Here is some excellent news about the Gulf oil spill. A major court decision has seriously placed the blame and responsibility where it belongs. And the court also made it clear what it thinks about BP, Transocean, and Halliburton ethics and behavior.
BP Plc acted with gross negligence in setting off the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, a federal judge ruled, handing down a long-awaited decision that may force the energy company to pay billions of dollars more for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster.
The first casualty of power politics, advocacy journalism, dark propaganda, rumor mills, and media-politico echo chambers is truth. Here’s a defensive tactic for your consideration.
Scholars have been concerned with the pollution of our infospheres (‘infopollution') for many decades. As I prepare this column I am reminded of a column that I wrote on information overload in 1997 (Cyberspace 2000: Dealing with Information Overload, Communications of the ACM, 40:2; February 1997). Some of my predictions were spot on – e.g., the Web did indeed evolve toward multi-mediocrity and self-indulgent tripe. To deal with this, some of us experimented with “cyberbrowsers” that could be optimized with respect to search relevance and maximal information uptake (Customizing information: Getting what we need, when we need it, IEEE Computer, parts I and II, September and October, 1994). But I was deluded into thinking that the solution to the needle-in-haystack problem was primarily a navigational issue. I failed to anticipate that the Web would become a convenient weapon of mass deception. As the toxicity of the Web increased, it became obvious that sophisticated navigation alone won't solve the problem of information overburden, and that defensive browsers were needed. By the mid-1990's the information content of large parts of cyberspace rivaled that of air dancers and lava lamps.
This toxicity may have been anticipated by alert and well-read software developers. By 1990 propaganda models of mass media had been carefully articulated by scholars such as Alex Carey (Taking the Risk out of Democracy, University of Illinois Press, 1997), and Herman and Chomsky (Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, Pantheon, 1988). Further, the Orwell-Huxley models of dystopia had been extended to mass media by Neil Postman since the 1960’s (see, e.g. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Penguin Books, rev. ed., 2005). So the handwriting should have been visible on the erudite’s wall. However, I was` blindsided by the most insidious side of infopollution: mass deception. This is my chance to redeem myself for the oversight.
We are in our own way a developing world. Here you see the naked greed of aging infrastructure corporations attempting to block new technology owned by the public.
The US telecoms industry called on the Federal Communications Commission on Friday to block two cities’ plans to expand high-speed internet services to their residents.
USTelecom, which represents telecoms giants Verizon, AT&T and others, wants the FCC to block expansion of two popular municipally owned high-speed internet networks, one in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the other in Wilson, North Carolina.
I think this essay is stating the truth. I have read stuff coming out from the government on the subject of marijuana so flagrantly wrong that it has to be deliberate. Nobody speaking truthfully about the present state of research could possible make those statements.
In her latest blog post [3], US National Institute on Drug Abuse director Nora Volkow claims that ‘science should guide marijuana policy.” But if the nation’s top anti-drug doc truly believes that facts, not ideological rhetoric, ought to shape America’s drug policies, why does she feel the need to keep distorting the truth about pot?
This is just the beginning. Much more will be emerging on this story in coming weeks and months. Because while the focus will be initially on how this fraud has so harmfully affected Afro-American children, it will inevitably open up questions on how vaccines affect all children and adults, questions which the vaccine industry, their government shills and media cheerleaders do not want to be raised because they know the answers will mean the end of the vaccine industry, not to mention ruin the credibility of the government and media shills. Karma is such a bitch to bastards.
Sharing may sound utopian. But the sharing industry has a dark side and its name is insurance.
“Probably one of the hardest things we had to do in order to start our company was to get the insurance,” says Seth Peterson, co-founder and CEO of AllYouCanArcade.com, an arcade game rental business. Peterson says he had to call more than 100 insurance agents before he found one willing to work with him.
“Eventually what I did was I started to get my insurance license,” he says, “because I thought if no one is going to underwrite this, I’ll underwrite this myself.”
Peterson says the brokers he talked to were okay with the arcade game part of his business: “Then we would say, ‘Well, actually, though, we have these independent contractors who work for us, who fill demand across the entire United States.' And that was the point where they just freaked out.”
[Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans] Nine years ago this week, New Orleans drowned. Don’t you dare blame Mother Nature. Miss Katrina killed no one in this town. But it was a homicide, with nearly 2,000 dead victims. If not Katrina, who done it? Read on.
