"All that is needed is money and a candidate that can be coached to look sincere...the personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the things that really matter." Aldous Huxley
Below, Mike Wallace interviews Aldous Huxley, author of "Brave New World" in 1958, in which, Huxley gives an eerily prescient forecast concerning our nation's future.
“ . . . the Internet of Things refers to the seamless connection of devices, sensors, objects, rooms, machines, vehicles, etc, through fixed and wireless networks. Connected sensors, devices and tags can interact with the environment and send the information to other objects through machine-to-machine communication . . . The Semantic Web promotes this synergy: even agents that where not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data come with semantics.” -- Internet Governance and critical Internet resourcesAnyway, remember the concept of "pre-crime" - part of the predictive behavior model that describes stopping crimes before they happen - in the movie Minority Report, set in the year 2054? Well, the electronic police state, if not already here, arrived... a few years early.
The ‘Visible’ technology can automatically examine more than a million discussions and posts on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, and so forth each day. The technology also ‘scores’ each online item, assigning it a positive, negative or mixed or neutral status, based on parameters and terms set by the technology operators. The information, thus boiled down, can then be more effectively scanned and read by human operators.Privacy International rated eight countries as 'endemic surveillance societies' and the U.S. is one.
The free flow of information and ideas over new digital technologies is in our national and global interests: it is important for economic growth; for U.S. diplomatic relationships; for building sustainable democratic societies; and for meeting global challenges in the years and decades ahead.
The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are working with a wide range of partners outside of government to support these principles. They are pursuing an active agenda to promote Internet freedom, to boost online access across the developing world and to train civil society activists in online organizing.
William Windham once said in 1812, during a Speech he gave in Parliament, "The strength of a chain, according to an old observation, was the strength of the weakest link." Keeping that statement in mind, Texas would not rank amongst the strongest of states, nor should it serve as a model for the American Dream, as Texas has proved, repeatedly, its utter disregard for humanity.
Texas, the grim reaper state, executes the most people; claims the highest number of construction worker (fatalities) due to an egregious lack of inspectors; has the third highest poverty rate; has the nation's highest rate of uninsured (health care) people; second highest imprisonment rate; highest teen birth rate; lowest voter turnout, etc. etc....
If Texas, as it stands, becomes the new model, it would mean we truly are in a race to the bottom.
Having said that, one can't ignore the more than impressive way Texas has avoided many of the problems generated by the current financial meltdown. With an unemployment rate two points below the national average, one of the lowest foreclosure rates in the nation, and responsible for 71% of all new job created in the country, Texas is on the rise according to the article, California v. Texas America's Future in this month's edition of The Economist.
Texas's low tax, low regulation, low spend, business friendly model is chiefly responsible for their economic prosperity, but unfortunately, this good fortune comes at the expense of an emaciated public sector. As *Tom Ashbrook, host of On Point, said, "Texas is despoiling itself as it succeeds" when trying to sum up and clarify the point a caller was trying to make when he referred to Texas as the "new China".
The very thing that drove America's financial fiasco - lack of regulation and catering to corporate special interests at the expense of the public interest - is driving the Texan boom. Development without the tax base to support the cost of the growing infrastructure will not only increase the economic and ecological expense but ensure failure in the long run.
At the same time, California - at one time, the golden state where so many Americans projected their dreams and hopes of a more perfect life - by expanding the public sector beyond the political consensus, is facing a huge budget deficit and impasse largely as a result of political division, and serves as a timely warning that operating exclusively from either end of the spectrum - economic or social - will, more than likely, end in disaster, balance being the operative word.
Latest on Texas:
Texans losing health care coverage
According to National Center for Education Statistics's latest report, Achievement Gaps: How Black and White Students in Public Schools Perform in Mathematics and Reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Texas leads the nation in narrowing the math achievement gap between the two races and overall shows a better relative narrowing of gaps.
Texas Gov. who refused stimulus asks for a loan
Texas' jobless rate rises to 7.5 percent in June
* I highly recommend listening to Tom Ashbrook. He is always very well prepared, intelligent, knowledgeable and insightful, but what sets him apart is his amazing ability to concisely sum up and clarify what either the guest or caller has said very eloquently.
