Let's start with the state of inequality in the USA today–the concentration of wealth would make Hitler proud. The middle class is the Jews, the blue collar class is the working Poles (the ones allowed to live), and Congress is the appeaser and co-conspirator. The White House is the SS for Hitler (Goldman Sachs and Wall Street).
For the US media to be consumed with a less than $100 million budget cut at a time when the US Government is borrowing, WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION and WITHOUT CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY, one third of its operating budget, over a trillion dollars a year, is grounds for the impeachment of the President, every Senator, and every Member of Congress. This is a Demo-Publican Co-Conspiracy of insane criminality.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The fraud inherent in the government shut-down “confrontation” and the craven collaboration of the mass media, particularly the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Bloomberg, and CNN, is breathtaking. The lunacy continues.
To the left is a simple chart of where the federal, state, and local governments get their revenue. The fact that one third of the federal revenue is DEBT is itself breathtaking, and grounds for impeaching every Senator and Representative now serving. Source Online
Below is more interesting. This is a pie-chart that shows the current (tiny) slice of revenue sources in relation to the total economy and the much, much larger “pie” that has been ignored by the US Government because the US Government at the political level is CORRUPT and so is the corporate media that refuses to do holistic accurate reporting on what is and what could be.
As we become more comfortable with sharing ourselves on the ‘social web,’ we’re revealing a lot of valuable information about our interests, preferences and social connections, and it’s strewn across the web in many different 3rd party silos. One slice of me may be at home on Facebook, another segment of relationships and topics I follow are on Twitter, my online buying habits are known by Amazon and eBay, and a range of companies unknown to me are tracking the ‘digital exhaust’ I leave as I visit websites and travel around the web. There is a growing recognition of the value of all this data to assist us in decision-making, and a concern about who owns it currrently and what’s being done with it.
According to a recent W3C report, there are at least 4 main issues that arise when our data is trapped in 3rd party walled gardens:
1. Portability – The option of taking my personal information and social connections with me across any platform or marketplace is unavailable to me, so I’m forced to reenter and duplicate my data over and over again on different websites.
2. Identity – Instead of having a federated identity that is secure and interoperable across any website, I have an overwhelming (and growing) amount of usernames, passwords and accounts, making my online identity fractured and fragmented.
3. Linkability – People may be mentioning me or sharing photos of me on networks in which I am not a member, making that information invisible to me.
4. Privacy – Once I upload or add content to a site, I have no way of controlling the context of how it’s shared or creating permissions for what can be done with it.
In light of these concerns, I’ve been exploring the emerging tools and solutions for personal data ownership, unified online identity, and a federated social web that puts the user at the center of their online experience.
One of the recurring themes I’ve seen is the call for “personal data stores” or “personal data lockers.” This is the idea of a database that would store all of your personal information. The range of its functionality varies, but here is a comprehensive overview of what it could entail (from Mydex site):
Data Storage – a single access point for my information that is currently scattered
Data Management – a toolset for analyzing and understanding what my data means
Data Sharing – the ability to choose how to share my information and with whom
Data Collection – the ability to track my purchases, preferences, and activities
Verifications – the ability to authenticate sensitive information generated by 3rd parties
Identity Assurance – the ability to prove I am who I say I am
Privacy Management – my info has a privacy setting determined by me, not organizations
Manage Permissions – deciding the communication channels between me & my contacts
Express Interests & Intentions – the ability to announce what I want to buy, do or access
Plan & Implement Projects – a life management system for how I use my info over time
Below is a list I’ve been assembling of startups, open source projects, organizations, and standards that are defining what this next stage of the web will look like, where individuals are empowered by the ownership and understanding of their data and ability to verify identity. I’ve done my best to organize these, but am open for suggestions of how to arrange the list more usefully. And as always, if I’ve missed some vital information, please add to the comments section and I’ll keep the post updated.
There are some significant misunderstandings about failure. A common one, similar to one we seem to have about death, is that if you don't plan for it, it won't happen.
All of us fail. Successful people fail often, and, worth noting, learn more from that failure than everyone else.
