Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. Having dismissed his mother’s snap judgment of the site (“Facebook is the devil”), Harmsen now passionately agrees. He says, not entirely in jest, that he considers it a repressive regime akin to North Korea, and sells T-shirts with the words “Shut Your Facebook.” What especially galls him is the commercialization and corporate regulation of personal and social life.
. . . . . . .
“The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook — and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent — the more Facebook can and does abuse us,” Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. “It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about you.”
With a tip of the hat to Jean-Francouis Noubel, a pioneer of both Collective Intelligence and Open Money, we point today to the just-launched FLOWPLACE.
Free Currencies
Do not fail to listen to the short briefing. The money economy, based on secrecy, scarcity, and information asymmetries, is on the way out. The open economy, empowering the five billion poor with transparent open means of creating, recording, sharing, and exchanging value, is on the way in.
Professor Loch Johnson is one of two people who have served on both the Church Committee and the Aspin-Brown Commission. The other is Britt Snider, Esquire.
Today he examines the lack of integrity on the Hill, or totthless, inattentive oversight. He does not address two factors that we comment on below the fold:
1. There are five CIAs, and as long as the Wall Street and White House CIAs are doing what they are told to do, no one really cares about the integrity or the pathos of the other three.
2. Leon Panetta could have been the greatest Director in history, just as Barack Obama could have been the George Washington of this century, but both sacrificed their integrity for partisan gain, deliberately ignoring the urgent calls for both reform at CIA and non-partisan reality-based policy-making in the White House. Phi Beta Iota
By Loch K. Johnson
Sunday, August 30, 2009
skip sad story . . . . . . .
The Church Committee discovered that intelligence abuses ran far deeper than initially reported. The CIA had indeed spied on Vietnam War dissenters at home, but the FBI had gone further, disrupting the lives of antiwar protesters and civil rights activists. It was “a road map to the destruction of American democracy,” committee member Walter Mondale said during a public hearing.
Church was equally appalled by the overseas excesses of the CIA, including covert actions against democratic regimes — such as Chile's — and assassination plots. He blasted the agency for “the fantasy that it lay within our power to control other countries through the covert manipulation of their affairs.”
Tyranny looms large in America, because We the People have become ignorant, inert, and too subject to mass deception. Read the headline and first pargragraph, then (below the fold) the Phi Beta Iota comment, and then the full story online. One bird, two wings. Time to retire this turkey, starting with Rockefeller, Webb, and Warner. The Internet is resilient against everything EXCEPT domestic treason.
Bill would give president emergency control of Internet
Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
Congressional oversight of intelligence is broken. That was the dismal conclusion of a 2006 report by the Center for American Progress, as well as the bipartisan 9/11 commission, both of which scoured the histories of congressional watchdogging — real and imagined — and concluded that the system set up to guard against abuses and keep intelligence in line with U.S. policies was not working the way it was intended.
Click on the logo for the index of campaigns, the latest of which is against Kraft Foods for dumping toxic ingredients into food sold in the USA, ingredients not allowed in Europe and not included in Kraft products sold in Europe.
Most Americans do not realize that the USA is now a dumping ground for both toxic chemicals in food and other products, and unsafe products, because the Congress and Executive of the USA have been bribed to look the other way. The Federal Government, for example, now sets CEILINGS on environmental controls rather than floors, and this is one reason so may states are beginning to exercise their rights of nullification (one step down from secession from the United STATES of America.
Europe is more responsible, and hence a safer environment, for humanity. For the USA to become a dumping ground for toxins and products not allowed in Europe is an indictment of Congress and secessive Executives, and the two-party tyranny that has consistently betrayed the public trust and helped transfer the public dollar from the payer to the special interests looting the public treasury with Democratic and Republican party line voting that has been bought, not won on the merits of public intelligence. ENOUGH!