Times Atlas:
Africa (30.3 million km) is larger than the combination of China (9.6 million km), US (9.4 million km), Western Europe (4.9 million km), India (3.2 million km) , Argentina (2.8 million km), 3 Scandinavian countries, British Isles.
I always thought a map is a map, but apparently maps can be misleading, as it is very difficult to map out the spherical earth on to a flat surface without distorting the reality. Therefore, assuming most maps are the creation of the Eurocentrist, it comes as no surprise that reality is distorted in favor of the land masses that house "Europeans" (white people) and scale Africa down to the size of the U.S. in some cases.
Why is this important?
Well, since a picture is worth a thousand words, and maps are essentially pictures, it's very important that maps allow us to perceive the relative size of countries and continents in order to get a sense of their comparative importance.
As our world continues to shrink, we can't afford to live as if we are the only ones on the planet. We must create a new belief system based on, at the very least, enlightened self-interest. We must recognize that we benefit most when we can couple our own interests with those of the people around the globe. In some way we, the people, must truly embody collective interests, rather than buying into the illusion that we do, in order to guarantee our future.
Africa is a "gold mine" of natural resources, however, the continent is deteriorating at an alarming rate. For hundreds of years, policy makers and "big business" from developed countries, all around the world, acting in the interest of their people, have and continue to neglect, ignore and rape the continent without much thought for anyone but themselves.
Perhaps if we readjust our "mental maps" to incorporate the sheer size of Africa and its inherent value, we will start to pay more attention to the continent and start to influence our policy makers to protect what some day could be our savior.
As I have said before, Joe Biden's experience is a positive addition to Obama's candidacy, however, his long history becomes antiquated and is a detriment in the area of technology. Either that, or he's trying to make up for infringing on the copyright of others.
Biden's pro RIAA tech voting record, his effort to expand copyright law, his somewhat hypocritical effort to remedy the situation, and finally, his lack of perspective in this area could be compared to Spitzer's paradoxical behavior in another realm, although not as quite as drama filled and salacious as that of Mr. Spitzer.
Hopefully Obama will convince his running mate to support the principle of network neutrality and to quit backing the RIAA and the MPA as they are more than capable of taking care of business on their own.
Even after this "devastating" news, I'd still back Joe Biden's candidacy 100% if he were running for President. Why? Because, as I've also mentioned numerous times before, Joe Biden has demonstrated above all else, that he is willing to learn from his mistakes and that he's flexible enough to incorporate new information and experience in order to keep up with the rapidly changing complex global environment that is our future.
E-lance, coined by MIT Sloan School of Management's Thomas W. Malone, author of The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life stands for Electronically Connected Freelancers which Thomas Malone uses to describe what the future economy might look like, an "e-lance economy."
Much like movies are made now, where producers, directors, actors, writers, technicians come together temporarily to work on one project and then disband only to rearrange in other ways to work on other projects, Mr. Malone envisions an economy where more and more companies will operate in the same way.
"We're in the dawn of the e-lance economy, E-lancers are electronically connected freelancers. They work together on project teams for a day, a week, a month, or longer -- and then disperse and recombine to work on other projects." -- Thomas MaloneElance, Inc. took Mr. Malone's acronym to name their company and has embodied this concept. They are one of the few pioneers working toward providing the infrastructure that's needed for this kind of economy to succeed. Elance, Inc. is an online market place where services -- software development, graphics design, language translation, market research or anything that can be transmitted electronically -- are bought and sold. E-lancers post information regarding their skills, fees, and the date they can deliver and if they get the job, can download the materials to do the project, and get paid for it through this site. Like Ebay, Elance tracks the reputation of the freelancers by allowing previous clients to rate their performance.
NY Times Op-Ed columnist Tom Friedman thinks 9/11 has made us stupid.
"I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again."He doesn't want to forget those who died that terrible day but he wants America to stop living in the shadow of 9/11 and start to embrace what America stands for, hope for the future, "where anything is possible for anyone". Read more...
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