Category: Articles & Chapters

references not steele articles

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Reference: American Tragedy–Another Free Ride for Pentagon

Articles & Chapters, DoD, Media Reports
Chuck Spinney Sounds Off....

November 23, 2010

The Root Causes of the Defense Budget Mess

Another Free Ride for the Pentagon?

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney11232010.html

The Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission will be reporting out its results in early December. We can expect that it will focus on domestic spending, especially entitlements, including Social Security. By the time the dust settles, it is quite likely that the Pentagon — really the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex — will get a free ride for the reasons predicted by President Eisenhower in his farewell address.

Given the short attention span of the mainstream media, we can expect the Commission's recommendations will be examined as if they are current news, devoid of historical context. But the question of context — specifically, as it relates to how the spending behaviour of the US government managed to destabilize the improving trend in budget balances of the late 1990s (due in large part to the huge and growing surpluses of the Social Security Trust Fund in the 1990s as well as the effects of the economic expansion) — is central to any rational determination of whether the enactment of Simpson-Bowles' recommendations will make things better or worse. Given the gravity of our economic situation, this kind of omission would simply compound the ongoing American Tragedy.

Read the rest of this referential article, including historical and current referential links…

See Also:

Journal: Deficit Reduction Plan Hoses Everyone BUT the 10% at the Top

Reference: USA in Denial Over Reality

Journal: Who Dun It on the Deficit?

Reference: Saving Defense from Itself

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Reference: Social Media for Business 101

About the Idea, Articles & Chapters, Collaboration Zones, IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, IO Technologies, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Threats, Topics (All Other)

Eric Lefkofsky

The New York Times November 17, 2010

A Business Creator Sees Big Returns From Social Media

By DARREN DAHL

Asked to name the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, few people would think of Eric Lefkofsky, who is 40 and keeps a deliberately low profile in his hometown of Chicago. But Mr. Lefkofsky has an impressive entrepreneurial track record, one that recently led Forbes to estimate  his wealth at $750 million.

The first business Mr. Lefkofsky started, StarBelly, made tools for building Web sites; he sold it in 2000 for $240 million. He then started two companies that have since gone public —  InnerWorkings, which provides printing capabilities over the Web, and Echo Global Logistics, a transportation and logistics outsourcing business he founded with a law school friend, Brad Keywell. He also founded MediaBank, which helps companies buy advertising. In each case, Mr. Lefkofsky used the power of technology and the Internet to update an industry.

And then came Groupon, the social-coupon Web site that he bankrolled and started in 2008 with Andrew Mason  —  a venture that has been called the fastest-growing company ever. Groupon offers its followers a deal-of-the-day coupon, sponsored by a local business, that the followers are encouraged to share with their social networks. The local business gets customers, and Groupon takes a share of the coupon proceeds  —  a business model that has led to talk that Groupon, still privately owned, could be worth as much as $3 billion. More recently, Mr. Lefkofsky and Mr. Keywell started an investment fund with $100 million of their earnings. It’s called Lightbank, and it invests only in early-stage technology companies that are built around social media. The following is a condensed version of a recent conversation with Mr. Lefkofsky.

Read full article at The New York Times…

Continue reading “Reference: Social Media for Business 101”

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Reference: RockMelt Browser

Analysis, Articles & Chapters, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Tools, White Papers
Super Cool Must See

RockMelt Browser Comes Out from Behind Its Rock

PCMagazine

11.08.2010

PCMag.com met with RockMelt's founders Eric Vishria and Tim Howes last week for an early look at the new browser software. Entering a competitor into a full field that includes Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera, not to mention an even more direct socially enhanced-browser competitor, Flock, may seem questionable, but Visheria and Howes made a fairly compelling case for it. Their point was that the current all-purpose browsers don't reflect most people's actual usage patterns.

Reinventing the Browser
“At RockMelt we are reinventing the browser for the way people use the Web today,” said Howes. “We think this has changed dramatically from the way people used it just a few short years ago. But all the browsers available today, although they've gotten a lot faster, are still just about navigating web pages. We built features into the browser to address people's three top browsing behaviors: interacting with friends, consume news and information, and searching.”

Entire article well worth reading….

Get beta access and watch cool video…

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Reference: On the Issues from Abortion to War & Peace

Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom

I want to put this somewhat intellectual blog posting into perspective. Below is a quote from Matt Taibbi's new book, Griftopia-Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (Spiegel & Grau, 2 November 2010). Click on the title of the book to read my full review.

QUOTE (32): What has taken place over the last generation is a highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government. Far from taking care of the rest of us, the financial leaders of America and their political servants have seemingly reached the cynical conclusion that our society is not work saving and have taken on a new mission that involved not creating wealth for us all, but simply absconding with whatever wealth remains in our hollowed out economy. They don't feed us, we feed them.

In other words, nothing being discussed by any politician matters at all, because behind the scenes they have sold us out in such a total manner as to call into question why they are still in office. We have been stupid. That ends now, I hope.

My book, ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Earth Intelligence Network, 2008) is free online as well as on sale at Amazon as a very nice wire-bound color reference work. The below graphic opens the chapter in that book, “Candidates on the Issues”:

2010-11-04-candidates.jpg

Here are links to each of the chapters in the book, in the aggregate they offer a context for national deliberative dialog by sane people.

Prefaces

Paradigms of Failure

The Substance of Governance

Legitimate Grievances (US Internal)

Legitimate Grievances (Anti-US Global)

Candidates on the Issues

Balanced Budget 101

Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them

Annotated Bibliography

What I have realized over time is that candidates do not have positions, they have postures, and those postures are generally shaped by ideology and very narrow constituencies. Because of decades of corruption at the federal, state, and local levels, political districts have been so gerrymandered as to be representative of only one of the two extremes that monopolize power.

Continue reading “Reference: On the Issues from Abortion to War & Peace”

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Reference: Entangled Minds, Extra-Sensory Perception

Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom

Entangled Minds Dean Radin's blog

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Extrasensory Perception and Quantum Models of Cognition

By Patrizio E. Tressoldi, Lance Storm, & Dean Radin.

The possibility that information can be acquired at a distance without the use of the ordinary senses, that is by “extrasensory perception” (ESP), is not easily accommodated by conventional neuroscientific assumptions or by traditional theories underlying our understanding of perception and cognition. The lack of theoretical support has marginalized the study of ESP, but experiments investigating these phenomena have been conducted since the mid‐19th century, and the empirical database has been slowly accumulating. Today, using modern experimental methods and meta‐analytical techniques, a persuasive case can be made that, neuroscience assumptions notwithstanding, ESP does exist.

Read rest of overview blog….

The full paper is available at the online journal NeuroQuantology.

Tip of the Hat to Sumner Carter via Sandra D. Sabatini at Facebook.

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2010 Reference: 5 Lessons From Outgoing Microsoft Software Architect Ray Ozzie

Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom
Ray Ozzie Dawn of a New Day Memo (28 Oct 2010)

1. Take time to paint a vision of the future

2. Put past successes “in perspective”

3. Recognize what’s inevitable in your industry

4. “Inevitable” is not the same as “imminent”

5. Real transformation has to come from within

Read complete Fast Company Article

Phi Beta Iota: This is very depressing.  Read the entire Fast Company article for solid paragraphs on each of the five lessons.  The truth-teller is #5 and as best we can tell this is Steve Ballmer's firing notice–he's run the company into the ground, most of the groups do not make money, and he has no vision–antics are not a substitute for vision.  Below is one vision for the future of Microsoft, highly unlikely to ever be realized.

Click on Image to Enlarge