CounterPunch, Weekend Edition February 15-17, 2013
The tactics employed against Christopher Dorner by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department are attracting an awkward amount of interest since an audiotape surfaced with law enforcement officials referring to a munition as a “burner”.
As in (all quotes from the Feb. 15, 2013 LA Times report titled “As Dorner fired, tactics got tougher”):
“We’re going to go forward with the plan, with the burner,” the unidentified officer said, according to a recording of police radio transmissions reviewed by The Times.
“Seven burners deployed,” another officer responded several seconds later, according to the transmission which has circulated widely among law enforcement officials. “And we have a fire.”
. . . . . . . .
The thought processes of the San Bernadino County Sheriff’s Department—which had lost one of their own to Dorner—are probably reflected in an alleged transcription from the radio chatter that the LA Times demurely declined to reproduce, but was reported by the no-holds barred NY Post:
“Burn this motherf–ker!” one officer shouted …Amid sounds of gunfire, voices can be heard shouting, “Burn it down!” and “Shoot the gas!”
Douglas Rushkoff has been an authority on the intersection of technology and culture since before the word “google” was anything more than baby talk. He predicted the coming centrality of the Internet (CYBERIA, 1992 – a book initially canceled by a publisher who feared the net would be over by the time it came out); he coined the terms “viral media” (MEDIA VIRUS, 1994) and “social currency” (Upside Magazine, 1996); he forecasted the collapse of the dotcom bubble (SXSW, 1997) and the most recent recession in a 2004 column that later became his book, LIFE INC; he even inspired today’s code literacy movement (PROGRAM OR BE PROGRAMMED, 2010). He is the author of a total of twelve bestsellers (translated to over thirty languages), the host of three award-winning documentaries, an award-winning educator and frequent media commentator.
Robert Steele Comment and Present Shock Book Information Below the Line
Here's some idle thinking for a sunny afternoon at the end of winter.
To access it, let's make a simple assumption that economics, politics, and warfare are all a function of the dominant technological substrate.
A technological substrate is the family of related technologies that we rely upon. In the 20th Century, we were clearly reliant on an industrial substrate.
The challenges posed by industrial age technologies dictated the development of two management forms: bureaucracy and markets. Bureaucracies and markets are both decision making systems. These management forms dominated economics, politics, and warfare for centuries.
Neither system of management is sufficient as a solution for industrial economics, politics, or warfare.
Democracies use market decision making to determine leadership over a nation-state bureaucracy. Capitalism uses markets to determine leadership/control over corporate bureaucries. Education uses bureaucracy to manage its institutions and a combination of markets and bureaucracy to allocate students. The modern age was dominated by market based warfare (think: Wallenstein) but it is now firmly bureaucratic.
Although ideologies have been built and wars have been fought over the mix of bureaucracy and markets, neither system has proven dominant. .
This simplification is useful when we shift the technological substrate.
In the last thirty years, we've seen a shift in the technological substrate. This new susbstrate is increasingly a family of technologies related to information networks.
As this new substrate begins to take control, we're going to need new management forms. Both bureaucratic and market systems are proving insuffient solutions to the challenges of a networked age.
We are long past due cutting the chains of predatory proprietary expensive, non-scalable, non-interopperable software. Open Source Everything (OSE) is a very ugly baby, but it is the only baby that has a chance of affordable scaling to meet the needs of all humanity.
Michel Bauwens
Indifference of market leaders kills their own markets
The biggest disruption that the Internet may deliver to our world is just beginning: the upending of higher education.
. . . . . . . .
I've spent the past two years chronicling the emerging education technology industry at EdSurge, my startup devoted to helping educators and entrepreneurs find and use the best tools available to support learning. I had spent the previous 25 years in the national media.
Although the news media chronicled the rise of the Internet, we didn't appreciate how it gave voice to disgruntled customers – namely, our readers. Readers wanted to voice their thoughts in more than a wispy sentence or two in letters to the editor. They wanted more diversity in the news that got reported than teams of anonymous editors were serving up. The list goes on.
The parallels with universities are striking.
DefDog
Another reason to move to Open Source software..….
‘If your computer dies, so does your Office license,' says licensing guru; move seen as prod to adopt subscription-based Office 365
Microsoft yesterday confirmed that a retail copy of Office 2013 is permanently tied to the first PC on which it's installed, preventing customers from deleting the suite from one machine they own and installing it on another.
The move is a change from past Office end-user licensing agreements (EULAs), experts said, and is another way Microsoft is pushing customers, especially consumers, to opt for new “rent-not-own” subscription plans.
“That's a substantial shift in Microsoft licensing,” said Daryl Ullman, co-founder and managing director of the Emerset Consulting Group, which specializes in helping companies negotiate software licensing deals. “Let's be frank. This is not in the consumer's best interest. They're paying more than before, because they're not getting the same benefits as before.”
Offbeat: Installing standard binary drivers in Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit was easily the worst experience I’ve had with installing standard drivers in 20 years, due to three (3) interacting bugs that each should never have made it past release. Here’s a writeup for anybody else to avoid that experience that sucked a day out of my life.
Deploying cyber weapons to damage Industrial Control Systems (ICS) is relatively easy because such systems are insecure by design. Maintaining communication with an activated cyber weapon, and ensuring its persistence, is harder but feasible.
Like the horsemeat scandal in Europe this report on fake pharmaceuticals shows what happens when appropriate regulation is not maintained, because industries capture the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us, and the Congress is in the pocket of those industries as well. Once again we face the bitter fruit produced by anti-regulations forces. The t! ruth is we have become a thoroughly corrupted nation and, until we find the strength to speak truth to power it will only continue.
The risks of fake and flawed medicines have leapt from developing nations to Western supply chains, thanks to gaps in oversight of drug wholesalers, lax law enforcement, and ineffective tactics for tracking drugs as they change hands, according to a report released Wednesday by the Institute of Medicine.
‘It’s distressing to see vividly just how huge a problem it is in the United States,” said Larry Gostin, a Georgetown University law professor and World Health Organization adviser who led the study. ‘It’s more lucrative to traffic in illegitimate drugs than cocaine or heroin,” he said.
Dysfunctionalism is both a personality disorder and an institutional disorder. Public administration can refer to the pseudi-discipline of public administation, and to the functions of governance for which the discipline serves as a clerk, offering no normative or pro-functionality frame of reference.
The general definition of dysfunctional is (1) failing to perform the function that is normally expected, (2) unable to function emotionally as a social unit, (3) not functioning normally.
There are three general types of dysfunction in public administration:
01 During the wrong thing wrong.
02 Doing the wrong thing right.
03 Doing the right thing wrong.
The 21st Century Intelligence link is persistent within the What Price Integrity Box under Robert Steele's Head Shot. Public Intelligence 3.1
At the very highest level, public administration deals, in theory, with optimizing ends (what do we all want and need) with ways (how can we best achieve our ends) and means (how do we pay for the capabilities and behaviors that lead the the achievement of our ends).
At 12 Noon on Sunday, February 17, thousands of Americans will head to Washington, D.C. to make Forward on Climate the largest climate rally in history. Join this historic event to make your voice heard and help the president start his second term with strong climate action.
Crippling drought. Devastating wildfires. Superstorm Sandy. Climate has come home – and the American people get it.
The first step to putting our country on the path to addressing the climate crisis is for President Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. His legacy as president will rest squarely on his response, resolve, and leadership in solving the climate crisis.
