“It leaves them with the prospect of the only way we leave Guantanamo is death,” Warner said. “Unfortunately, I think the men are ready to embrace this.”
“Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion,” the assignment read. “You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”
Collaborative consumption: Technology makes it easier for people to rent items to each other. But as it grows, the “sharing economy” is hitting roadblocks
WHY pay through the nose for something when you can rent it more cheaply from a stranger online? That is the principle behind a range of online services that enable people to share cars, accommodation, bicycles, household appliances and other items, connecting owners of underused assets with others willing to pay to use them. Dozens of firms such as Airbnb, which lets people rent out their spare rooms, or RelayRides, which allows other people to rent your car, act as matchmakers, allocating resources where they are needed and taking a small cut in return.
Phi Beta Iota:The Economist is the first mainstream media source to open up to the emergent possibilities. There are three major changes being facilitated by the Internet and the related applications, generally those that are NOT proprietary, NOT owned by a major corporation, and NOT predatory:
01 Collaborative Sharing of products, services, and places
02 True history of products, services, and places (e.g. “my fish today”)
03 True cost of products, services, and behaviros.
It is the last one that is awaiting a major breakthrough that combines the open source crisis making and global diaspora translation and posting, with the still missing heavy lifting of research such as was done for a single cotton T-shirt.
Someone smarter than me wrote this in an email. Scary stuff, seems to be right on target.
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The freight train bearing down on us is the Millennials – 80 million strong, 15% unemployment, that's 6 million 18 to 34 males who are fucked. How many have hardcore urban combat experience from Iraq or open country insurgency skills from AfPak?
Oklahoma City & D.C. Sniper came from 38 days of ground combat during Desert Storm. Now we get TBI guys who've done three tours and get screwed out of benefits with a PDO discharge because the VA doesn't want to deal? Ticking bomb, size XXXXL, and it's all around us.
So when does it flip from an edgy theory into a “holy shit how do we stop THAT?” Can't say for sure, but it'll be like trying to un-tornado a house once it gets moving …
Phi Beta Iota: The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.
This is the page from Gulf Wild program. When you buy a fish that has a Gulf Wild ID number on it, you can find out everything about it.
Simply enter this ID number on their website or (cell phone) and it will provide you with:
Click on Image to Enlarge
The bio and history of the fisherman who caught the fish.
What the fish is, where the fish was caught (with a map) down to 10 miles, and when it was caught.
Info on fishing practices (e.g. was it caught as part of a sustainable fisheries program?).
NOTE: Canada has a similar program called “This Fish”
I believe we're going to see programs like this for all of the food (and an increasing number of products) we buy, from meats to vegetables.
Why? Info like this is addicting. Once you get it, you want it on everything.
Fortunately, it's also really easy to put a service like this together for local producers, and that's a good thing.
Here's why: This type of insight would positively differentiate fresh, high quality local produce from the generic products of indefinite age, quality, and origin we get from the global industrial system.
That would be a good thing, since it would help make local food more plentiful and that makes us ALL more resilient.
I have reached a point where I have been forced to conclude that Monsanto is an evil corporation, as I understand that word. I know, from what you have written me that many of you, as have I and Ronlyn, have signed petitions against Monsanto. Now take the next step. Stop buying their products. Here is a URL where you will find the list of the companies Monsanto owns.
WARNING NOTICE: The list is not accurate and has been removed from Phi Beta Iota. The concept remains valid, but the public must first properly identify all Monsanto companies. We continue to wonder why farmers are not suing Monsanto for willful trespass, unlawful deprivation of property use, and health violations related to the toxicity and third generation infertility that are associated with Monsanto's GMO offerings.
An international network of journalists has obtained some 2.5 million records from tax havens detailing shell companies, offshore accounts and dubious financial deals. The unprecedented leaks include the names of 130,000 people who at one time or other moved their money offshore.
Oligarchs and dictators' daughters apparently have a penchant for bunkering their assets on the British Virgin Islands. Barons and composers, on the other hand, seem to prefer the Cook Islands. To cheat on taxes, they create bogus firms with imaginative names like Tantris, Moon Crystal or Sequoia.
Those are just a few details published this week on a major global system of tax evasion, which sheds new light on the methods used to deceive fiscal authorities and hide money. In what is believed to be the largest data leak in history, anonymous informants have provided an international consortium of journalists with around 2.5 million documents detailing activities in tax havens around the world.
The virtual Everest of data exposes some 120,000 letterbox entities, offshore accounts and other dubious deals in more than 170 countries, in addition to the names of 140,000 individuals alleged to have placed their money in known tax havens. The list includes politicians, celebrities, weapons dealers, oligarchs, financiers and a very diverse cast of characters. It also includes hundreds of Germans. Reporters at the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper noted that the most famous German featured on the list is society playboy Gunter Sachs, best known abroad as Brigitte Bardot's husband for a brief period in the 1960s, who committed suicide in 2011 at the age of 78.
Bradley Manning & The Deepwater Horizon By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
Wednesday, 3. April 2013
Three years ago this month, on the 20th of April, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew itself to kingdom come.
Soon thereafter, a message came in to our office's chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, from a person I dare not name, who was floating somewhere in the Caspian Sea along the coast of Baku, Central Asia.
The source was in mortal fear he’d be identified – and with good reason. Once we agreed on a safe method of communication, he revealed this: 17 months before BP’s DeepwaterHorizon blew out and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.
Crucially, both the Gulf and Caspian Sea blow-outs had the same identical cause: the failure of the cement “plug”.
To prevent blow-outs, drilled wells must be capped with cement. BP insisted on lacing its cement with nitrogen gas – the same stuff used in laughing gas – because it speeds up drying.
Time is money, and mixing some nitrogen gas into the cement saves a lot of money.
However, because BP’s penny-pinching method is so damn dangerous, they are nearly alone in using it in deep, high-pressure offshore wells.
The reason: nitrogen gas can create gaps in the cement, allow methane gas to go up the borehole, fill the drilling platform with explosive gas – and boom, you’re dead.
So, when its Caspian Sea rig blew out in 2008, rather than change its ways, BP simply covered it up.
Our investigators discovered that the company hid the information from its own shareholders, from British regulators and from the US Securities Exchange Commission. The Vice-President of BP USA, David Rainey, withheld the information from the US Senate in a testimony he gave six months before the Gulf deaths. (Rainey was later charged with obstruction of justice on a spill-related matter.)
Britain's Channel 4 agreed to send me to the benighted nation of Azerbaijan, whose waters the earlier BP blow-out occurred in, to locate witnesses who would be willing to talk to me without getting “disappeared”. (They didn’t talk, but they still disappeared.)
And I was arrested. Some rat had tipped off the Security Ministry (the official name of the Department of Torture here in this Islamic Republic of BP). I knew I’d get out quick, because throwing a reporter of Her Majesty’s Empire into a dungeon would embarrass both BP and the Azeri oil-o-crats.
The gendarmes demanded our film, but I wasn’t overly concerned: Before I left London, Badpenny handed me one of those Austin Powers camera-in-pens, on which I’d loaded all I needed. But I did fear for my witnesses left behind in Azerbaijan – and for my source in a tiger cage in the USA: Pvt Bradley Manning.
Manning could have saved their lives
Only after I dove into deep water in Baku did I discover, trolling through the so-called “WikiLeaks” documents, secret State Department cables released by Manning. The information was stunning: the US State Department knew about the BP blow-out in the Caspian and joined in the cover-up.
