I keep seeing what could be very subtle “canary in the coal mine” moments that might be evidence that influential people behind the scenes are expecting a crash.
This time it's Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman. He just announced that he's planning to sell $1.5 billion worth of shares of stock. He claims it's because he wants to diversify his portfolio.
SAN FRANCISCO — Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt plans to sell up to 2.4 million shares of stock currently worth nearly $1.5 billion.
Schmidt, now Google's executive chairman, intends to stagger the sales of the stock over a one-year period. Google disclosed Schmidt's plans in a Friday regulatory filing. The company said Schmidt, 56, is trying to raise some money and diversify his investment portfolio.
If all 2.4 million shares of stock are sold, that will reduce Schmidt's stake in Google Inc. from 2.8 percent to 2.1 percent.
Schmidt's decision to sell some of his shares comes 10 months after he ended his 10-year stint as Google's CEO and turned the job over to one of the Internet search leader's co-founders, Larry Page.
Twelve students at the University of Virginia on Saturday began a hunger strike for a living wage policy for university employees. They've taken this step after having exhausted just about every other possible approach over a period of 14 years. I was part of the campaign way back when it started. I can support the assertion made by hunger-striking student A.J. Chandra on Saturday, who said,
“We have not spent 14 years building up the case for a living wage. Rather, the campaign has made the case over and over again.”
This is the latest in a long series of reports making the case.
Another striking student, David Flood, explained,
“We have researched long enough. We have campaigned long enough. We have protested long enough. The time for a living wage is now.”
In my previous blog post on the use of drones for human rights, I also advocated for the use of drones to support nonviolent civil resistance efforts. Obviously, like the use of any technology in such contexts, doing so presents both new opportunities and obvious dangers. In this blog post, I consider the use of DIY drones in the context of civil resistance, both vis-a-vis theory and practice. While I've read the civil resistance literature rather widely for my dissertation, I decided to get input from two of the world's leading experts on the topic.
The first expert opined as follows: “Whether a given technology delivers strategic or tactical avantage is typically dependent on context. So to the extent that a drone can be useful in getting evidence that delegitimizes a movement's opponent (i.e. exposing atrocities), and/or legitimizes a movement (i.e. docu-menting strictly nonviolent activities), and/or provides useful intelligence to a movement about an opponent's current capabilities (i.e. the amount of supplies an adversary has), strengths, and weaknesses, then one could indeed argue that drones could provide strategic or tactical advantages. But contextually speaking, if the amount of human and financial resources necessary to acquire and deploy a drone are a drain on beneficial activities that a movement may otherwise be undertaking, then it's a cost/benefit analysis.”
5.0 out of 5 stars Gift Book, Gift Idea, Gift Economy, Get a Grip,February 18, 2012
I received a copy of this book as a gift, and gladly so since the top review at this time is unfairly dismissive while also confessing that the reviewer only read the first third of the book (but evidently not the preface (first page) that states plainly (first sentence, actually), “The things we know about food have a lot to teach us about how to have a healthy relationship with information.”
Having just reviewed The Telescreen: An Empirical Study of the Destruction and Despiritualization of Consciousness, and so many other books here at Amazon, I easily connect the point in last night's reading: that food, medicine, education, and the media are all “co-conspirators” in dumbing down a human population whose brains started out as enormous pools of potential creativity, to this book. The information — and the food and the medicine and the tabloid garbage we are ingesting — is killing us.
What the first reviewer completely misses is that this is the first manifesto, beyond The Age of Missing Information, to actually focus on how out of control our relationship is to the world of information. As a lifetime professional in these matters I can state clearly that not only are governments substituting ideology for intelligence and corruption for integrity, but so are all the other communities of information (academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government / non-profit. We live in a totally corrupt world where — right now — banking families (Rothschild et al) own the banks and the banks own the two-party tyrannies (or the outright dictators) that own government, and they own the the corporations, with the 99% being expendable fodder for 1% theft from the commonwealth. This book is a cry from the heart, and an eloquent one at that.
WARNING: The “free download” is a Chinese virus, generally identified across various websites with the preface (hotpdf). Under the terms of the contact this book is NOT free online as with all of Robert Steele's other books and publications.
Back Cover: What the world lacks right now–especially the United States, where every form of organization from government to banks to labor unions has betrayed the public trust–is integrity. Also lacking is public intelligence in the sense of decision-support: knowing what one needs to know in order to make honest decisions for the good of all, rather than corrupt decisions for the good of the few. “The Open-Source Everything Manifesto “is a distillation of author, strategist, analyst, and reformer Robert David Steele life's work: the transition from top-down secret command and control to a world of bottom-up, consensual, collective decision-making as a means to solve the major crises facing our world today. The book is intended to be a catalyst for citizen dialog and deliberation, and for inspiring the continued evolution of a nation in which all citizens realize our shared aspiration of direct democracy–informed participatory democracy. Open-Source Everything is a cultural and philosophical concept that is essential to creating a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for one hundred percent of humanity. The future of intelligence is not secret, not federal, and not expensive. It is about transparency, truth, and trust among our local to global collective. Only “open” is scalable. As we strive to recover from the closed world corruption and secrecy that has enabled massive fraud within governments, banks, corporations, and even non-profits and universities, this timely book is a manifesto for liberation–not just open technology, but open “everything.”
5.0 out of 5 stars You need a brain to read this book; if you have one, the book will scare you,February 17, 2012
I have been keeping in touch with “alternative” sources for some time, ever since I realized in about 1988 that neither the US secret intelligence world nor the US media were at all reliable — they are each very good at what they choose to do, but that does not include the public interest.
I am hugely impressed by this author. He does detailed, meticulously documented research and the presentation is excellent. I especially like footnotes I can see while reading the body instead of endnotes.
