How many people work for governments in the United States. Let’s look at the numbers.
The usual estimate of the number of employees of the U.S. government is 2.8 million. The estimate is fake. This does not count military personnel. But most important, it does not count contract workers paid by the federal government.
The Office of Personnel Management does not keep track of these workers. That would give the game away.
One man has estimated the total: Prof. Paul Light of New York University.
[The federal government] uses contracts, grants, and mandates to state and local governments to hide its true size, thereby creating the illusion that it is smaller than it actually is, and give its departments and agencies much greater flexibility in hiring labor, thereby creating the illusion that the civil-service system is somehow working effectively. . . .
Contractors and grantees do not keep count of their employees, in part because doing so would allow the federal government . . . to estimate actual labor costs.
The National Security Agency (NSA) mega-data center, combined with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) special relationship with Google, and the federalization of local police using Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funds to pay for monitoring both the locations and the conversations of anyone they wish — without a warrant –suggest that the government of the United States of America (USA)-from local to national-is no longer in friendly hands.
As a professional intelligence officer and a retired Marine Corps officer, I am deeply offended, personally threatened, and patriotically alarmed. Evil has triumphed across the United States of America. Every single institution — from academies to civil society to commerce to the government and law enforcement at all levels, the media, the out of control military-industrial complex, and the bottom-feeding non-governmental and non-profit organizations that suck at the federal government tits gorged with printed money — has failed to respect the Constitution. There is neither intelligence nor integrity at the highest levels of all of our institutions.
2012 is a year of confrontation and convergence. On the confrontation side, we have a federal government that dismisses the Constitution across all three branches — a Court that believes corporations are citizens and strip-searches for parking tickets are “okay”; a Congress that abdicates its Article 1 responsibilities, instead serving as foot-soldiers to the corrupt two-party tyranny that excludes the majority from the ballot and the vote; and an Executive that borrows a trillion a year in our name, wastes two trillion a year, and has claimed the right to kill US citizens without due process, and to lie to the Courts when it deems it necessary for “national security.”
In the emerging institutional model of peer production, most visibly in the free software industry, we can distinguish an interplay between three partners, i.e.
1) a community of contributors that create a commons of knowledge, software or design;
2) an enterpreneurial coalition that creates market value on top of that commons; and
3) a set of “for-benefit institutions' which manage the ‘infrastructure of cooperation'.
There is a clear institutional division of labour between these three players.
The contributors create the use value that is deposited in the shared innovation commons of knowledge, design and code.
The for-benefit institution enables and defends the general infrastructure of cooperation which makes the project ‘collectively' sustainable. For example the Wikimedia Foundation collects the funds to support the server space without which access to the Wikipedia would become impossible.
The enterpreneurial coalition makes the individual contributors ‘sustainable', by providing an income, and very often they provide means for the continued existence of the for-benefit associations as well.
Can we also learn something about the politics of this new mode of value creation, something that would be useful not just for these particular communities, but to society in general? Is there perhaps a new model of power and democracy co-evolving out of these new social practices, that may be an answer to the contemporary crisis of democracy? My answer will be an emphatic yes, and stronger yet, I will argue that we are witnessing a new model for the state. A ‘P2P' state, if you will.
Let's look at the mechanics of power and the politics of commons-oriented peer production by looking at the three players involved in this new institutional set-up.
Headlines Only:
1. The post-democratic logic of community
2. The relation between the community and the enterpreneurial coalition
3. The democratic logic of the for-benefit institutions
4. Towards a Partner State
5. A value crisis of the capitalist economy
6. The prefiguration of a new social model
7. Towards a civilization based on economies of scope, not scale
. . . . . . .
The only thing left to do is to have an answer to the crucial question: how does global governance look like in P2P civilization? How can we transform the global material Empire which at present dominates world affairs for the benefit of a few, and replace the ineffectual global institutions that are present inadequate to deal with global challenges?
Phi Beta Iota: Those of us committed to a prosperous world at peace, in which governance is characterized by intelligence and integrity, all see the insanity of artificial scarcity and embedded corruption. What is emergent and increasingly visible (i.e. comprehensible) to the public at large is the alternative model of Open Source Everything, a Non-Zero approach to both the material and the intangible. The above can be readily expanded to embrace the eight communities (academic, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental/non-profit)–all of them have vital resources and perspectives that must be integrated if we are to achieve Panarchy–self-governance with intelligence and integrity at all levels on all issues.
