Academic literature on the topic 'Los Angeles. Union Rescue Mission'

While the skid-row rescue mission has been an institution for over a century, modern missions are experiencing many changes. We conducted a survey of the International Union of Gospel Missions, the largest organization of missions in the United States. Missions still relied almost exclusively on private, individual contributions though some missions accepted state, federal, and United Way funds. The missions continued to offer “soap, sleep, soup, and salvation,” but they also offered medical care, psychological counseling, vocational training, benefits counseling, and alcoholism treatment. Most missions required attendance at a religious service to receive service including alcoholism treatment. About half of the missions had alcoholism treatment programs. Most of the programs used psychological counseling, but some programs also offered vocational training and Alcoholics Anonymous. Most of the programs were professionally staffed. The programs emphasized spiritual conversion as the key to successful rehabilitation. Many missions were serving new populations.

In November 2014, Frontex started its Southern Mediterranean border monitoring operation Triton, followed in June 2015 by the Common Security and Defence Policy anti-smuggling mission EU Naval Force Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR Med) ‘Sophia’. Both operations’ outward communication has placed considerable emphasis on the conduct of maritime search and rescue. Still, this commitment was not matched by consistent action. Triton and EUNAVFOR Med have conducted a relatively limited number of search and rescue operations, prioritizing border control and anti-smuggling tasks. This article explains the gap between the European Union missions’ humanitarian rhetoric and an operational conduct primarily focusing on curbing irregular migration as a form of organized hypocrisy. Decoupling talk and action allowed Triton and EUNAVFOR Med to reconcile the conflicting expectations arising from European governments’ willingness to reduce migrant arrivals and the normative imperative to act against the loss of life at sea. However, the European Union missions’ organized hypocrisy had several negative externalities, hindering effective management of the humanitarian crisis offshore Libya.

Abstract Missionaries from the Lutheran Norwegian Mission Society (NMS) came to South Africa from the 1840s. By 1940, more than 6000 pupils were attending NMS-owned schools in Zululand and Natal. World War II brought about different forms of negotiations between the missionaries and other actors. The War resulted in the missionaries losing contact with their central board in Norway and the provincial authorities of the Union were among those bodies who came to rescue them financially. Local congregations took over more of the mission responsibilities and the nature and forms of cooperation with other Lutheran missions changed. Added to these changes was the growing aspiration among Zulu pastors for more independence that also manifested itself in the management of schools. This paper presents an analysis of the ways in which the Norwegian missionaries negotiated their educational work in Zululand and Natal during the World War II period.

It first seemed to be a simple, if fantastic, deal: Blut gegen Waren, Jewish blood in exchange for goods. On 18 May 1944 two emissaries flew into Intanbul on special missions for high Nazi authorities. The first, Joel Brand of the Jewish Rescue Committee in Budapest, explained that he came with a proposal from Adolf Eichmann. If the Allies provided Nazi Germany with ten thousand trucks for use exclusively on the eastern front, as well as large quantities of tea, coffee, cocoa, soap, and assorted war materiel, Eichmann and Germany would spare the lives of approximately eight hundred thousand Jews then in German-occupied Hungary. But Brand's travel companion, Andrea Gyorgy (alias Bandi Grosz), a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a smuggler as well as agent for several intelligence services, claimed that he had a separate and more complicated mission: to contact Allied authorities and initiate peace negotiations between Nazi Germany and the West at the expense of the Soviet Union. After brief discussions with Jewish officials in Istanbul, Brand and Gyorgy separately crossed the border into British-held Syria, trying to reach Palestine. Suspicious of both men and both offers, British officials arrested them and sent them to intelligence headquarters in Cairo for extensive interrogation, which kept them out of action.

In the summer of 1989, an extended strike by the various “Baby Bell” telephone companies, including those of New York, Massachusetts, California, and thirteen other states in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast, brought to public attention the importance of health and hospital insurance to the nation's workers. In what theLos Angeles Timesheadline proclaimed was a “Phone Strike Centered on the Issue of Health Care,” workers at NYNEX, Pacific Bell, and Bell Atlantic went out on strike over management's insistence that the unions pay a greater portion of their hospital insurance premiums. In contrast to their willingness to grant wage concessions throughout most of the 1980s, the unions and their membership struck to protect what was once considered a “fringe” benefit of union membership. What had been a trivial cost to companies in the 1940s and 1950s had risen to 7.9 percent of payroll in 1984 and 13.6 percent by 1989. Unable to control the industry that had formed around hospitals, doctors, drug companies, and insurance, portions of the labor movement redefined its central mission: the fringes of the previous forty years were now central concerns. In the words of one local president engaged in the bitter communication workers strike: “‘It took us 40 years of collective bargaining’ to reach a contract in which the employer contributed [substantially to] the costs of health care, ‘and now they want to go in one fell swoop backward.’”