Two habits that don't help:
Getting good at avoiding blame and casting doubt
Not signing up for visible and important projects
While it may seem like these two choices increase your chances for survival or even promotion, in fact they merely insulate you from worthwhile failures.
I think it's worth noting that my definition of failure does not include being unlucky enough to be involved in a project where random external events kept you from succeeding. That's the cost of showing up, not the definition of failure.
Identifying these random events, of course, is part of the art of doing ever better. Many of the things we'd like to blame as being out of our control are in fact avoidable or can be planned around.
Here are six random ideas that will help you fail better, more often and with an inevitably positive upside:
Whenever possible, take on specific projects.
Make detailed promises about what success looks like and when it will occur.
Engage others in your projects. If you fail, they should be involved and know that they will fail with you.
Be really clear about what the true risks are. Ignore the vivid, unlikely and ultimately non-fatal risks that take so much of our focus away.
Concentrate your energy and will on the elements of the project that you have influence on, ignore external events that you can't avoid or change.
When you fail (and you will) be clear about it, call it by name and outline specifically what you learned so you won't make the same mistake twice. People who blame others for failure will never be good at failing, because they've never done it.
If that list frightened you, you might be getting to the nub of the matter. If that list feels like the sort of thing you'd like your freelancers, employees or even bosses to adopt, then perhaps it's resonating as a plan going forward for you.
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has announced a new initiative launching April 8, 2011: The National Conversation at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The National Conversation will examine overarching themes of U.S. international and domestic policy, drawing on high-profile guests and experts from all sides of the political sphere to provide thoughtful, intelligent explorations of challenging issues with the goal of informing the national public policy debate.
From uprisings in the Arab world to troubled economies around the globe, challenges to America’s role in the global community have seldom been greater or more complex. And with economic woes at home and our military capacity stretched thin through involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, many are left wondering about our ability to respond and adapt to a rapidly changing world. At a time when national unity around a shared vision is lacking, there is a growing belief that a new national security narrative must emerge that defines the role of the U.S. in global affairs for a new century. But can we achieve such a national consensus in this era of hyper-partisanship? A possible answer comes in the form of an anonymous “white paper.” Two US military officers have written an essay describing a vision for the missing narrative under the authorship of “Mr. Y.” Join our panel as it discusses the ideas contained in this provocative paper from an unexpected source. Is this the blueprint for the narrative we seek?
The inaugural National Conversation kicks off April 8 from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m., with a discussion on the search for a new national security narrative to guide U.S. policy in the 21st Century. Five panelists will participate in a discussion moderated by award-winning New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman. The panel will feature: Steve Clemons, founder of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation; Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim American to be elected into the U.S. Congress; Robert Kagan, senior fellow for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution; Brent Scowcroft, U.S. national security adviser to President Ford and President H.W. Bush; and Professor Anne Marie Slaughter, former director for policy planning for the U.S. Department of State and current Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Here are the concise references focused on revolution. For corruption, collective intelligence, open space and other methods of non-violent consensus building and emergence, see the lists at the end of this post.
REVOLUTION OS tells the inside story of the hackers who rebelled against the proprietary software model and Microsoft to create GNU/Linux and the Open Source movement.
On June 1, 2001, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”
Microsoft fears GNU/Linux, and rightly so. GNU/Linux and the Open Source & Free Software movements arguably represent the greatest threat to Microsoft's way of life. Shot in cinemascope on 35mm film in Silicon Valley, REVOLUTION OS tracks down the key movers and shakers behind Linux, and finds out how and why Linux became such a potent threat.
REVOLUTION OS features interviews with Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, Brian Behlendorf, Michael Tiemann, Larry Augustin, Frank Hecker, and Rob Malda. To view the trailer or the first eight minutes go to the ifilm website for REVOLUTION OS.
For the second time, Icelanders voted down a deal to repay Britain and the Netherlands billions of euros lost in the island nation's 2008 financial collapse—at once a bold popular rejection of the notion that taxpayers must bear the burden for bankers' woes and a risky outcome that will complicate Iceland's efforts to rejoin global markets.
