In other words, someone has sold Obama on Pakistaning the Libyan War, i.e., pursuing a military strategy of relying on drone attacks to a destroy an adversary hiding in the environmental background. What is astonishing is that Obama took the cape, despite the fact that only 12 days earlier, a report in the Los Angeles Times by David Cloud illustrated once again the absurdity of Cartwright's and Gates' claims.
Unions representing Central Florida teachers, firefighters, police and other government workers are pulling an estimated $10 million from five banks affiliated with the Florida Chamber of Commerce, blaming them for an attack on public employees.
The unions are also asking their members — an estimated 20,000 people — to withdrawal their personal money from Bank of America, PNC Bank, Regions Bank, SunTrust and Wachovia. And labor leaders across the state could follow in the coming weeks, union officials say.
Archangel73 at 11:59 AM April 22, 2011I have noticed that all of these attacks on Public servants [are] having an opposite effect.
The Fire and Police depts used to be mostly Republican, now all of those folks are leaving the party because they're upset that the burden of everything is being put on THEIR backs.
What was intended to WEAKEN the Unions appears to be having the opposite effect, and employees are becoming more resolute. More importantly, they are becoming angry with the GOP.
Have you ever thought about how completely irrelevant structured learning is? Indeed. “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot unlearn and relearn.” – Alvin Toffler. The video below advocates a change in how we learn – network-centric, personal, based on your context, not based on some institution’s agenda. (Thanks to Judi Clark for sending me the link to this video.)
Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker profiles David Eagleman, a brilliant researcher who’s studying the brain, consciousness, and the perception of time. At a personal level I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years studying and trying to comprehend my own degrees and levels of consciousness and perception. We think of our “conscious experience” as a constant, and our unconscious as inaccessible… but through attention we learn that there are gradations in the range of conscious to “un-” or “sub-” conscious experience; that perceptions can vary with context; that memory is selective and undependable; that our perception of the world is generally incomplete though we do a good job of filling the gaps. When David Eagleman was a child he fell from a roof and realized that his perception of time had changed as he was falling. Now he’s doing evidence-based research to determine how people experience the world, what are the variations, how does the brain work and how does the mind work? Read about it here. If you know about similar studies and writings, please post in comments.
Houston grandmother Leticia Aguirre began hosting what's believed to be the nation's first residential “Super Wi-Fi” hot spot this month. Super Wi-Fi, a long-range, wall-piercing version of Wi-Fi that is broadcast on unused TV channels, could be a boon for both rural and urban residents who lack broadband access. Credit: Jade Boyd/Rice University
When the Federal Communications Commission worked out the rules last fall to convert unused TV channels for a new long-range, wall-piercing version of Wi-Fi, Houston resident Leticia Aguirre had no way of knowing that she'd host the nation's first residential “Super Wi-Fi” hot spot.
“We have federal support from the National Science Foundation to develop this technology in an open-source way,” said Rice's Edward Knightly, professor in electrical and computer engineering, whose research group built the prototype Super Wi-Fi equipment that Aguirre is using. “Ultimately, we want to develop this technology in such a way that it benefits the most people by accessing the right spectrum for the right users. Having Mrs. Aguirre as our first user really shows the potential benefits for people who've been underserved with traditional broadband.”
Here is the TFA homepage. They received $9.6 Million grant from the National Telecommunications
Infrastructure Administration (NTIA) September, 2010. I wonder who really owns and controls TFA…
Phi Beta Iota: Universities in the USA have prostituted themselves to commercial interests in the past two decades, but in recent years there has been a discernible return of ethics to some of them. The first to break back were those inventing pharmaceuticals and insisting on holding the patents open for generic exploitation in the Third World (one reason the US pays 100X more, Congress mandated “no negotiation” of price, a corrupt decision if there ever was one). Now we see innovation in the public interest in wireless. This is a very good thing. Free Internet access–and an Autonomous Internet–are essential to creating a prosperous world at peace.
It is a question asked repeatedly across America: why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?
To me the moral of this story is that Washington has created a vast immoral hazard. We are all truly in a world of peril when regulators and law enforcers believe our financial institutions are too big to be brought to justice—and when our leadership in Washington is so gutless that its response is to let these same institutions emerge bigger and more beyond challenge than ever.
Tip of the Hat to Lynn Wheeler at LinkedIn for the clean links.
Phi Beta Iota: It is our view that the President, the Attorney General, the Secretary of the Treasury, and most Senators and Representatives are immediately impeachable for failing to uphold their oaths to the Constitution and failing to represent the public interest in the face of massive legalized fraud on the part of Wall Street.
Phi Beta Iota: We disagree on the inclusion of the New America Foundation–they are not stakeholders as much as beltway “think-tank” opportunists, and too heavily reliant on proprietary hooks going nowhere. New Software Foundation has been changed to Free Software Foundation. We would add to the above list:
