The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Google Head of Open Source Opens Up
Google and open source have worked together since the search engine’s inception and it has contributed to its success. Tech Radar hosts an interview with Google’s head of open source Chris DiBona about how Google uses open source, how it has shaped the company, and how Google has changed the face of open source: “How Open Source Changed Google-And How Google Changed Open Source.”
Power is energy that gets things done — or has obvious potential to do so.
Our most common conceptions of power — especially social power — involve our ability to cause things to happen that we want to have happen.
While this is definitely a major facet of power, a holistic, co-intelligence perspective suggests that there's more to power than that.
What does power look like when we are working not just for what we want but for what others want as well — or when we join the power of the whole to satisfy the needs and aspirations of the whole?
Worse than NSA, plus Hazardous to Health & Home (Causes House Fires)
This is one of the 2-3 most important and perhaps alarming articles (and well documented) I've referred to on this site in the last twelve months. An absolute must-read for anyone living in the US and all other western countries and owns a house or lives in a dwelling with smart meters. The dangers this technology poses to freedom and health cannot be overstated.
Excerpts:
Reuters. Bossnapping returns to France. The target? A couple of unlucky Goodyear executives. What's bossnapping? Here's the entry for it in Wikipedia
Bossnapping: a form of lock-in where employees detain management in the workplace, often in protest against lay-offs and redundancies, and has especially been carried out in France. The term gained wide usage in the media following a series of bossnapping incidents in the spring of 2009 in France where workers used the tactic in the context of widespread labor unrest resulting from the late 2000 recession.
Where did the tactic originate? Of course, kidnapping senior people in the opponents orginization has been around as long as warfare itself, however. The popularization of using it to manipulate global media networks in a way that coerces a public company to change its behavior is new.
That method was perfected in the conflict sandbox of the Iraqi war back in 2004.
In 2004, Iraqi guerrillas began to target the employees of the business ventures that the US military outsourced operations to. It was very effective (it drove up the costs and radically reduced the scope/span/rate of reconstruction). The implication (as I wrote at the time) was that in order to this type of corporate disruption would eventually be used against executives as close to the boardroom as possible. That occurred and it was proven successful in later years.
We'll see much more of this as the old economy begins to depopulate the protected bureaucracies where so many still work…
PS: France is early on this because they haven't prosecuted anyone for the 2009 incidents and those events yielded positive outcomes for the union. I suspect the US would treat it as terrorism and shoot everyone involved.
It is an article of faith by the Theocratic Right that poor people generally abuse social programs. They are drug abusers, who just want to lay around and who squander the government's largesse on booze, and $600 purses. The fascinating thing is that every time they get a chance to prove this the opposite is proved. The urine test that showed significantly lower drug usage — 2.6% — than the national average 4.7%.! Oops. Now a particularly grotesque version by the tea bagger governor, Maine's Paul LePage who in trying to prove welfare fraud is rampant has produced a study showing it is a tenth of one percent. The truth is, as study after study and nation after nation show a decent safety net is an essential component of a healthy democracy.
Governor’s Attempt To Find Massive Welfare Fraud Turns Up Next To Nothing
BRYCE COVERT – Think Progress
Beneath the political polemics a tectonic movement in the electorate is occurring, as this survey shows. Moderate Republicans are abandoning the party and calling themselves Independents. The Theocratic Right is capturing the Republican Party. Click through to see the very helpful charts.
Record-High 42% of Americans Identify as Independents
JEFFREY M. JONES – The Gallup Organization
This story is absolutely appalling. It is bad on so many levels. Many of these arrests are for marijuana possession. There is an arrest for this every 48 seconds in America, grossly disproportionately Black young men. One of the consequences of ending Marijuana Prohibition is that this will end. It will be bitterly opposed, however. Private prisons corporations, prison guard associations and unions, court systems whose budget is tied to criminal trials, prison clothing providers, small towns near prisons where the prison is the big employer, and anybody else who lives on the incarceration and warehousing of human beings en mass will resist the end of racist prohibition.
Study: Nearly 50 Percent Of Black Men Report Being Arrested By Age 23
ZOE SCHLANGER – Talking Points Memo
It is amazing to me that everyone did not see this banking issue coming. It was perfectly obvious. Banks are not going to deal with Marijuana dispensaries until it is Federally legal, or they are required to do so. The issue should have been anticipated and dealt with. Hopefully Washington State will see this, and make adjustments.
‘Absurd on Every Single Level”: How the Feds May be Crippling the Legal Pot Industry
DAVID DAYEN – Salon
An increasing number of people are worried about the way in which our data is being mined by governments and corporations. One of these people is Evgeny Morozov. In an article that appeared in the MIT Technology Review back in October 2013, he argued that this trend poses a serious threat to democracy, one that should be resisted through political activism and “sabotage”. As it happens, I have written about similar threats to democracy myself in the past, so I was interested to see how Morozov defended his view.
Continue reading “John Danaher: Rule by Algorithm? Big Data and the Threat of Algocracy”
Today's fixation in Washington is former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' so called new revelation, breathlessly reported by the Washington Post (Robert Woodward), the New York Times (Thom Shanker) and others, that Barak Obama was not fully committed to George Bush's (and Robert Gates') war in Afghanistan, especially the troop surge there which Obama allowed himself to be maneuvered into by the Pentagon's generals (and Robert Gates). We are then blown away-well, not entirely–by the other dramatic news from Gates that Hilary Clinton said politics influenced her own position during her 2007-8 presidential campaign on the other troop surge-the one in Iraq. Quite a stunner, eh?
Without giving this fluff any further attention, it's time to consider something a little more important and a little less comforting to those seeking to distract us from the effects of their handiwork.
Consider the question of life and death. Specifically, almost a half a million deaths, mostly of civilians. That is the tally in Iraq directly attributable to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq: “461,000, just under half a million people,” a recent study says. It came out in October 2013. (I had cast it into my to-read pile; I finally got to it; I urge you to read it-more promptly than I did.)
