part of a decade.
To get a second sampling, I headed east from Espoo to Helsinki and a rough neighborhood called Siilitie, Finnish for “Hedgehog Road” and known for having the oldest low-income housing project in Finland. The 50-year-old boxy school building sat in a wooded area, around the corner from a subway stop flanked by gas stations and convenience stores. Half of its 200 first- through ninth-grade students have learning disabilities. All but the most severely impaired are mixed with the general education children, in keeping with Finnish policies.
A class of first graders scampered among nearby pine and birch trees, each holding a stack of the teacher’s homemade laminated “outdoor math” cards. “Find a stick as big as your foot,” one read. “Gather 50 rocks and acorns and lay them out in groups of ten,” read another. Working in teams, the 7- and 8-year-olds raced to see how quickly they could carry out their tasks. Aleksi Gustafsson, whose master’s degree is from Helsinki University, developed the exercise after attending one of the many workshops available free to teachers. “I did research on how useful this is for kids,” he said. “It’s fun for the children to work outside. They really learn with it.”
Gustafsson’s sister, Nana Germeroth, teaches a class of mostly learning-impaired children; Gustafsson’s students have no learning or behavioral issues. The two combined most of their classes this year to mix their ideas and abilities along with the children’s varying levels. “We know each other really well,” said Germeroth, who is ten years older. “I know what Aleksi is thinking.”
The school receives 47,000 euros a year in positive discrimination money to hire aides and special education teachers, who are paid slightly higher salaries than classroom teachers because of their required sixth year of university training and the demands of their jobs. There is one teacher (or assistant) in Siilitie for every seven students.
In another classroom, two special education teachers had come up with a different kind of team teaching. Last year, Kaisa Summa, a teacher with five years’ experience, was having trouble keeping a gaggle of first-grade boys under control. She had looked longingly into Paivi Kangasvieri’s quiet second-grade room next door, wondering what secrets the 25-year-veteran colleague could share. Each had students of wide-ranging abilities and special needs. Summa asked Kangasvieri if they might combine gymnastics classes in hopes good behavior might be contagious. It worked. This year, the two decided to merge for 16 hours a week. “We complement each other,” said Kangasvieri, who describes herself as a calm and firm “father” to Summa’s warm mothering. “It is cooperative teaching at its best,” she says.
Every so often, principal Arjariita Heikkinen told me, the Helsinki district tries to close the school because the surrounding area has fewer and fewer children, only to have people in the community rise up to save it. After all, nearly 100 percent of the school’s ninth graders go on to high schools. Even many of the most severely disabled will find a place in Finland’s expanded system of vocational high schools, which are attended by 43 percent of Finnish high-school students, who prepare to work in restaurants, hospitals, construction sites and offices. “We help situate them in the right high school,” said then deputy principal Anne Roselius. “We are interested in what will become of them in life.”
Finland’s schools were not always a wonder. Until the late 1960s, Finns were still emerging from the cocoon of Soviet influence. Most children left public school after six years. (The rest went to private schools, academic grammar schools or folk schools, which tended to be less rigorous.) Only the privileged or lucky got a quality education.
The landscape changed when Finland began trying to remold its bloody, fractured past into a unified future. For hundreds of years, these fiercely independent people had been wedged between two rival powers—the Swedish monarchy to the west and the Russian czar to the east. Neither Scandinavian nor Baltic, Finns were proud of their Nordic roots and a unique language only they could love (or pronounce). In 1809, Finland was ceded to Russia by the Swedes, who had ruled its people some 600 years. The czar created the Grand Duchy of Finland, a quasi-state with constitutional ties to the empire. He moved the capital from Turku, near Stockholm, to Helsinki, closer to St. Petersburg. After the czar fell to the Bolsheviks in 1917, Finland declared its independence, pitching the country into civil war. Three more wars between 1939 and 1945—two with the Soviets, one with Germany—left the country scarred by bitter divisions and a punishing debt owed to the Russians. “Still we managed to keep our freedom,” said Pasi Sahlberg, a director general in the Ministry of Education and Culture.
In 1963, the Finnish Parlia-ment made the bold decision to choose public education as its best shot at economic recovery. “I call this the Big Dream of Finnish education,” said Sahlberg, whose upcoming book, Finnish Lessons, is scheduled for release in October. “It was simply the idea that every child would have a very good public school. If we want to be competitive, we need to educate everybody. It all came out of a need to survive.”
Practically speaking—and Finns are nothing if not practical—the decision meant that goal would not be allowed to dissipate into rhetoric. Lawmakers landed on a deceptively simple plan that formed the foundation for everything to come. Public schools would be organized into one system of comprehensive schools, or peruskoulu, for ages 7 through 16. Teachers from all over the nation contributed to a national curriculum that provided guidelines, not prescriptions. Besides Finnish and Swedish (the country’s second official language), children would learn a third language (English is a favorite) usually beginning at age 9. Resources were distributed equally. As the comprehensive schools improved, so did the upper secondary schools (grades 10 through 12). The second critical decision came in 1979, when reformers required that every teacher earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of eight state universities—at state expense. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers. Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive. In 2010, some 6,600 applicants vied for 660 primary school training slots, according to Sahlberg. By the mid-1980s, a final set of initiatives shook the classrooms free from the last vestiges of top-down regulation. Control over policies shifted to town councils. The national curriculum was distilled into broad guidelines. National math goals for grades one through nine, for example, were reduced to a neat ten pages. Sifting and sorting children into so-called ability groupings was eliminated. All children—clever or less so—were to be taught in the same classrooms, with lots of special teacher help available to make sure no child really would be left behind. The inspectorate closed its doors in the early ’90s, turning accountability and inspection over to teachers and principals. “We have our own motivation to succeed because we love the work,” said Louhivuori. “Our incentives come from inside.”
To be sure, it was only in the past decade that Finland’s international science scores rose. In fact, the country’s earliest efforts could be called somewhat Stalinistic. The first national curriculum, developed in the early ’70s, weighed in at 700 stultifying pages. Timo Heikkinen, who began teaching in Finland’s public schools in 1980 and is now principal of Kallahti Comprehensive School in eastern Helsinki, remembers when most of his high-school teachers sat at their desks dictating to the open notebooks of compliant children.
And there are still challenges. Finland’s crippling financial collapse in the early ’90s brought fresh economic challenges to this “confident and assertive Eurostate,” as David Kirby calls it in A Concise History of Finland. At the same time, immigrants poured into the country, clustering in low-income housing projects and placing added strain on schools. A recent report by the Academy of Finland warned that some schools in the country’s large cities were becoming more skewed by race and class as affluent, white Finns choose schools with fewer poor, immigrant populations.
A few years ago, Kallahti principal Timo Heikkinen began noticing that, increasingly, affluent Finnish parents, perhaps worried about the rising number of Somali children at Kallahti, began sending their children to one of two other schools nearby. In response, Heikkinen and his teachers designed new environmental science courses that take advantage of the school’s proximity to the forest. And a new biology lab with 3-D technology allows older students to observe blood flowing inside the human body.
It has yet to catch on, Heikkinen admits. Then he added: “But we are always looking for ways to improve.”
In other words, whatever it takes.
Lynnell Hancock writes about education and teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Photographer Stuart Conway lives in East Sussex, near the south coast of England.
   


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