Occupy Wall Street. Remember them? Well, in that well worn cliched phrase: They haven’t gone away you know!
One of the more successful actions of the Belfast group was occupying the old Belfast stock exchange on Royal Avenue, thereby flagging up latent resources.
OWS is going to start buying distressed debt (medical bills, student loans, etc.) in order to forgive it. As a test run, we spent $500, which bought $14,000 of distressed debt. We then ERASED THAT DEBT. (If you’re a debt broker, once you own someone’s debt you can do whatever you want with it — traditionally, you hound debtors to their grave trying to collect. We’re playing a different game. A MORE AWESOME GAME.)
Marcus Aurelius: Interesting for two reasons. First, the rejection of the traditional color for the GOP, semantically shifting “red” to the Democracts. Second, and more important, what this map does not depict is all of the Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law, Reform, and Socialist as well as Independent voters, and the huge number of voters that did not vote. As Tom Atlee has noted, dichotomies are inherently fraudulent and misrepresentative.
Obama and Independents: The Micro, the Macro and the Forest
by Jacqueline Salit
The Obama campaign team did everything right. That's the consensus among journalists, consultants, and the political class. I've watched some of them literally swoon over maps of the 50 states showing how the President's campaign surgically identified pockets of “blue voters”, marooned in “red territory” and drew them to the polls in sufficient numbers to carry a battleground state.
An impressive operation, surely, even if it reminds me–in a spooky way–of the satellite imaging that helps our military track terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Amazing technology and our obsession with data, fused with the time-tested political machinery of the political parties, has produced a slice-and-dice culture of campaigning where the “micro” rules and where the geeks are inheriting the earth. Or, at least they're helping the parties maintain control of it.
I am an Obama supporter–one of the independents who voted for him both times. (Our numbers dropped from about 20 million in 2008 to about 16 million in 2012.) I'm very glad he won re-election for many, many reasons. And the methodology of the “micro” surely enabled Obama's political victory. But I worry that the reductionism of micro-targeting–such as making sure that the 200 voting-age Latinos who moved to Broward County in Florida got the right mailer-obscures the political meaning of the macro. In the old days, we used to call this not being able to see the forest for the trees.
In this election, one forest that was missed was the 40 percent of Americans who disalign from the Democrats and Republicans and call themselves independents. Independent voters were an indispensable part of the Obama coalition in 2008. He carried 52 percent of independents nationwide–an 8-point margin over Republican John McCain. That post-partisan coalition provided both the numbers and the heart of the 2008 campaign.
Denver — Clay Shirky is one of the country’s most prominent Internet thinkers—“a spiritual guide to the wired set,” as The Chronicle Review put it in a 2010 profile of him. In his latest book, Cognitive Surplus,the New York University professor argues that a flowering of creative production will arise as the Internet turns people “from consumers to collaborators.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Shirky took that message to a group of higher-education-technology leaders who have been buffeted by a rapidly evolving ed-tech landscape. Mr. Shirky, in a keynote speech kicking off this year’s Educause conference, explored how technology was changing everything, from research to publishing to studying. (The talk starts about 20 minutes into this link.)
Robert David STEELE Vivas Click on Image for Personal Web Page
TIME has provided an utterly spectacular story on how the Obama team melded big data. As I finished the article, I could not help but wonder how much more useful the secret intelligence world would be, to so many more people, if it could do this for the rest of the world — with the $75 billion a year it spends — what the Obama team was able to do for a fraction of that price in the USA alone — as Stephen Cambone called for in 2000, neighborhood and household level granularity. This is what I told NSA in Las Vegas in 2002; this is what I put into a US Army monograph and a book in 2002. An Open Source Agency (OSA) as recommended by the 9/11 Commission, but under diplomatic or commercial auspices, remains the needed foundation for making intelligence (decision-support) not just relevant, but compellingly necessary to policy, acquisition, and operations.
In passing, this story helps us understand that Karl Rove did not do so badly — handicapped as he was by a party bent on self-destruction (or they would have nominated Ron Paul and an Independent or Libertarian Vice President) — the “nine ways” with “twelve amigos” came vastly closer than anyone had a right to expect.
In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.
So as they did with all the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for re-election, Obama’s top campaign aides decided to put this insight to use. They sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars produced by the Clooney contest. “We were blessed with an overflowing menu of options, but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker,” explains a senior campaign adviser. And so the next Dinner with Barack contest was born: a chance to eat at Parker’s West Village brownstone.
Sandy knocked out power for 8.5 million people, mostly in New York and New Jersey. Wow. What's worse?
A week later, nearly a million people were still without power.
Now, a Nor'easter — a freezing cold version of a tropical storm that plagues New England during the Winter — just dropped nearly a record amount of snow on these same people.
NOTE: Again. Any time you hear “record-breaking” in relation to Finance and Weather, it usually isn't good news. When you hear it all the time, like we have recently, it's usually a sign that something is very wrong.
That's scary.
Of course, it doesn't have to be this difficult. A home and community that is resilient can bounce back from a regional disaster like this in seconds, if not hours. For example, my home and the homes of other people reading this letter right now didn't suffer an outage when the power went down. We produced our own power. Enough for us to serve as islands of resilience for our neighbors that didn't have this capability. To help them stay warm, recharge cell phones, take a hot shower, etc….
