The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
C-SPAN has made available it's one hour recording of Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson, speaking to the National Press Club audience on 19 August 2011. We found the candidate and his views to be extraordinary.
Highly recommended.
Phi Beta Iota: The idea of an open hardware and open software handset phone will not die. When combined with OpenBTS and open mesh networks, this makes the Autonomous Internet and the resurrection of the five billion poor an immediate possibility.
GTA04 – the next generation Openmoko
This is the official home page of the GTA04 project. Its goal is to provice a high quality OMAP3 based motherboard for the Openmoko GTA01 and GTA02 systems. This includes providing a working bootloader and kernel/drivers. A preconfigured Debian image with LXDE is maintained as the basis for developing better GUIs and distributions.
See Also:
2012 Manifesto for Truth: Expanding the Open Source Revolution (Evolver Editions, July 2012)
Item 1 is an insightful essay by Patrick Seale outlining the common characteristics of the political instabilities and revolutionary pressures now sweeping Europe and the Middle East. Although Seale uses the term Global Intifada to describe these instabilities, the term Intifada evolved out of the Palestinian struggle against occupation. He suggests the instabilities may be following a more general dynamic. The common causal factors he describes in the second paragraph also bring to mind a very loose comparison of the unrest unleashed in 2011 to the explosion of revolutions in 1848 across Europe. That many of Seale's common factors also exist in varying degrees in the United States makes one wonder why the politics of rage in the US remain confined to the right side of political spectrum. Item 2, “The World Consequences of US Decline,” is an equally insightful essay by Immanuel Wallerstein that suggests obliquely that this may be a temporary condition.
Chuck Spinney
Nice, France
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Dysfunctional West Sharply Unstable”
Why are we surprised that governments and organizations are lining up to control ideas and the way they spread?
When power resided in property, governments and corporations became focused on the ownership, regulation and control of property.
When power shifted to machines and interstate commerce, no surprise, the attention shifted as well.
Now, we see that the predictions have come true, and it's ideas and connections and permission and data that truly matter.
So gifted inventors shift gears and become patent trolls, suing instead of merely creating. So government agencies rush to turn off cell phone towers. So corporations work to extend and reinvent the very notion of copyright protection.
Here's what we ought to demand:
Continue reading “Seth Godin: When Ideas Become Powerful, the Dark Side”
Status check on Brazil's specialized police units trying to supplant illicit drug governance in the favelas. Per an upcoming law, these units will be in place for 25 years. “Many communities previously relied on the drug gangs for services from water to wireless internet, and critics have pointed out that the state has been slow to replace them.”
Phi Beta Iota: The program has been successful in applying ruthless pervasive special violence to displace the drug gangs and insert permanent police presence. The program has FAILED in two respects: it has not been accompanied by the rapid provision of normal services from water to wireless; and it has not provided for the education of the people, something that requires call centers and free cell access to the Internet (they don't have the time to sit in a classroom for N years).
In their own words:
“People in the favela don't believe in themselves. What is really needed in the long term is more education.”
The memorandum “Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001” has been circulating for years on the Internet, studiously ignored by most. It was previously posted as a journal item on this website. Since then, the public has learned a great deal more about both gold and greed, and the memorandum is once again circulating.
This is by no means the complete story, and there are some leaps of imagination and speculation that must be deeply investigated or discounted. Central to appreciating the magnitude of the government cover-up is the FACT that MONTHS before 9/11 Dick Cheney set in motion the national counter-terrorism exercise that gave him complete control on “the day” of 9/11.
What is clear is that there is a great deal more investigation to be done, and that a truth and reconciliation commission should be created in time to put Dick Cheney and the others on the stand before they either die a natural death or are assassinated by foreign governments righteously angry over what has been done to them by American children playing with fire.
Here are a few extracts that today have a greater likelihood of being appreciated for their substance.
Reality Sandwich
EXTRACT:
Yes, we are watching something melt down. But I'd argue the thing that's dying is not business itself, but a financial parasite — a speculative marketplace that no longer funds business but instead seeks to extract value from healthy commerce. More a funds vampire than an infuser of needed capital, the investment industry has been exposed as a drag on business. The future of commerce looks bright to me because it may be unencumbered by the weight of this non-productive capital.
. . . . . . .
Once we accept the fact that the money and banks we have grown accustomed to using are not the only ways to generate capital, we liberate ourselves and our businesses from a finance industry that has enjoyed a monopoly over our commerce for much too long. They have not only abused our trust through corrupt self-dealing, but abused their privilege through systemic usury. Businesses are only obligated to support their employees, owners, and customers — not an entire finance industry.
