The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
97% Owned – Monetary Reform documentary – Directors Cut
97% owned present serious research and verifiable evidence on our economic and financial system. This is the first documentary to tackle this issue from a UK-perspective and explains the inner workings of Central Banks and the Money creation process.
YouTube (2:10:23) 97% Owned – Monetary Reform documentary – Directors Cut
Peer-to-peer production and the coming of the commons | Red Pepper
Michel Bauwens examines how collaborative, commons-based production is emerging to challenge capitalism. Below, Hilary Wainwright responds
Capitalism in its present form is facing limits, especially resource limits, and in spite of the rapid growth of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) economies, is undergoing a process of decomposition. The question is whether the new proto-mode can generate the institutional capacity and the alliances able to break the political power of the old order.
Amplify Brooklyn: Designing A Sustainable Economy At The Community Level
EXTRACT:
This fall, graduate students in the Transdisciplinary Design MFA program at Parsons, in New York City, worked with Penin and her co-director, Eduardo Staszowski, to create Amplify, an exhibit currently on display at Brooklyn’s Arts at Renaissance, which demonstrates existing and potential design solutions to local issues related to everyday experience. The project’s aim was to re-think service design in terms of sustainability. Duane Bray, Sarah Soffer and Tom Eich from the design firm Ideo facilitated the Amplify workshop.
Jacques Ellul, technology doomsdayer before his time
“People see him as just a bringer of bad news, but the two most important things in his writing aren’t taken into account. One is the comprehensiveness of his explanation of the technological phenomenon. The second is his powerful moral concern. Those two aspects of Ellul’s thought are not as influential as I’d like them to be.”
“Technology becomes our fate only when we treat it as sacred,” says Darrell J. Fasching, a professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of South Florida. “And we tend to do that a lot.”
Via Manuel Pinto, Artur Alves
EXTRACT:
His central argument is that we’re mistaken in thinking of technology as simply a bunch of different machines. In truth, Ellul contended, technology should be seen as a unified entity, an overwhelming force that has already escaped our control. That force is turning the world around us into something cold and mechanical, and—whether we realize it or not—transforming human beings along with it.
Phi Beta Iota: All of these authors overlook the role of corruption — the lack of integrity and intelligence among decision-makers allocating financial resources. The fact is that technology is like complex financial instruments: a means of defrauding various parties for the benefit of the few. This is one reason why Open Source Everything must apply to all technologies as well as all financial dealings.
See Also:
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (Vintage, 1967)
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (Vintage, 1973)
Jacques Ellus, The Subversion of Christianity (Eerdmans, 1986)
Jacques Ellul, Reprint: Money and Power (Wipf & Stock, 2009)
Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred (Peter Smith, 1999)
Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale (New Catalyst, 2007)
John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (Vintage, 1993)
Robert Steele, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust (North Atlantic Books, Evolver Editions, 2012)
Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (Anchor, 1996)
Very interesting….from the summary statement:
Our point is that social networks are today’s version of AOL and CompuServe, not the Web and SMTP email—a service model that’s in conflict with the open, standards-based Internet. Furthermore,even though they’ve evolved to support mobile devices, today’s social services were designed for the era of PC-based Web browsers, not handheld smartphone apps.
If you’re thinking, “There must be a better way,” you’re right. In this report we’ll examine some groundbreaking research aimed at bringing openness to social networking on mobile devices.
Phi Beta Iota: Google, Facebook, and Twitter are all “dead men walking.” They have failed to make the leap to the mix of open source everything and creating intelligence (decision-support) with integrity, settling instead for information overload with no integrity.
PDF: Musubi Brings Openness to Mobile Social Networking
See Also:
Phi Beta Iota: Until governments commit to true-cost economics (and of course to telling the truth and being fully transparent) they will not achieve full legitmacy and efficacy in serving the public interest. The work of one man, Winslow Wheeler, should shame all governments by example, but especially the US Government, where no fraud, waste, or abuse is neglected as long as Members of Congress get their 5% kick-back.
How the F-35 Nearly Doubled In Price (And Why You Didn’t Know)
On June 14 — Flag Day, of all days — the Government Accountability Office released a new oversight report on the F-35: Joint Strike Fighter: DOD Actions Needed to Further Enhance Restructuring and Address Affordability Risks. As usual, it contained some important information on growing costs and other problems. Also as usual, the press covered the new report, albeit a bit sparsely.
Fresh bad news on the F-35 has apparently become so routine that the fundamental problems in the program are plowed right over. One gets the impression, especially from GAO’s own title to its report, that we should expect the bad news, make some minor adjustments, and then move on. But a deeper dive into the report offers more profound, and disturbing, bottom line.
The Collapsing US Economy and the end of the world
In a recent column, “Can The World Survive Washington’s Hubris,” I promised to examine whether the US economy will collapse before Washington in its pursuit of world hegemony brings us into military confrontation with Russia and China. This is likely to be an ongoing subject on this site, so this column will not be the final word.
