An event revolving around the UN Millennium Goals, TEDx Change Dubai, recently gathered three hundred participants at the creek side Dubai Chamber of Commerce. Melinda Gates, wife of billionaire philanthropist and once Microsoft overlord Bill Gates, asked a pertinent question while streaming live from New York.
How is it that Coke can sell 1.5 billion servings daily and dispense to far flung areas that NGOs, Quangos and aid agencies have difficulty reaching with aid or vaccines? It's simple. Coke's distribution takes advantage of local entrepreneurs. NGOs often don't. Entrepreneurs are by nature both disruptive and generative. They distress the fabric of large business through hyper-local knowledge. They nimbly pounce on small market opportunities, or even build them from scratch. They catalyze economic spurts and the birth of cultures and sub-cultures as microcosms of activity appear around them. Their knowledge and drive can often be a powerful catalyst for social improvement.
University and Media Hosted Debates Continue to Exclude Alternative Candidates Despite Responsibility to Maintain a Free Marketplace of Ideas.
Southwestern Community College Goes One Step Further, Censors Student Journalists.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Universities and media outlets across California are excluding alternative candidates from participating in the debates they sponsor. The September 28 debate held at the University of California at Davis and co-sponsored by The Sacramento Bee included Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman, but excluded all the other candidates. Other universities and media outlets have followed suit.
While colleges already suppress dissenting voices in the student population, they are also suppressing them in vital public debates. Once bastions of intellectual freedom, many of our nation’s universities have created a repressive environment, hindering tomorrow’s leaders from absorbing ideas from anyone but the leading Republican and Democratic candidates. And the media has continued the censorship through their coverage of only the top funded candidates.
Phi Beta Iota: The time has come to end the two-party tyranny and make it illegal–it is already unconstitutional–to deny ballot access and public voice to any earnest candidate for public office. The universities, in failing to honor their responsibility for nurturing clarity, diversity, and integrity in the public dialog, should be penalized by loss of funds from any public treasury, inclusive of all research grants….IOHO.
Wanna know how incestuous amplification works in the politico's OODA loop … or put another way, why the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac has become so disconnected from reality? … See if you have the stomach to read this disgusting drivel.
Truth in advertising: I did not have the stomach to finish it, but you don't need to finish it to appreciate the sicko psychology of worshipping at the altar of inside-the-beltway
Before he goes to sleep, between 11 and midnight, Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, typically checks in by e-mail with the same reporter: Mike Allen of Politico, who is also the first reporter Pfeiffer corresponds with after he wakes up at 4:20. A hyperactive former Eagle Scout, Allen will have been up for hours, if he ever went to bed. Whether or not he did is one of the many little mysteries that surround him. The abiding certainty about Allen is that sometime between 5:30 and 8:30 a.m., seven days a week, he hits “send” on a mass e-mail newsletter that some of America’s most influential people will read before they say a word to their spouses.
EXTRACT:
“The people in this community, they all want to read the same 10 stories,” he said, table-chopping in the Hay-Adams. “And to find all of those, you have to read 1,000 stories. And we do that for you.”
As a practical matter, here is how Allen’s 10 stories influence the influentials. Cable bookers, reporters and editors read Playbook obsessively, and it’s easy to pinpoint exactly how an item can spark copycat coverage that can drive a story. Items become segment pieces on “Morning Joe,” the MSNBC program, where there are 10 Politico Playbook segments each week, more than half of them featuring Allen. This incites other cable hits, many featuring Politico reporters, who collectively appear on television about 125 times a week. There are subsequent links to Politico stories on The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post and other Web aggregators that newspaper assigning editors and network news producers check regularly. “Washington narratives and impressions are no longer shaped by the grand pronouncements of big news organizations,” said Allen, a former reporter for three of them — The Washington Post, The New York Times and Time magazine. “The smartest people in politics give us the kindling, and we light the fire.”
Phi Beta Iota: We read the whole thing, and here is the bottom line–Washington is incest on steroids. It has little to do with reality, with the needs of the public, with balancing the books, or with actually engaging in public service. It has become its own bog, Of, By, and For Washington. And that does, as Brother Chuck suggests, make one sick with shame.
3 Ways the Underwear Bomber Changed Counterterrorism
December 25, 2009 was a pivotal day for U.S. counterterrorism. Although the airline bombing failed, the reverberations from the attempt are still being felt. Here’s how this incident changed U.S. counterterrorism policy, as told by Mike Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Popular Mechanics By Joe Pappalardo September 16, 2010 2:30 PM
Deaf Leading the Blind
1) The incident saved the Counterterrorism Center's budget.
2) New teams were formed to chase leads, not write reports.
3) The failed attack focused the Obama administration on counterterrorism.
