Infopolicy: The habit for companies to write terms of service to a length and complexity nobody can understand, coupled with the subsequent habit of everybody of agreeing to them without reading them, has become a real problem. It undermines the concept of contracts as such, and it enables corporations to undermine citizens’ rights without democratic oversight. Maybe regulation is needed.
People are agreeing to anything with a “yeah, whatever” shrug today. A particular website’s terms of service may well include signing away their entire inheritance and house, and it’s likely nobody would notice. This is a real problem, as our ancestors fought hard to give us the rights we have today – rights that are routinely signed away just to play the latest game.
Phi Beta Iota: The law is no longer the law. At the top, governments legalize crime and government agencies become partners in crime with cartels and other forms of organized predation. At the bottom, “terms of service” are so contrived as to waive all existing rights, e.g. to a jury trial, in favor of arbitration or worse, no standing at all. The law has become stupid and irresponsible. Under such circumstances, the law lacks legitimacy. This is a much bigger problem.
As the father of two Waldorf educated daughters, and the husband of a career Waldorf teacher, I have observed the truth of this report.
Ronlyn kept baskets of bits and pieces in baskets in her classroom, and not a single formal toy. It was fascinating to watch the inventiveness of her 5 year olds, and the many uses to which a corn cob, some pieces of 2×4 lumber, and colored scarves could be turned as her students created imaginary worlds. Their play required imagination in a way no video game, or complete miniature recreation could possibly stimulate.
What surprised me was that Ronlyn often had to teach her children to play when the school year began. Initially they would just sit, waiting to be entertained by some electronic gadget, or to push buttons. Play is the business of childhood, because it stimulates the brains of children, and imagination is an essential part of the process. Modern toys which leave nothing to the imagination, and risk-free plastic playgrounds completely miss this point.
In 1888, the psychologist Stanley Hall published a story about a sand pile. A minor classic, it describes how a group of children created a world out of a single load of sand. These children were diligent, they were imaginative, they were remarkably adult.
More than a century later, at the architect David Rockwell’s Imagination Playground in lower Manhattan, small humans scurry back and forth all day long, carrying Rockwell’s oversized blue foam blocks from self-devised task to self-devised task. These children are intent, they are cooperative, they are resourceful. The scene resembles nothing so much as Stanley Hall’s sand pile-with each grain of sand much bigger and much bluer. (Except for the bits of actual sand, that is.)
More than any playground in recent memory, the Imagination Playground has inspired an outburst of excitement. It’s a hit with the hip parents who take their kids to Dan Zanes concerts, and is just as crowded as one. But it also represents something much more mundane: the triumph of loose parts. After a century of creating playgrounds for children, of drilling swing sets and plastic forts into the ground, we have come back to children creating their own playgrounds. Loose parts-sand, water, blocks-are having a moment.
The resurgence of loose parts is an attempt to put the play back in playgrounds. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of exuberant playground design, culminating in the great Richard Dattner adventure playgrounds in New York City. Then the grownups got skittish. Down came the merry-go-rounds and the jungle gyms, and in their place, a landscape of legally-insulated, brightly-colored, spongy-floored, hard-plastic structures took root. Today, walking onto a children’s playground is like exiting the interstate: Regardless of where you are, you see the exact same thing.
The below well referenced article was sent to me by JFK Assassination expert Robert Morrow. In the email to me, he endorses the analysis, “I think it is fine article.” I have no separate knowledge of the facts detailed in this article or if the facts could be interpreted differently. I provide this analysis simply as a starting point for those who may want to explore the topic in more depth. The USS Liberty, Israel & President Johnson’s Order to Destroy the USS Liberty
By Judy Morris
Economic Policy Journal, Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Lyndon Baines Johnson is a president who has escaped the scrutiny and judgment of history despite considerable documentation that should make him an outstanding candidate for historical review, critique and analysis. His primary biographer, Robert Caro, consistently gets rave book reviews from mainstream media for his disingenuous puff piece books on LBJ. It’s entirely possible that LBJ is the most evil or one of the most evil presidents in US history.
