The results of the last Italian election are baffling, if not incomprehensible, to most foreign observers: as one American friend put it, a majority of Italians voted either for a comedian (Beppe Grillo) or a clown (Silvio Berlusconi). A center-left coalition won a narrow plurality in the lower house of parliament with about 29.6 per cent of the vote, barely edging Berlusconi’s center-right coalition, with Grillo’s Five Star Movement, a loose collection of citizens organizing over the Internet, gaining an astonishing 25.6 per cent, more than any single party.In all likelihood, the three-sided split spells an ungovernable chaos. It would be a mistake, though, to see Italy as a crazy farce that is entirely different from America. Our two-party system has limited the success of more radical parties, but the Italian experience illuminates phenomena that are at work in the United States, too. Are we really sure that Congress is a saner institution than the Italian parliament?
From WebVisions New York 2013, Live from Theater for the New City, Douglas Rushkoff gives his Keynote from his new book, “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now”.
“Currently serving as Code Evangelist for Codecademy, Rushkoff is the author of a dozen bestselling books on media, technology, and society, including Program or Be Programmed, Media Virus, and the upcoming Present Shock. He made the PBS documentaries Merchants of Cool and Digital_Nation, lectures around the world, and has taught at The New School and NYU.”
Via Youtube: “Dr. West gives a passionate speech about government love of power and the fact of government oppression. MLK could have been jailed without due process under the NDAA or killed without due process under the present administration.”
Dr. West hits the nail on the head in many respects. But the question remains: Why is no one discussing the fact the U.S. Government was indicted in MLK's murder over 13 years ago?
Phi Beta Iota: Below the embedded YouTube we provide some additional links. We as a collective hold Dr. Cornell West in high regard. This six minute articulation is passionate, informed, and a call to Jesus for the American public.
For the first time, 25-year-old U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning has admitted to being the source behind the largest leak of state secrets in U.S. history. More than a thousand days after he was arrested, Manning testified Thursday before a military court. He said he leaked the classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in order to show the American public the “true costs of war.” Reading for more than an hour from a 35-page statement, Manning said: “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” At the pretrial hearing at Fort Meade military base in Maryland, Manning pleaded guilty to reduced charges on 10 counts, which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. But even if the judge accepts the plea, prosecutors can still pursue a court-martial on the remaining 12 charges. The most serious of those is “aiding the enemy” and carries a possible life sentence. We are joined by Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a lawyer to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He just returned from attending Manning’s hearing. [includes rush transcript]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has launched a nationwide campaign to assess police militarization in the United States. Starting Wednesday, ACLU affiliates in 23 states are sending open records requests to hundreds of state and local police agencies requesting information about their SWAT teams, such as how often and for what reasons they're deployed, what types of weapons they use, how often citizens are injured during SWAT raids, and how they're funded. More affiliates may join the effort in the coming weeks.
Additionally, the affiliates will ask for information about drones, GPS tracking devices, how much military equipment the police agencies have obtained through programs run through the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, and how often and for what purpose state National Guards are participating in enforcement of drug laws.
Drawing from State Department and academic sources, Navanti presents the periodic table of terrorist groups, which details the size, scope, and level of activity of each group:
From the article: “In the arsenal of eternal skeptics there are few tools more dramatically and more commonly used than Ockham’s razor. It is triumphantly applied to resolve arguments about ghosts (more parsimoniously seen as misperceptions by distraught family members or the suggestible), UFOs (evidently hoaxes and mistaken observations of natural phenomena) and telepathy (a “delusion” of wishful thinking and poorly-constructed tests).”
Taking Vallee's point a step further, such truncated-reasoning is also used to dismiss “Conspiracy Theories”. False-Flag Terror and Manufactured International Strife are simply labeled as ‘Blowback', and the true perpetrators/complicit actors within one's own government and world power structures are simply labeled as ‘Incompetent' instead of ‘Criminal'.
LONDON (AP) — It's a royal secret, but the Duchess of Cambridge may have inadvertently dropped a hint about the gender of the baby she and Prince William are expecting.
When a wellwisher gave the former Kate Middleton a teddy bear during a rare public appearance Tuesday, one woman in the crowd said she heard Kate respond: “Thank you, I will take that for my d…” before she broke off her comments.
That reported exchange was enough for Britain's tabloids to trumpet “It's a girl” in Wednesday's papers.
Sandra Cook, who was standing near Kate, told reporters that she asked Kate if she had been about to say, ‘daughter' and was told at first that the royal couple did not know and then that the couple would not reveal the child's gender.