Phi Beta Iota: Click on the photo for the full story at Popular Mechanics. Above we just list the three “ways,” each of them a perfect outcome for a fraudulent staged “threat” that was almost certainly concocted with Israeli help. Until the guy video-taping the whole thing from in front is produced, our professional judgment is that the Underpants Bomber was an agent of the US Government doing precisely what this worthless activity wanted: give it a reason, however absurd, to keep on being worthless. [Covert Operations against a US audience are illegal, but who cares about the Constitution or laws, these days?] NCTC's leader, a decent well-intentioned politically-appointed lawyer who knows nothing relevant, is the poster child for what is wrong with the entire US national security domain.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's remarks at the formal White House launching of the resumed Middle East peace talks on September 2 were the clearest indication yet of his lack of seriousness. But neither the host, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, nor any of the distinguished guests seemed aware of it. Indeed, they applauded his remarks. What they applauded was Netanyahu's dramatic declaration, as he faced Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, that the success of the resumed negotiations will depend on his own and Abbas' readiness to make “painful concessions” for the sake of peace.
If these words have any significance, they must mean that Netanyahu is prepared to make Israeli concessions that match Palestinian concessions: i.e., if Palestinians concede to Israel part of their territory east of the 1967 border, Israel would concede to the Palestinians comparable territory on its side of that border.
But everyone present at this festive White House event knew this to be completely untrue. Netanyahu has never offered to concede even one inch of Israeli territory to the Palestinians — not even from Palestinian territories Israel acquired in 1948 during its War of Independence, which the 1947 UN Partition Plan had assigned to Palestine's Arab population. In fact, no one has ever asked Israel to make any concession to the Palestinians — whether territory, water resources, Jerusalem or sovereignty. In respect to these and the other permanent-status issues, the concessions have all been demanded of the Palestinians. None were asked of Israel. So Netanyahu's offer of parallel Israeli concessions is a lie. Unless, of course, Netanyahu meant to apply the term “painful concessions” to his willingness to return to Palestinians a part of their own territory, all of which — up to the 1967 border — is universally recognized as being under Israeli occupation, and therefore subject to the Fourth Geneva Convention's strictures that absolutely forbid the transfer of the occupying power's population to those territories. If that is what he meant, what Netanyahu was telling Abbas is that Israel expects to be rewarded for returning some of the territory it unlawfully confiscated from the Palestinians by having Palestinians concede their right to the balance of that territory.
By getting the distinguished guests at this event to applaud this offer, Netanyahu can fairly be said to have done for international peace diplomacy what Bernard Madoff did for financial markets.
Phi Beta Iota: Mr. Siegman is the Ambassador to Israel designate in the Huffington Post Virtual Cabinet. Here he presents FACTS that neither the White House nor the Department of State nor the US Intelligence Community appear capable of acknowledging. The US is an enabler of the atrocities perpetuated by Israel against the Palestinians.
Phi Beta Iota: We decided to post a long email about helping a major international bank decide not to fund mountaintop removal coal projects for the following reasons:
1) It illustrates the emergent power of focused citizen advocacy.
2) It documents the modified behavior of select major banks.
3) It highlights the complete fragmentation of citizen advocacy–all over the lot with no strategic analytic model, no information-sharing network, no ability to co-evolve and achieve multiplication effects.
The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reports that President Obama begged Prime Minister Netanyahu to extend his settlement freeze in order to save the so-called peace talks.
As a quid pro quo, Obama is reported to have promised Netanyahu that (1) Israel could resume settlement construction if the peace negotiations failed to produce results and (2) that the United States would give Israel written assurances of its commitment to Israel’s security (suggesting a formal peace treaty perhaps?). Despite Obama’s desperation, Netanyahu blew Obama off and allowed the so-called freeze to expire.
If, as is likely, this report is true, Israel has humiliated the United States once again — a fact that will no doubt be deemed irrelevant by Israel’s shills on both sides of the aisle in Congress, not to mention the mainstream media.
The last president to stand up to Israel was Dwight Eisenhower, when he pulled the plug on the second Arab-Israeli war in 1956 and forced Israel to retreat from the east bank of the Suez Canal and to give up its conquest of the Sinai.
But eleven years later, Israel learned US condemnation was no longer a problem.
In fact, Israel learned it could get away with murder and could treat the United States with utter contempt when (1) its air and naval forces not only attacked the USS Liberty — a high priority US Navy signals intelligence ship — on 8 June 1967 during the Six-Day War, killing 34 and wounding 171 US sailors, but (2) was able to secure a cover up of its perfidy by the highest levels of the US government, including President Johnson, Secretary of Defense McNamara, and most of the senior military officers in the Pentagon, despite the misgivings of Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State and Admiral Thomas Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (neither of whom chose to resign in protest, however).
Phi Beta Iota: As has been reported on more than one occasion, even when Israel “promises” to stop settlements, they continue apace. The Israeli government cannot be trusted on any detail.
