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This week, the American Spring began. It was a celebration of what's best in America -- civic community and self-expression. But last night I also saw the worst of America.
Douglas Rushkoff: Media derides the Wall Street protest at its peril. The net-driven movement is a preview of a new sustainable disussion on disconnect in U.S.
Lobbyist who fought California's Prop. 19 cashes in helping cop shops milk the feds for drug-enforcement money.
Thomas Drake on life inside the National Security Agency and the price of truth telling the truth. Its even worse than under Cheney/Bush!
As promised in December, WikiLeaks has begun to release a stash of documents related to the modus operandi of the "private intelligence" sector, using Texas-based Stratfor as a case study. A CIA officer who "serves the world" from his platform is typically put on trial for being a mole. But in the world of private intelligence, national allegiance isn't as important as the almighty dollar. This means that if a report is commissioned by an American client, whether a company or state entity, the same report could also be peddled to a Russian oligarch or Chinese businessman to benefit either those governments or their state-owned companies.
They offer each house up to one gigabit per second in bandwidth, making this one of the fastest streets in America. For only $69.95/month (100MBps for $39.95, both include phone service. ... Wondering "why can't somebody else do this?" You're asking the right question. But you may not like the answer.
HOW DO WE CLEAN UP POLITICS?
1. Provide that public elections are publicly funded;
2. Limit, and make transparent, independent political expenditures, and;
3. Reaffirm that when the Declaration of Independence spoke of entities “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” it was speaking of natural persons only.
The battle for birth control revives a feminist movement that was dormant and defensive... Only claiming women’s right to a flourishing life and to any social technology, including, openly, abortions, which enables it, will stop the long downward spiral of the women’s movement. Are women ready? It’s been 40 years since the Hyde Amendment. Maybe American women have been sleepwalking in the wilderness long enough.
Frank VanderSloot, Romney finance co-chair, suppresses scrutiny by threatening reporters and bloggers... Time to start arresting these people who are abusing the Courts and the Legislature (thru their cronies). These are enemies of the People and Democracy. They are traitors that should be proscecuted to the point where they are in jail for the rest of their lives as a warning to others who would use their ill gotten gains to run roughshod over the Constitution and the People of the United States.
Star Wars meets the RIAA, the MPAA, Intellectual Ventures, and everyone else scheming to enthral the people with digital “rights” management and criminal prosecution of “file sharing.”
One jaw-dropping leak is that that the treaty contemplates requiring licenses for ephemeral copies made in a computer's buffer. That means that the buffers in your machine could need a separate, negotiated license for every playback of copyrighted works, and buffer designs that the entertainment industry doesn't like -- core technical architectures -- would become legally fraught because they'd require millions of license negotiations or they'd put users in danger of lawsuits.
It's simple: When workers gain some leverage, it gets a little harder to generate totally obscene profits...
I want the abortion rate to plummet, but abstinence-only sex ed and reversing Roe v. Wade Where is the lowest abortion rate? The Netherlands – where abortion (and prostitution) are completely legal. What do they have that we don’t? Accordingly to U.S. News & World Report and the Guttmacher Institute, their low abortion rate is credited to very comprehensive sex education and easy access to contraceptives.
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This year, central-government expenditure on science and technology is set to rise to 228.5 billion renminbi (US$36.1 billion), a 12.4% increase on last year’s spending, which slightly trails the country’s overall projected budget increase of 13.7%. Of that science budget, 32.5 billion renminbi will go towards basic research, a 10.1% increase on the 29.5 billion renminbi spent in 2011. Wen also stressed the government’s continuing commitment to improving agriculture, promising an additional 10.1 billion renminbi — a 53% rise on last year — for developing new agricultural technologies and modernizing China’s seed industry.
Let's just pay them the money! They've made it very clear that they consider digital copies to be just as valuable as the original. That makes it a lot easier to pay them back in two ways: a. We can email them scanned images of dollar bills instead of bulky paper and b. We don't have to worry about the hassle of shipping huge quantities of cash.
In the war against obesity, one’s own fat cells may seem an unlikely ally, but new research suggests ordinary fat cells can be reengineered to burn calories. http://goo.gl/Z7IjG
The Stratfor analyst “told him he was nuts to rule anything against Halliburton.” The case appears to be a November 2007 case against Hallburton Energy Services brought by the US government, though interestingly the Southern District of Texas already had a misconduct inquiry ongoing against him. The Justice Department was not revealed publicly to be involved until December.
A lot of Republicans complain about voter fraud. But they are the most egregious perpatrators.
The Republican war on women has awoken a sleeping giant and she is furious, driven, educated, and will remove these male supremacists from power.
Better-educated Republicans are more likely to doubt global warming and believe Obama's a Muslim. This was my first encounter with what I now like to call the “smart idiots” effect: The fact that politically sophisticated or knowledgeable people are often more biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant. But it’s not just global warming where the “smart idiot” effect occurs. It also emerges on nonscientific but factually contested issues, like the claim that President Obama is a Muslim. Belief in this falsehood actually increased more among better-educated Republicans from 2009 to 2010 than it did among less-educated Republicans, according to research by George Washington University political scientist John Sides.
What's the main impediment right now to jobs, jobs, jobs?
Max Berger: We know it will take more than a season to make change on the scale we seek. Before Occupy, politicians and the news media were obsessed with how much to cut the programs that benefit people in need. In a few short weeks, Occupy Wall Street put normal people back in control of the narrative. Instead of listening to the 1% lecture us, we showed that wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the few is keeping the rest of us from getting what we need.
Global warming is wreaking devastation, but Big Oil won't give up profits without a planet-destroying fight...
After three years, it's time for Obama to deliver on his promise to curb money in politics... The corruption of this government is a cancer. And you don’t launch an attack on cancer by prescribing good eating and exercise. Nor can you make change believable by pushing for reforms that won’t change anything in that corruption. What Obama must do if he is to make American democracy possible again is to speak boldly, not practically, about reform. He has to give us the big ideas that would actually have an effect, not the pathetic tinkering that only makes the lobbyists laugh.
Wall Street's favorites resist the effort to ban profiteering on non-public information... This is not just insider trading, but another form of bribery. US Politicians of both parties are corrupt to the core. They should be perp walked to jail now. Unfotunately they still control the courts, police and army. The Media Pundits eat their crums (and probably get passed insider tips)
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