On olives and births

********** DISCLAIMER (Irony maybe on)  ************

I'm asking myself about the infatuation of women on giving birth and still want to be around in science. Could we envision something structural to address it? Something like a joint compensatory fund. We northern societies age deadly, at the big scale. In the small scale, the she-buddies get excluded from hiring processes due to the possibility of their absence that makes a hole in projects that are intrinsically stressed and aim to publish as machines. And in the meanwhile the planet is plenty of urgent inquiries to clarify as the one of loosing the olives due to the Xylella fastidiosa disease!

The end of the second world post-war

First thoughts on Brexit:
1) Learn German, it's not clear anymore that English would be the future Lenguage
2) Would Russia join in?
3) Could we de-neoliberalize the remaininig continental Europe, once rid of the submarine of USA? Was UK the problem?
4) If RestOfEurope survives, maybe RestOfSpain could also survive peacefully one divorce (or two).

mumble?

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky.
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all,
and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

-JRR Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Interview with a asylum applicant in Vienna

Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (Austria). A classical architecture, straight forms and red colors. Side by side with that other building that got the name, and truly was Secession. It's hall, plenty of columns and frescos, is the hosting place for asylum applicants. They call themselves "refugee protest". Here I interview one of them:
 

Salva: You ask for asylum.
Mr. Jahangir Awan: Many among us have had problems in our places of origin. Prosecution by the talibans, or by the secret services, for example. Some of us belong to peoples that live trapped in between two countries, in areas of conflict. We aim to a normal life, that's why one year ago we organized a demo to protest against the austrian system of asylum. Often we have to wait up to 5 and 10 years to get an answer to our applications. If they are rejected, we are deported. And in the meanwhile we are not allowed neither to study nor to work. We want to show our troubleshoot to the society, to the media. The authorities refuse to talk with us. We are exposed here to inhuman conditions, and nobody listens to us.

We live together. At least we are doing something here in Austria, I hope we are contributing to the future situation. Now it's the time for the authorities, for the politics. Everything is controlled by the Ministry of Interior.

We want that, at least, our applications get refused, and then we will go somewhere else.

Salva: When the solution to your situation is achieved, what will you do?
Mr. Jahangir Awan: I will move on with my studies in Business Administration. I will start a business, of hotel managment.

Salva: How is the internal dynamic of your group?
Mr. Jahangir Awan: We make assemblies, together refugees and supporting people. We discuss and decide what to do.

Salva: Do you have links with the european emigration?
Mr. Jahangir Awan: We are in contact with people in Denmark, in Berlin, and more places. We share our feelings and we are united.

Salva: Just now, you are looking for a place to live.
Mr. Jahangir Awan: Yes, for all of us, 25 people.

Salva: And what are your requirements?
Mr. Jahangir Awan: We demand legal status, working permits.

Salva: Do you also cover the internet side?
Mr. Jahangir Awan: We have a legal workgroup, a press workgroup, ... Different people are attending different responsibilities.

Salva: And what can you tell me about international organisms, as United Nations, or the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)?
Mr. Jahangir Awan: They are not interested in us.

Salva: Are you in contact with other refugee camps?
Mr. Jahangir Awan: Yes. The same situations holds all over the world.

Salva: Do you have communication with them in a regular basis?

Mr. Jahangir Awan: Yes. 

Mir Jahangir Awan (25 years old) 

Kashmir 

leo.awan01(at)gmail.com 

Salvador Espada Hinojosa (39 years old) 

Andalucian

salvador.espada(at)gmail.com

Photo: Gryffindor in Wikimedia Commons

Beyond "lets save the tubeworms"

Mining and drilling are economic primary productions in a planet where there are production, consumption and distributions. There is some beauty in this, whether not always at the same level.

In the northern hemisphere primary forest the timber activity cuts an old tree and restores and assures its replacement in accordance to their ethics. Non-renewable resources cannot be restored. Mining and drilling compensate the unrepairable damage they cause, also according to their own ethics. Fishery, scientific sampling and metal quest go deeper in an ocean that gets warmer, more acidic and full of plastic and fan noise.

The united nations organization, daughter of the society of nations, protects the moon, the antarctica and aims to the universal bare necessities satisfaction. For that it recalls for a conscient, fully informed and collectively reflected human action, to our best understanding, accompanying the brute labor force, the machine and the feed-back orchestration.

Any human intervention wells from the participated decision of a center, and involves its periphery. When the alignment between both of them emerges, synergy gets closed and cycled. Toga can supply metal for the Paris Hilton limousines, damaging with it the whole, some part, or being fully aware. The people that could think about how and about if, we talk about it, we write about it and we review what is written.

Environmental Impact Assessments will include a null scenario, in which the intervention is not carried out.

At the Political Song Festival

Youth goes educated and trained.

Decision making is of limited access, people self-organize themselves.

Public policies are oriented to the major players.

Inter-rail and Erasmus are very good, but that's all in three decades!

Economy is the satisfaction of human needs.

Land, Capital and Labour together produce the wealth.

Last times the visible fight was between Capital and Labour.

Both, Capital and Labour apparently agreed on depleting the Land.

Public transportation, organic farming, fair trade, sufficiency. Rethink economy.

Report for Wikimedia Austria

Back in 2008 I inscribed in a Master Program about Sciences and Sustainable Development in the University of Cadiz (Spain). I got introduced in Wikipedia editing just by searching items and finding them in the English edition, and not in the Spanish edition. So I started translating.

2011 was a year of political activism in many locations of the world. Tunisia and Egypt started what was named Arab Spring, and social unrest spread to many other countries including Greece, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Chile, or USA.

I was involved in the international coordination of the global action day of 15 October 2011. Mainly it was carried on through facebook. Several facebook groups put together the coordination efforts of people from different locations. Calendars were lined-up and graphic design was built-up, in parallel with the local processes of gathering assemblies and promoting and organizing that day event in every place.

Three major networks popped up. One based on Spain, under the name of "¡Democracia Real Ya!" ("Real Democracy Now!"). Other one USA-based, under the tag of "Occupy". And a third one I believe based on UK and Spain, named "Take the Square" or "Toma la Plaza".

The diversity of informatic tools and the heterogeneity in locations, languages, and world-views was not hindering in an early moment the self-organization of a global unified event. The only precedent I know of are the demonstrations carried out previously of the Azores Summit that triggered the Second Gulf War back in 2003.

The experience of Wikimedia projects on overcoming the difficulties of multilinguality and on providing a frame for heterogeneous communities made me think on using Mediawiki to empower further the participative social processes. This is already happening to some extension. Anyway, there's a tough challenge on establishing new wiki tools, specially to achieve the community development that make it functional.

The Wikimedia conference provided a good insight to these concerns. One of the speakers was pointing that the average number of contributors after analyzing 8000 wiki based projects is one! I also meet the Canadian person who nourish the Occupy wiki, and had the opportunity of talking face to face with him about the potentiality of the use of Mediawiki on social issues.