Some researchers believe that LBJ was the mastermind behind JFK’s assassination and researcher Phillip F. Nelson wrote a book documenting his investigation on this issue: LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination. However, one of greatest unknown chapters in LBJ’s presidency is that he personally gave the order to Israel to bomb and utterly destroy the USS Liberty and its entire crew of 294 Americans. Astoundingly, when the mission went awry and Sixth Fleet Commanders were ordering the rescue of the besieged and bloodied USS Liberty crew, LBJ ordered that rescue operations be called back, at least twice. Against all odds, the USS Liberty survived but after the attack, 34 Americans lay dead. Except for 4 worthless 50 caliber machine guns, the USS Liberty was unarmed and defenseless against the far superior firing power of the Israeli navel and air force armada that descended upon it with relentless and unspeakable terror.
Not a whole lot has been written about the USS Liberty and its just another critically important issue that has been buried in history but two extraordinary books document the truth. James M. Ennes Jr., a retired US Navel Officer and a survivor of the USS Liberty who wrote a book on the USS Liberty that documents his investigative disclosure of the truth, here.
Peter Hounam, an investigative journalist, wrote Operation Cyanide, Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III. Hounam’s extraordinary book, published in 2003, relies heavily on the work of Ennis and also documents numerous interviews that Hounam conducted with the USS Liberty survivors as well as other folks in the US, British and Israel governments.
Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is slated to testify before lawmakers on the Benghazi attacks, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters Tuesday.
4.0 out of 5 stars A Useful Contribution–See the Table of Contents, January 30, 2013
This review is from: Open Source Intelligence Techniques: Resources for Searching and Analyzing Online Information (Paperback)
I started the modern Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) movement in 1988, picking up where earlier pioneers such as Jan Herring, former NIO for S&T, left off. We are still fighting this battle. The CIA Open Source Center (OSC) is retarded — it does less than 10% of what could be done by a proper Open Source Agency (see tiny url forward slash OSA2011), and compounds their ignorance by classifying what they produce.
I *like* this book. If you have any doubts at all, use the superb Inside the Book feature that is one of Amazon's signal innovations. If you believe — as the OSC believes — that OSINT is all about online surfing in English, this is a great book. It is a good complement to Ran Hock's stuff, or Arno Reuser's stuff, and Ben Benavides stuff, and I certainly also recommend the Super-Searcher series and anything by Mary Ellen Bates.
Hagel's legislative record belies his potential role as bit player on the stage of the American empire, unlikely to wield the kind of influence suggested by the controversy over his nomination.
Ideological elements of both the Left and the Right have inflated the nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense to symbolize far more than he can possibly achieve in office, good or bad. The controversy over his nomination is based on a handful of his comments and valedictory Senate addresses. His actual legislative record is a lot thinner. From my time as a Senate staffer, I do not remember any significant legislation he was personally responsible for, nor did he involve himself to any great extent in floor debates on authorization or appropriation bills having to do with national security.
Let the banks go down says Olafur Grimsson at the World Economic Forum in Davos
[Editors Note: Virginia is retired from the Vanderbilt University Medical School and at Harvard's before that. She has been a long time American Heritage activist, and has spent many years fighting our corrupt illegal immigration system…Jim W. Dean]
Iceland is a small country, under 1 million citizens with a very homogeneous culture, so perhaps its lessons are not broadly applicable.
Nevertheless, I have been proud of the Icelanders since they let their banks take the consequences – bankruptcy – of their greedy bets on derivatives and other financial “products”.
Recalling the history of a few years ago, the Icelandic government initially said that the innocent Icelandic citizens would bear the burden of the banks’ irresponsible practices. But mass protests led to a rethink.
The Icelandic President called for a referendum on the general public assuming bank debts. The bankers lost.
Citizens voted to let the banks fail. Iceland went through a rough patch but, after four years, is prospering. At least one Icelandic banker has gone to jail.
This all makes one think that Americans should have started protesting when Alan Greenspan arranged for a bailout of Long Term Capital Management in 1999. Or maybe earlier, when Chrysler was bailed out in the 1980s, because nothing is sacred about car companies, either.
Bailing out businesses that make a mistake creates “moral hazard”. For the sake of super-profits, businesses [or households] are encouraged to take risks on the assumption that any losing bets will be covered by the all-suffering tax-payer.