Marxism was not merely a teaching of historical or economic materialism; it was also a teaching about the rescue, a “Messianic mission”, of the proletariat, about a perfect society due in the future, a teaching of the man’s power and defeat of the irrational forces of nature and society. The features of the selected “People of God” have been transferred onto the proletariat. A logically contradictory blend of materialist, scientific-deterministic and non-moralist elements with the idealistic, moralistic and religious mythmaking elements has existed in the Marxist system. Marx created the proletariat myth and his mission was object of faith. Marxism was not merely a science and politics, but also a religion. His power was based on this.Communist atheism represented a type of “apophatic theology”, the next step of development that should lead to deletion of the theological component. The most significant features of this process were violence and totalitarianism. The energy of negation of the previous religious concept was transferred into affirmation of the new, terrestrial hierarchy. That is how the god-type leaders appeared quite rapidly as the state forms of the service and worshipping of God, which represented more than good conditions for the formation of personality cults. Just like all religions, communism is irrational, dogmatic and based on faith, rather than on science. Just like Christianity and Islam, communism had its own scriptures, the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. Just like most other religions, required irrational faith; the people living in communist countries had to cherish absolute faith in the order and its leaders, whereas the others were treated as classic heretics.Like in the Soviet Union, the totalitarian political power in Yugoslavia was imposed through sacralization of the Communist party and its leader. The most important elements in this process were the level of party Manichaeism, viewing of the party as the center of “holiness” surrounded by the sinister “mass of enemies”. A new faith was developed over time, which replaced the original tendency to have things improved. Communists were unforgiving in treating their political opponents as deadly enemies. Any connivance was experienced by the representatives of “new religion” as “intolerable weakness”.In the overly religious world at the turn of 20th century one of the instantly obvious characteristics of communism as ideology was the apparently clear lack of religiousness. When it turned out that “the plagues of communism had brought nothing more than death and poverty, totalitarian regimes and tyrants”, offending of atheists, especially after the world wars, by labeling them communists was widespread very much. And indeed, communism did not appear to have any gods, churches or holy books. Nevertheless a logical question came up why an apparently godless ideology has caused a catastrophe of such scale. The answer is more than simple: that ideology was far from atheistic, communism contains all the most specific features of religion, so it is no wonder it has brought so much pain, suffering and death.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The J. Paul Getty Trust is a cultural and philanthropic institution dedicated to the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy.</p><p>Through the collective and individual work of its constituent programs – the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, the J Paul Getty Museum, and the Getty Research Institute – the Getty pursues its mission in Los Angeles and throughout the world, serving both the general interested public and a wide range of professional communities in order to promote a vital civil society through an understanding of the visual arts.</p><p>The Getty Research Institute is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts and their various histories through its expertise, active collecting program, public programs, institutional collaborations, exhibitions, publications, digital services, and residential scholars programs. Its Research Library and Special Collections of rare materials and digital resources serve an international community of scholars and the interested public.</p><p>The Institute's activities and scholarly resources guide and sustain each other and together provide a unique environment for research, critical inquiry, and scholarly exchange.</p><p>The Getty Vocabularies have been produced and maintained for decades by the Getty Vocabulary Program, which is part of the Getty Research Institute (GRI).</p><p>They are compliant with ISO and NICO standards for multilingual thesaurus construction and contain terminology and other information about people, places, objects, and art-historical and conservation concepts.</p><p>They are compiled resources and grow through contributions from various Getty projects and from many external institutions.</p><p>Although there are now five vocabularies, this talk will concentrate on the three that have been released as Linked Open Data.</p><p>They are the Art &amp;amp; Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)®, the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)&amp;reg;, and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN)&amp;reg;. These three vocabularies were the first to be released because they are used universally in the cultural heritage and library communities and represent best practice.</p><p>The presentation will show examples of how AAT, TGN and ULAN are used and to highlight reasons why they have become such valuable resources. It will provide an overview of some of the major challenges and lessons learned since the vocabularies were made available as LOD. Topics will range from reconciling external resources with the Getty vocabularies to strategies for cultural heritage organizations to contribute new concepts and terminology and the need to easily and quickly provide contributors with the information they need to insert the link into their collection management systems.</p><p>The goal is not only to work with the community to help everyone make the best use of the LOD datasets, but to make sure the datasets themselves continue to grow through contributions.</p>

