Author: reclaimer

Read the Weather

Resting

I rested my back on a yoga mat outside and looked at the clouds. I noticed that they were relatively close to me and of a dark shade of gray. They were moving quickly from a south-easterly direction.

Indicators of Rain

I looked up online on what were the signs of rain. And here is what I found:

  • Indicator 1: Clouds that are low-hanging with a darker shade of gray.
    • Gray indicates a load of rain.
  • Indicator 2: Wind not from the west
    • As the earth rotates west to east, most normal clouds comes from the west. If clouds come from the east, it may indicate unusual activity.

These two indicators expanded what I look for when I go outside: (1) location and color of clouds; and (2) the direction of the wind.

Sources

Land Reclamation

For thousands of years, the Wiyot people were the stewards of Duluwat Island, situated in the marshes and estuaries of what’s now Humboldt Bay along California’s northern coast. Then in 1860, a group of White settlers interrupted the tribe’s annual world renewal ceremony and massacred scores of Wiyot women, children and elders.

In the years since, the island had been transformed into a shipyard. By 1990, it lay vacant, scattered with scrap metal and contaminated with toxic chemicals.

Last year, the Wiyot had reclaimed almost all of Duluwat Island — the culmination of decades of efforts to get back their ancestral land.

CNN, Harmeet Kaur

Rewilding the planet

Coral Reef at Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge“Coral Reef at Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge” by USFWS Pacific is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Sir David also wants to see what he calls a “rewilding” of the planet, giving plants and animals on land and in the ocean time and space to bounce back. The World Wildlife Fund says that two thirds of the earth’s wildlife has disappeared in the past 50 years.

Sir David Attenborough: Repopulation of the oceans can happen like that, in a decade. If we had the will to do it. But we require everybody to agree that.

60 Minutes

Polling

This is where weather and electoral forecasts start to differ. For weather, we have fundamentals — advanced science on how atmospheric dynamics work — and years of detailed, day-by-day, even hour-by-hour data from a vast number of observation stations. For elections, we simply do not have anything near that kind of knowledge or data. While we have some theories on what influences voters, we have no fine-grained understanding of why people vote the way they do, and what polling data we have is relatively sparse.

Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times

Slogan

The use of a slogan towards a goal

An operator (a person or entity) uses a slogan to direct someone else’s attention to their goal. A policymaker (operator) says a slogan (tool) for the passage of legislation (goal).  

An organization can use that same phrase to their end, namely self-perpetuation. If there are competing goals internally, self-perpetuation overrides given the requirements of stakeholders.

A slogan as a tool

A craftsman shapes a tool towards a goal. For example, a craftsman shapes a hammer towards a goal of hammering a nail. A hammer has a handle connected to a metal head for that purpose.

Slogans can be thought of as tools.

Activists create and use a slogan so that it fulfills a goal. For example, environmental activists use “Save the Planet” to further efforts against climate change.

But if an organization uses that same phrase to meet its goal, there is confusion. If the goal of an organization is self-perpetuation, then the phrase does not have the same power it did as it for activists.

For clarity, it is easier to think of them as different slogans entirely.

  1. [“Save the Planet” for saving the planet]; and
  2. [“Save the Planet” for the self-perpetuation of an organization]

Because we just hear or see the phrase “Save the Planet,” we can easily assume these are the same slogans and assume that the activist and the organization have the same goals.

Power of a slogan

The confusion between a phrase (“Save the Planet”) used for different goals weakens the power of the activist’s slogan.

Power of a slogan seems to be the alignment between the operators, the words of the slogan itself, and the use of the slogan towards the goal specified in the slogan. The more outside operators use phrases of a slogan for their own, different goals, they create more confusion and weaken the power of the original slogan; because people mistake one use of the phrase in a slogan for another’s use of that phrase. We have a shared language and no restriction on who can use a phrase or not.

An example of the power of a slogan is when President Lyndon Baines Johnson said “We Shall Overcome” in an address to a joint session of Congress on March 15 1965 after the attack of state troopers on a massive protest march led by John Lewis in Selma, Alabama.

Here, President Johnson (operator) said “We Shall Overcome” (tool) when pressing for the goal of the activists: a protection of voting rights for all Americans.

That he said “We Shall Overcome”:

  • as an government official;
  • in spite of his previous lukewarm support for the activist’s goals;
  • And now as an advocate in line with their goals

lent the slogan power.

Awareness

But doesn’t the use of “Save the Planet” lead to greater awareness in general?

If awareness itself is the goal, okay.

But the power of a slogan is to tie its use with a goal in the world. Awareness itself may be a detriment to the initial goal, because awareness will be substituted for or used as an evidence of action when there is none. “Save the Planet” has been used since the 1970s, but there has not been substantial action to avert climate change.

Prediction and Prophecy

Simulmatics’ legacy endures in predictive analytics, what-if simulation and behavioral data science. It lurks behind the screen of every device. Simulmatics [a 1960s corporation that helped JFK’s presidential campaign], notwithstanding its own failure, helped invent the data mad, a near-totalitarian 21st century, in which the only knowledge that counts is prediction, and corporations extract wealth by way of the collection of data and the manipulation of attention and the profit of prophecy.

Jill Lepore on NPR