Yoda: Opus machine prints books in minutes

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Commerce, Methods & Process
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Opus machine prints books in minutes at Politics and Prose

The new Opus machine at Politics and Prose bookstore on Connecticut Avenue in Washington can print and bind a book that is indistinguishable from one of the professionally mass-printed books on the shelves at the same store. Public domain works, out-of-print novels, electronic books supplied via publishing houses and personal books can all be printed in minutes while customers wait.

VIDEO 2:30 Via Washington Post

Phi Beta Iota:  Price is always an issue.  HOWEVER, now that “true cost” economics is converging with Occupy and the 99%, we anticipate that publishers and Amazon are in for an eye-opener.  This will also empower authors who choose to by-pass the entire “system” and local book stores who can be liberated from inventory and publisher overhead.

David Swanson: Set Your Doomsday Clock to 11:51

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David Swanson

Set Your Doomsday Clock to 11:51

By David Swanson

The National Defense Authorization Act is not a leap from democracy to tyranny, but it is another major step on a steady and accelerating decade-long march toward a police state. The doomsday clock of our republic just got noticeably closer to midnight, and the fact that almost nobody knows it, simply moves that fatal minute-hand a bit further still.

I'm not referring to the “doomsday” predicted by Leon Panetta should military spending be scaled back to the obscenely inflated levels of 2007. I'm talking about the complete failure to keep the republic that Benjamin Franklin warned we might not. Practices that were avoided, outsourced, or kept secret when Bill Clinton was president were directly engaged in on such a scale under president George W. Bush that they became common knowledge. Under President Obama they are becoming formal law and acceptable policy.

Obama has claimed the power to imprison people without a trial since his earliest months in office. He spoke in front of the Constitution in the National Archives while gutting our founding document in 2009. So why not pick the 220th anniversary of the Bill of Rights to further codify its elimination? President Obama has claimed the power to torture “if needed,” issued an executive order claiming the power of imprisonment without trial, exercised that power on a massive scale at Bagram, and claimed and exercised the power to assassinate U.S. citizens. Obama routinely kills people with unmanned drones.

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Event: 23-25 Feb Austria Surfing Democracy

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surfing democracy

Dynamic Facilitation and Wisdom Council – Practitioners Network Conference

There have been many Dynamic Facilitation seminars and successful Wisdom Councils in different places around the world. A strong global network of DF’ers has yet to form. Therefore we plan to host an Open Space for those who have already taken Dynamic Facilitation trainings. At this gathering we will have an opportunity to network, learn, share stories, and to choice-create as we build a community of practice.

The process used in the conference will be a combination of Open Space and Dynamic Facilitation.  So the focus will be on your needs and interests. We welcome you to join us in Vorarlberg for a collective learning experience around the topic “to DF powerful change.”

Open Space, Feb 23rd to Feb 25th 2012 Batschuns/Austria

Two page program (PDF)

Jim Rough: Citizen Wisdom Councils Gaining Traction

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Jim Rough

It's been eight years since Society's Breakthrough was published. Many experiments have been done with the idea presented in this book … in cities, corporations, schools, coops, and conferences.

In the book it's called the “Citizens Amendment” but now it's called ” the Wise Democracy Amendment“.  It's one of five Wise Democracy innovations including choice-creating, Dynamic Facilitation, the Wisdom Council Process, and the Creative Insight Council.

The Center for Wise Democracy promotes experiments with these ideas by governments and citizen groups.

NEW VIDEO:

John Steiner: A Nation of Populists and Class Warriors

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John Steiner

A nation of populists and class warriors

Pew Research has just released the most detailed polling I’ve seen yet on Occupy Wall Street, economic fairness, rising inequality, and the lack of Wall Street accountability. If these numbers don’t put an end to the nonsense about how Dems risk alienating the “middle of the country” by embracing a populist “class warfare” message, nothing will:

Roughly three-quarters of the public (77%) say that they think there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations in the United States. In a 1941 Gallup poll, six-in-ten (60%) Americans expressed this view. About nine-in-ten (91%) Democrats and eight-in-ten (80%) of independents assert that power is too concentrated among the rich and large corporations, but this view is shared by a much narrower majority (53%) of Republicans.

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