Bono's ONE foundation under fire for giving little over 1% of funds to charity By Daily Mail ReporterDaily Mail UK, 23rd September 2010 Bono's anti-poverty foundation ONE is under pressure to explain its finances after it was revealed that only a small percentage of money it raises reaches the needy. The non-profit organisation set up by the U2 frontman received almost £9.6million in donations in 2008 but handed out only £118,000 to good causes (1.2 per cent). The figures published by the New York Post also show that £5.1million went towards paying salaries.
Phi Beta Iota: This fraudulent attribute afflicts almost all “charities” and most especially the Clinton and Bush “foundations” as well as the Red Cross. Katrina and Haiti are classic examples of the fraud that is common.
The same people who brought you Wikileaks are back, and this time, they've created a virtual currency called Bitcoin that could destabilize the entire global financial system. Bitcoin is an open-source virtual currency generated by a computer algorithm that is completely beyond the reach of financial intermediaries, central banks and national tax collectors. Bitcoins could be used to purchase anything, at any time, from anyone in the world, in a transaction process that it is almost completely frictionless. Yes, that's right, the hacktivists now have a virtual currency that's untraceable, unhackable, and completely Anonymous.
And that's where things start to get interesting. Veteran tech guru Jason Calacanis recently called Bitcoin the most dangerous open source project he's ever seen. TIME suggested that Bitcoin might be able to bring national governments and global financial institutions to their knees. You see, Bitcoin is as much a political statement as it is a virtual currency. If you think there's a shadow banking system now, wait a few more months. The political part is that, unlike other virtual currencies like Facebook Credits (used to buy virtual sock puppets for your friends), Bitcoins are globally transferrable across borders, making them the perfect instrument to finance any cause or any activity — even if it's banned by a sovereign government.
You don't need a banking or trading account to buy and trade Bitcoins – all you need is a laptop. They're like bearer bonds combined with the uber-privacy of a Swiss bank account, mixed together with a hacker secret sauce that stores them as 1's and 0's on your computer. They're “regulated” (to use the term lightly) by distributed computers around the world. Most significantly, Bitcoins can not be frozen or blocked or taxed or seized.
Phi Beta Iota: This 27:37 film focuses on a Serbian organization that claims to have provided peaceful non-violent training to 36 countries, with five successes including Ukraine, Georgia, Tunesia, Egypt, and the Maldives. The film strives to suggest that the US Government is funding this organization–more likely is that it is privately funded by a mix of George Soros, the Ayn Rand network, and related movements. Not to be confused with the Private Military Contractors and related quasi-criminal networks (e.g. Brown & Root) with close ties to clandestine elements of the U.S. Government. This is not “Shock Capitalism.” Russia and Venezuela are said to fear the concepts and organizational teaching represented by this group and its network of young learners. The film concludes that Globalization BENEFITS from revolutions by the young, over-throwing opponents of the New World Order such as Iran, Libya, and Venezuela. On balance, we are impressed. We do not believe that the awakening of the young will prolong predatory capitalism, virtual colonialism, and unilateral militarism. We welcome any initiative that empowers the young.
A new Straus Military Reform Project paper that I have just finished explains how the Pentagon has tailored measures of inflation for itself that generate added billions of dollars — each year — and additional (hidden) “real growth” for its budget. As just one example of the consequences, during the span of President Obama's $400 billion “savings” in the security budget over 12 years, I calculate that $167 billion of that amount is for inflation that the most widely accepted measure of inflation says will not exist.
It's an arcane subject, and some will remember a scandal and studies about this in the 1980s, but despite the complexities of the Pentagon's budget labyrinth, hundreds of billions are at issue. I urge you to read the summary below, as well as the paper itself.
The paper's summary is below; the full text is online.
Summary
The Pentagon uses a specially tailored measure of inflation that masks past budget growth and induces Congress to appropriate excess funding for inflation that the most commonly accepted inflation index says will not occur.
Phi Beta Iota: All of the posters (use link) are expandable and printable. Below are just a few examples. Visit the 2011 GIS Poster Expo Gallery for all the others. These are generally GIS 2.0, and do not yet focus on “deltas” between collected data sets (e.g. Chinese investment and corruption), nor do they question standing assumptions (e.g. that wind farms are the answer vice individual windmills).
My colleague Jessica recently won the Tufts GIS Poster Expo with her excellent poster on civil resistance. She used GIS data to analyze optimal approaches to Tahrir Square in Cairo. According to Jessica, many previous efforts to occupy the square had failed. So Egyptian activists spent two weeks brainstorming the best strategies to approach Tahrir Square.
Just too funny to not post. Evidently the Australian government has not made the connection between animal and human shit in the groundwater causing E. coli and other forms of disease migrating into vegetables–as occurred in the USA when spinach and cow shit combined. Immaculate Australian shit–perhaps it's all the beer they drink.