This article investigates and assesses a peacekeeping mission of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) as it relates to a case study of South Africa’s intervention in the Lesotho conflict in 1998. The article bases its argument on the international relations paradigm of realism so as to refute South Africa’s claim that the SADC sanctioned the 1998 military intervention and that this armed intervention was aimed at promoting democracy and stability. Realists interpret world politics as a struggle for power and survival in an anarchic world. The aims of this article are to: determine the reasons for the said military intervention and the extent to which it was conducted on humanitarian grounds; investigate and assess the degree to which the intervention by South Africa was encouraged by national interests; determine the nature of the involvement of the SADC, African Union (AU) and the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in the 1998 intervention; and explore the 2014/2015 mediation process and the challenges encountered. The study used qualitative techniques for data collection and analysis. The primary and secondary data were obtained from government and other publications and reports. The article argues that South Africa appears to have used the 1998 intervention and the mediation process in 2014/2015 to pursue its strategic and economic interests in the Kingdom of Lesotho, because it was not mandated or authorised by the UN, AU, and SADC to carry out these actions. The intervention was not a humanitarian peacekeeping mission to rescue Lesotho from a coup as claimed by South African officials. The intervention appears to have been inconsistent with the UN charter and the SADC treaty.

When George Orwell encountered ideas of a technological utopia sixty-five years ago, he acted the grumpy middle-aged man Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic “progressive” books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” and “all parts of the world are now interdependent” (1944). It is worth revisiting the old boy’s grumpiness, because the rhetoric he so niftily skewers continues in our own time. Facebook features “Peace on Facebook” and even claims that it can “decrease world conflict” through inter-cultural communication. Twitter has announced itself as “a triumph of humanity” (“A Cyber-House” 61). Queue George. In between Orwell and latter-day hoody cybertarians, a whole host of excitable public intellectuals announced the impending end of materiality through emergent media forms. Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Daniel Bell, Ithiel de Sola Pool, George Gilder, Alvin Toffler—the list of 1960s futurists goes on and on. And this wasn’t just a matter of punditry: the OECD decreed the coming of the “information society” in 1975 and the European Union (EU) followed suit in 1979, while IBM merrily declared an “information age” in 1977. Bell theorized this technological utopia as post-ideological, because class would cease to matter (Mattelart). Polluting industries seemingly no longer represented the dynamic core of industrial capitalism; instead, market dynamism radiated from a networked, intellectual core of creative and informational activities. The new information and knowledge-based economies would rescue First World hegemony from an “insurgent world” that lurked within as well as beyond itself (Schiller). Orwell’s others and the Cold-War futurists propagated one of the most destructive myths shaping both public debate and scholarly studies of the media, culture, and communication. They convinced generations of analysts, activists, and arrivistes that the promises and problems of the media could be understood via metaphors of the environment, and that the media were weightless and virtual. The famous medium they wished us to see as the message —a substance as vital to our wellbeing as air, water, and soil—turned out to be no such thing. Today’s cybertarians inherit their anti-Marxist, anti-materialist positions, as a casual glance at any new media journal, culture-industry magazine, or bourgeois press outlet discloses. The media are undoubtedly important instruments of social cohesion and fragmentation, political power and dissent, democracy and demagoguery, and other fraught extensions of human consciousness. But talk of media systems as equivalent to physical ecosystems—fashionable among marketers and media scholars alike—is predicated on the notion that they are environmentally benign technologies. This has never been true, from the beginnings of print to today’s cloud-covered computing. Our new book Greening the Media focuses on the environmental impact of the media—the myriad ways that