Worth a Look: Movie, “Lifting the Veil” (on the two-party system scam & banking scam)
Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Policy, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Videos/Movies/Documentaries, Worth A LookWorth a Look: AVAAZ Movement 13 Million and Growing
Worth A Look
Dear Amazing Avaazers,
It feels like everything is happening exponentially.
In the last 30 days, our community has grown by 2.5 million people. We were already the largest political web movement ever, and yet we're growing faster than anyone has seen before! We're taking more actions, winning more victories, donating more and generating thousands more media hits in one month than we used to in a year. It's thrilling, even a little scary, especially when we see that the pace is still accelerating…
Just to give a snapshot of the last few weeks —
- 5 million of us stood up to the ACTA and SOPA internet censorship bills, helping to put SOPA on ice, and putting ACTA under threat, with the President of the European Parliament and Germany, Poland and many other countries reconsidering their positions.
- we smuggled $1.8 million worth of medical supplies into Syria when no one else could, and raised $1.5 million more in donations, while our citizen journalists provided much of the world media's information and images.
- we generated thousands of news articles on 20 different campaigns.
- our sex trafficking hotline generated information that will result in a major set of arrests this week (can't say which country yet).
- we raised over 4 million dollars/euros/yen online to supercharge our work, and are growing our staff team like mad to keep up with the need.
- we ran over 40 campaigns, took over 10 million actions and told 25 million friends about campaigns we care about, on everything from deforestation in Brazil to the Murdoch scandal in the UK — and made a serious impact on many of these.
If all that wasn't enough, we're about to launch a couple of big projects (stay tuned) that will take our community to a whole NEW level!
It's a thrilling privilege to serve this amazing community, and while the challenges we face are growing, the surge of spirited people rising to meet these challenges is growing even faster and stronger. We've come together and built something special, and it's taking off. Let's shoot for the stars.
With hope and excitement,
Ricken, Stephanie, Wen, Emma, Wissam, Veronique, Heather and the entire Avaaz team
PS – here's some recent features on our community in the Economist, Times and Guardian. And here's a radio piece by NPR on our work in Syria, and an LA Times article on our Internet freedom campaign.
Worth a Look: Open Government Partnership
Advanced Cyber/IO, Worth A Look
The Open Government Partnership is a global effort to make governments better. We all want more transparent, effective and accountable governments — with institutions that empower citizens and are responsive to their aspirations. But this work is never easy.
It takes political leadership. It takes technical knowledge. It takes sustained effort and investment. It takes collaboration between governments and civil society.
The Open Government Partnership is a new multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. In the spirit of multi-stakeholder collaboration, OGP is overseen by a steering committee of governments and civil society organizations.
Tip of the Hat to Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet (2012)
Worth a Look: Liars and Outliers – Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive (Bruce Schneier)
5 Star, Information Society, Worth A Look
How does society function when you can't trust everyone?
When we think about trust, we naturally think about personal relationships or bank vaults. That's too narrow. Trust is much broader, and much more important. Nothing in society works without trust. It's the foundation of communities, commerce, democracy—everything.
In this insightful and entertaining book, Schneier weaves together ideas from across the social and biological sciences to explain how society induces trust. He shows how trust works and fails in social settings, communities, organizations, countries, and the world.
In today's hyper-connected society, understanding the mechanisms of trust is as important as understanding electricity was a century ago. Issues of trust and security are critical to solving problems as diverse as corporate responsibility, global warming, and our moribund political system. After reading Liars and Outliers, you'll think about social problems, large and small, differently.
AUTHOR BIO
BRUCE SCHNEIER is an internationally renowned security technologist who studies the human side of security. He is the author of eleven books; and hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, and is regularly quoted in the press. His blog and monthly newsletter at www.schneier.com reach over devoted 250,000 devoted readers world-wide.
“The closest thing the security industry has to a rock star.”
—The Register
Phi Beta Iota: Brother Schneier is not normally associated with coercion as a solution, and he is plain wrong to advance this thesis in the book. Transparency, and an educated public that embraces the truth for the right reasons, is how you achieve scalable trust.
See Also:
John Robb: Four Sources of Trust, Crypto Not Scaling….
Robert Garigue at Phi Beta Iota
Robert David Steele, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust (Evolver Editions, 5 June 2012)
Worth a Look: Good to Be King – On the USA Constitution
6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Democracy, Worth A Look
This book provides readers with the fundamentals of the Constitution by analyzing the legitimate basis for government, and the circumstances that lead to its ratification. Mr. Badnarik starts with fundamentals, identifying the difference between rights and privileges. He discusses the critical- and needed- distinction between republican and democratic systems of government, arguing that freedom can survive in America only if we return to our republican roots. He also illustrates the forgotten tenets of federalism and states' rights, arguing that federal usurpation of state power has accelerated the loss of our freedoms. The author then provides a detailed explication of the true meaning of major constitutional provisions and amendments.He does an excellent job of demystifying our founding document, demonstrating that ordinary Americans can and should understand the Constitution and how it applies to their lives.
Michael was born in Hammond, Indiana, and attended Indiana University in Bloomington. A computer programmer and technical trainer who lives in Austin, Texas, Michael was nominated in May, 2004 as the Libertarian Party's Presidential Candidate for the November national election.
Phi Beta Iota: Out of print at this time, used copies are available at outrageous prices. We are working on getting the author connected to CreateSpace for producing the book on demand at a reasonable right.
Worth a Look: David Winberger on Too Big to Know and Howard Rheingold on Net Smart
Advanced Cyber/IO, Worth A Look
David Weinberger
Released 3 January 2012
Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus
“Too Big To Know is Weinberger's brilliant synthesis of myriad little debates—information overload, echo chambers, the wisdom of crowds—into a single vision of life and work in an era of networked knowledge.”
His earlier books include The Cluetrain Manifesto, Everything Loose Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, and Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.
NET SMART: How to Thrive Online
Howard Rheingold
Available for Pre-Order Release Date 16 March 2012
Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or “crap detection”), and network smarts. He explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; he examines how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; and he teaches us a lesson on networks and network building.
Worth a Look: Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think
Worth A Look
RELEASE DATE 21 Feburary 2012
Providing abundance is humanity’s grandest challenge—this is a book about how we rise to meet it. We will soon be able to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp. This bold, contrarian view, backed up by exhaustive research, introduces our near-term future, where exponentially growing technologies and three other powerful forces are conspiring to better the lives of billions. An antidote to pessimism by tech entrepreneur turned philanthropist, Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler.Since the dawn of humanity, a privileged few have lived in stark contrast to the hardscrabble majority. Conventional wisdom says this gap cannot be closed. But it is closing—fast. The authors document how four forces—exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the Technophilanthropist, and the Rising Billion—are conspiring to solve our biggest problems. Abundance establishes hard targets for change and lays out a strategic roadmap for governments, industry and entrepreneurs, giving us plenty of reason for optimism.
Examining human need by category—water, food, energy, healthcare, education, freedom—Diamandis and Kotler introduce dozens of innovators making great strides in each area: Larry Page, Steven Hawking, Dean Kamen, Daniel Kahneman, Elon Musk, Bill Joy, Stewart Brand, Jeff Skoll, Ray Kurzweil, Ratan Tata, Craig Venter, among many, many others.
Phi Beta Iota: This may be a much superior book to the first one, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. It certainly merits direct consideration. However, we view with great skepticism all of the hype from personalities who know little about the nuances of whole systems. For this book to be named one of the twelve best in 2012, before the first month of that year is over, suggests a general lack of integrity surrounding the book and its marketing. We will evaluate it directly when it becomes available.