Solar cells thinner than a thread of spider silk and so flexible they can be wrapped around a single human hair have been created by scientists.
By Danielle Demetriou, Tokyo
The Telegraph, 09 Apr 2012
The ultra-thin film consists of electrodes on a plastic foil and measures only 1.9 micrometres in thickness – a tenth of the thinnest solar cells currently available, according to researchers in Austria andJapan.
The fact it is extremely thin, light and flexible paves the way for a number of new future uses, including portable electrical charging devices or electronic textiles worn on clothing.
Unveiling the research in a report published by the on-line science journal Nature Communications, the researchers said: “The total thickness of this device is less than a typical thread of spider silk.”
Tsuyoshi Sekitani, from the University of Tokyo, added: “Being ultra-thin means you don’t feel its weight and it is elastic.
A Twitter analytics company that said it detected Osama bin Laden's death before it was reported by the news media has signed a partnership with Twitter, and is expanding the availability of its service for notifying financial firms and government clients of highly unusual events.
The company, Dataminr, described its technology at the Twitter Devnest conference last May, shortly after its service used Twitter data to report bin Laden's death to its clients before the story hit major media outlets. Today, Dataminr is announcing a partnership with Twitter allowing it greater access to tweets and their metadata, and is expanding availability of the service.
Dataminr and Twitter did not make its executives available for phone interviews, saying Dataminr customers are concerned about revealing too much information, but gave us an early copy of the press release being issued this morning. The announcement says that “Dataminr has just signed a partnership with Twitter, which includes access to the full Twitter Firehose in real-time,” and that it is unveiling “its novel technology for using Twitter’s public Tweets to create actionable signals for enterprise clients.”
One can only look on in anguish as the US Government continues to betray the public trust for lack of intelligence and integrity.
The headlines about earthquakes being related to oil and gas drilling have been common for some time now. Despite the fact that the federal government has noticed the connection at very low bureaucratic levels, the fact is that the politicized government persists in ignoring the precautionary principle and continues to betray the public trust by not stopping all activities associated with increasing earthquakes.
Earthquakes are now coming to the East Coast just as they are about to become much more frequent, intense, and consequential on the East Coast.
One can only pray that at some point the public will demand an honest government capable of making informed decisions with integrity.
A vaccine that can train cancer patients’ own bodies to seek out and destroy tumor cells has been developed by scientists.
The therapy, which targets a molecule found in 90 per cent of all cancers, could provide a universal injection that allows patients’ immune systems to fight off common cancers including breast and prostate cancer.
Preliminary results from early clinical trials have shown the vaccine can trigger an immune response in patients and reduce levels of disease. The scientists behind the vaccine now hope to conduct larger trials in patients to prove it can be effective against a range of different cancers.
They believe it could be used to combat small tumours if they are detected early enough or to help prevent the return and spread of disease in patients who have undergone other forms of treatment such as surgery.
Cancer cells usually evade patient’s immune systems because they are not recognised as being a threat. While the immune system usually attacks foreign cells such as bacteria, tumours are formed of the patient’s own cells that have malfunctioned.Scientists have, however, found that a molecule called MUC1, which is found in high amounts on the surface of cancer cells, can be used to help the immune system detect tumors.
The new vaccine, developed by drug company Vaxil Biotheraputics along with researchers at Tel Aviv University, uses a small section of the molecule to prime the immune system so that it can identify and destroy cancer cells.
A statement from Vaxil Biotheraputics said: “ImMucin generated a robust and specific immune response in all patients which was observed after only 2-4 doses of the vaccine out of a maximum of 12 doses.
“In some of the patients, preliminary signs of clinical efficacy were observed.”
The results are still to be formally published but if further trials prove to be successful the vaccine could be available within six years. As a therapeutic vaccine it is designed to be given to patients who are already suffering from cancer to help their bodies fight off the disease rather than to prevent disease in the first place.
Cancer cells contain high levels of MUC1 as it is thought to be involved helping tumours grow. Healthy human cells also contain MUC1, but have levels that are too low to trigger the immune system after vaccination.