media technology consumes, despoils, and wastes natural resources. We introduce ideas, stories, and facts that have been marginal or absent from popular, academic, and professional histories of media technology. Throughout, ecological issues have been at the core of our work and we immodestly think the same should apply to media communications, and cultural studies more generally. We recognize that those fields have contributed valuable research and teaching that address environmental questions. For instance, there is an abundant literature on representations of the environment in cinema, how to communicate environmental messages successfully, and press coverage of climate change. That’s not enough. You may already know that media technologies contain toxic substances. You may have signed an on-line petition protesting the hazardous and oppressive conditions under which workers assemble cell phones and computers. But you may be startled, as we were, by the scale and pervasiveness of these environmental risks. They are present in and around every site where electronic and electric devices are manufactured, used, and thrown away, poisoning humans, animals, vegetation, soil, air and water. We are using the term “media” as a portmanteau word to cover a multitude of cultural and communications machines and processes—print, film, radio, television, information and communications technologies (ICT), and consumer electronics (CE). This is not only for analytical convenience, but because there is increasing overlap between the sectors. CE connect to ICT and vice versa; televisions resemble computers; books are read on telephones; newspapers are written through clouds; and so on. Cultural forms and gadgets that were once separate are now linked. The currently fashionable notion of convergence doesn’t quite capture the vastness of this integration, which includes any object with a circuit board, scores of accessories that plug into it, and a global nexus of labor and environmental inputs and effects that produce and flow from it. In 2007, a combination of ICT/CE and media production accounted for between 2 and 3 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted around the world (“Gartner Estimates,”; International Telecommunication Union; Malmodin et al.). Between twenty and fifty million tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) are generated annually, much of it via discarded cell phones and computers, which affluent populations throw out regularly in order to buy replacements. (Presumably this fits the narcissism of small differences that distinguishes them from their own past.) E-waste is historically produced in the Global North—Australasia, Western Europe, Japan, and the US—and dumped in the Global South—Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Southern and Southeast Asia, and China. It takes the form of a thousand different, often deadly, materials for each electrical and electronic gadget. This trend is changing as India and China generate their own media detritus (Robinson; Herat). Enclosed hard drives, backlit screens, cathode ray tubes, wiring, capacitors, and heavy metals pose few risks while these materials remain encased. But once discarded and dismantled, ICT/CE have the potential to expose workers and ecosystems to a morass of toxic components. Theoretically, “outmoded” parts could be reused or swapped for newer parts to refurbish devices. But items that are defined as waste undergo further destruction in order to collect remaining parts and valuable metals, such as gold, silver, copper, and rare-earth elements. This process causes serious health risks to bones, brains, stomachs, lungs, and other vital organs, in addition to birth defects and disrupted biological development in children. Medical catastrophes can result from lead, cadmium, mercury, other heavy metals, poisonous fumes emitted in search of precious metals, and such carcinogenic compounds as polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, polyvinyl chloride, and flame retardants (Maxwell and Miller 13). The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency estimates that by 2007 US residents owned approximately three billion electronic devices, with an annual turnover rate of 400 million units, and well over half such purchases made by women. Overall CE ownership varied with age—adults under 45 typically boasted four gadgets; those over 65 made do with one. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) says US$145 billion was expended in the sector in 2006 in the US alone, up 13% on the previous year. The CEA refers joyously to a “consumer love affair with technology continuing at a healthy clip.” In the midst of a recession, 2009 saw $165 billion in sales, and households owned between fifteen and twenty-four gadgets on average. By 2010, US$233 billion was spent on electronic products, three-quarters of the population owned a computer, nearly half of all US adults owned an MP3 player, and 85% had a cell phone. By all measures, the amount of ICT/CE on the planet is staggering. As investigative science journalist, Elizabeth Grossman put it: “no industry pushes products into the global market on the scale that high-tech electronics does” (Maxwell and Miller 2). In 2007, “of the 2.25 million tons of TVs, cell phones and computer products ready for end-of-life management, 18% (414,000 tons) was collected for recycling and 82% (1.84 million tons) was disposed of, primarily in landfill” (Environmental Protection Agency 1). Twenty million computers fell obsolete across the US in 1998, and the rate was 130,000 a day by 2005. It has been estimated that the five hundred million personal computers discarded in the US between 1997 and 2007 contained 6.32 billion pounds of plastics, 1.58 billion pounds of lead, three million pounds of cadmium, 1.9 million pounds of chromium, and 632000 pounds of mercury (Environmental Protection Agency; Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition 6). The European Union is expected to generate upwards of twelve million tons annually by 2020 (Commission of the European Communities 17). While refrigerators and dangerous refrigerants account for the bulk of EU e-waste, about 44% of the most toxic e-waste measured in 2005 came from medium-to-small ICT/CE: computer monitors, TVs, printers, ink cartridges, telecommunications equipment, toys, tools, and anything with a circuit board (Commission of the European Communities 31-34). Understanding the enormity of the environmental problems caused by making, using, and disposing of media technologies should arrest our enthusiasm for them. But intellectual correctives to the “love affair” with technology, or technophilia, have come and gone without establishing much of a foothold against the breathtaking flood of gadgets and the propaganda that proclaims their awe-inspiring capabilities.[i] There is a peculiar enchantment with the seeming magic of wireless communication, touch-screen phones and tablets, flat-screen high-definition televisions, 3-D IMAX cinema, mobile computing, and so on—a totemic, quasi-sacred power that the historian of technology David Nye has named the technological sublime (Nye Technological Sublime 297).[ii] We demonstrate in our book why there is no place for the technological sublime in projects to green the media. But first we should explain why such symbolic power does not accrue to more mundane technologies; after all, for the time-strapped cook, a pressure cooker does truly magical things. Three important qualities endow ICT/CE with unique symbolic potency—virtuality, volume, and novelty. The technological sublime of media technology is reinforced by the “virtual nature of much of the industry’s content,” which “tends to obscure their responsibility for a vast proliferation of hardware, all with high levels of built-in obsolescence and decreasing levels of efficiency” (Boyce and Lewis 5). Planned obsolescence entered the lexicon as a new “ethics” for electrical engineering in the 1920s and ’30s, when marketers, eager to “habituate people to buying new products,” called for designs to become quickly obsolete “in efficiency, economy, style, or taste” (Grossman 7-8).[iii] This defines the short lifespan deliberately constructed for computer systems (drives, interfaces, operating systems, batteries, etc.) by making tiny improvements incompatible with existing hardware (Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 33-50; Boyce and Lewis). With planned obsolescence leading to “dizzying new heights” of product replacement (Rogers 202), there is an overstated sense of the novelty and preeminence of “new” media—a “cult of the present” is particularly dazzled by the spread of electronic gadgets through globalization (Mattelart and Constantinou 22). References to the symbolic power of media technology can be found in hymnals across the internet and the halls of academe: technologies change us, the media will solve social problems or create new ones, ICTs transform work, monopoly ownership no longer matters, journalism is dead, social networking enables social revolution, and the media deliver a cleaner, post-industrial, capitalism. Here is a typical example from the twilight zone of the technological sublime (actually, the OECD): A major feature of the knowledge-based economy is the impact that ICTs have had on industrial structure, with a rapid growth of services and a relative decline of manufacturing. Services are typically less energy intensive and less polluting, so among those countries with a high and increasing share of services, we often see a declining energy intensity of production … with the emergence of the Knowledge Economy ending the old linear relationship between output and energy use (i.e. partially de-coupling growth and energy use) (Houghton 1) This statement mixes half-truths and nonsense. In reality, old-time, toxic manufacturing has moved to the Global South, where it is ascendant; pollution levels are rising worldwide; and energy consumption is accelerating in residential and institutional sectors, due almost entirely to ICT/CE usage, despite advances in energy conservation technology (a neat instance of the age-old Jevons Paradox). In our book we show how these are all outcomes of growth in ICT/CE, the foundation of the so-called knowledge-based economy. ICT/CE are misleadingly presented as having little or no material ecological impact. In the realm of everyday life, the sublime experience of electronic machinery conceals the physical work and material resources that go into them, while the technological sublime makes the idea that more-is-better palatable, axiomatic; even sexy. In this sense, the technological sublime relates to what Marx called “the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour” once they are in the hands of the consumer, who lusts after them as if they were “independent beings” (77). There is a direct but unseen relationship between technology’s symbolic power and the scale of its environmental impact, which the economist Juliet Schor refers to as a “materiality paradox” —the greater the frenzy to buy goods for their transcendent or nonmaterial cultural meaning, the greater the use of material resources (40-41). We wrote Greening the Media knowing that a study of the media’s effect on the environment must work especially hard to break the enchantment that inflames popular and elite passions for media technologies. We understand that the mere mention of the political-economic arrangements that make shiny gadgets possible, or the environmental consequences of their appearance and disappearance, is bad medicine. It’s an unwelcome buzz kill—not a cool way to converse about cool stuff. But we didn’t write the book expecting to win many allies among high-tech enthusiasts and ICT/CE industry leaders. We do not dispute the importance of information and communication media in our lives and modern social systems. We are media people by profession and personal choice, and deeply immersed in the study and use of emerging media technologies. But we think it’s time for a balanced assessment with less hype and more practical understanding of the relationship of media technologies to the biosphere they inhabit. Media consumers, designers, producers, activists, researchers, and policy makers must find new and effective ways to move ICT/CE production and consumption toward ecologically sound practices. In the course of this project, we found in casual conversation, lecture halls, classroom discussions, and correspondence, consistent and increasing concern with the environmental impact of media technology, especially the deleterious effects of e-waste toxins on workers, air, water, and soil. We have learned that the grip of the technological sublime is not ironclad. Its instability provides a point of departure for investigating and criticizing the relationship between the media and the environment. The media are, and have been for a long time, intimate environmental participants. Media technologies are yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s news, but rarely in the way they should be. The prevailing myth is that the printing press, telegraph, phonograph, photograph, cinema, telephone, wireless radio, television, and internet changed the world without changing the Earth. In reality, each technology has emerged by despoiling ecosystems and exposing workers to harmful environments, a truth obscured by symbolic power and the power of moguls to set the terms by which such technologies are designed and deployed. Those who benefit from ideas of growth, progress, and convergence, who profit from high-tech innovation, monopoly, and state collusion—the military-industrial-entertainment-academic complex and multinational commandants of labor—have for too long ripped off the Earth and workers. As the current celebration of media technology inevitably winds down, perhaps it will become easier to comprehend that digital wonders come at the expense of employees and ecosystems. This will return us to Max Weber’s insistence that we understand technology in a mundane way as a “mode of processing material goods” (27). Further to understanding that ordinariness, we can turn to the pioneering conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, who noted three decades ago “the failures of technocratic dreams [:] that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Such fantasies derived from the very banality of these introductions—that every time they took place, one more “technical apparatus” was simply “being made at home with the rest of our world’ (548). Media studies can join in this repetitive banality. Or it can withdraw the welcome mat for media technologies that despoil the Earth and wreck the lives of those who make them. In our view, it’s time to green the media by greening media studies. References “A Cyber-House Divided.” Economist 4 Sep. 2010: 61-62. “Gartner Estimates ICT Industry Accounts for 2 Percent of Global CO2 Emissions.” Gartner press release. 6 April 2007. ‹http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867›. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia. Seattle: Basel Action Network, 25 Feb. 2002. Benjamin, Walter. “Central Park.” Trans. Lloyd Spencer with Mark Harrington. New German Critique 34 (1985): 32-58. Biagioli, Mario. “Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 816-33. Boyce, Tammy and Justin Lewis, eds. Climate Change and the Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Commission of the European Communities. “Impact Assessment.” Commission Staff Working Paper accompanying the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) (recast). COM (2008) 810 Final. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 3 Dec. 2008. Environmental Protection Agency. Management of Electronic Waste in the United States. Washington, DC: EPA, 2007 Environmental Protection Agency. Statistics on the Management of Used and End-of-Life Electronics. Washington, DC: EPA, 2008 Grossman, Elizabeth. Tackling High-Tech Trash: The E-Waste Explosion & What We Can Do about It. New York: Demos, 2008. ‹http://www.demos.org/pubs/e-waste_FINAL.pdf› Herat, Sunil. “Review: Sustainable Management of Electronic Waste (e-Waste).” Clean 35.4 (2007): 305-10. Houghton, J. “ICT and the Environment in Developing Countries: Opportunities and Developments.” Paper prepared for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2009. International Telecommunication Union. ICTs for Environment: Guidelines for Developing Countries, with a Focus on Climate Change. Geneva: ICT Applications and Cybersecurity Division Policies and Strategies Department ITU Telecommunication Development Sector, 2008. Malmodin, Jens, Åsa Moberg, Dag Lundén, Göran Finnveden, and Nina Lövehagen. “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Operational Electricity Use in the ICT and Entertainment & Media Sectors.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 14.5 (2010): 770-90. Marx, Karl. Capital: Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, 3rd ed. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1987. Mattelart, Armand and Costas M. Constantinou. “Communications/Excommunications: An Interview with Armand Mattelart.” Trans. Amandine Bled, Jacques Guot, and Costas Constantinou. Review of International Studies 34.1 (2008): 21-42. Mattelart, Armand. “Cómo nació el mito de Internet.” Trans. Yanina Guthman. El mito internet. Ed. Victor Hugo de la Fuente. Santiago: Editorial aún creemos en los sueños, 2002. 25-32. Maxwell, Richard and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Nye, David E. Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2007. Orwell, George. “As I Please.” Tribune. 12 May 1944. Richtel, Matt. “Consumers Hold on to Products Longer.” New York Times: B1, 26 Feb. 2011. Robinson, Brett H. “E-Waste: An Assessment of Global Production and Environmental Impacts.” Science of the Total Environment 408.2 (2009): 183-91. Rogers, Heather. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: New Press, 2005. Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Vols. I and II. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Malden: Blackwell, 1995. Schiller, Herbert I. Information and the Crisis Economy. Norwood: Ablex Publishing, 1984. Schor, Juliet B. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: Penguin, 2010. Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials. Los Angeles: Academy Imprints, 2007. Weber, Max. “Remarks on Technology and Culture.” Trans. Beatrix Zumsteg and Thomas M. Kemple. Ed. Thomas M. Kemple. Theory, Culture [i] The global recession that began in 2007 has been the main reason for some declines in Global North energy consumption, slower turnover in gadget upgrades, and longer periods of consumer maintenance of electronic goods (Richtel). [ii] The emergence of the technological sublime has been attributed to the Western triumphs in the post-Second World War period, when technological power supposedly supplanted the power of nature to inspire fear and astonishment (Nye Technology Matters 28). Historian Mario Biagioli explains how the sublime permeates everyday life through technoscience: "If around 1950 the popular imaginary placed science close to the military and away from the home, today’s technoscience frames our everyday life at all levels, down to our notion of the self" (818). [iii] This compulsory repetition is seemingly undertaken each time as a novelty, governed by what German cultural critic Walter Benjamin called, in his awkward but occasionally illuminating prose, "the ever-always-the-same" of "mass-production" cloaked in "a hitherto unheard-of significance" (48).

On November 24, 2015, a Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M aircraft on the Syria-Turkey border. For seventeen seconds the Russian aircraft crossed the southern tip of a salient of Turkish territory that Syria claimed rightfully belonged to it. Two Russians ejected from the plane over Syria. A local Turkmen militia, commanded by a Turkish citizen, fired at the aviators, killing one. A second Russian serviceman was killed during a rescue mission to save the surviving aviator. The incident, recorded on radar systems by many countries and partially captured on video camera, was the first time since the Korean War that a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) country’s fighter jet destroyed a Soviet/Russian Air Force aircraft. Fortunately the event did not escalate into a full-blown NATO Russia crisis, although with tensions high over the Ukraine crisis and two authoritarian leaders at loggerheads, it could well have done so. There were background accusations. Turkish president Erdoğan was aggrieved that Russia was bombing co-ethnic kin in its southern near abroad while aiding Kurdish separatists, while Russian president Putin saw Turkey as an accomplice of international terrorists. Entwined territorial and terrorist anxieties, as well as near abroad insecurities, preoccupied both men. Had Russia responded with force against Turkey, this could have triggered Article V of NATO’s Washington Treaty, and NATO members would have faced the prospect of war with Russia over a tiny piece of territory in the Middle East most knew nothing about. Relations between the NATO alliance and Russia are now at their lowest point since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Airspace violations, incidents at sea, military training exercises, and hybrid war hysteria have kept tensions high. After Crimea, NATO moved to strengthen its capacity to respond to perceived Russian encroachment on the Baltic countries. The Obama administration’s European Reassurance Initiative was launched in June 2014 with a $1 billion budget for training and temporary rotations. In a speech in Riga in September 2014, President Obama declared: “We’ll be here for Estonia.