Africa · America · BSD · CSAIL · Dictionaries · DocBook · Documentation · Haskell · IRC · Indiana · Java · Music · NAT · OS · Ohio · PHP · Python · RDF · SCOTUS · Science · SearchEngines · South-America · Supreme-Court · TODO · The-Daily-Show · URI · VIM · XML · activism · apple · assembler · audio · backup · banking · banking-industry · bash · bibliographies · biking · biology · bookmark-management · books · bootloader · brief · capitalism · cataloging · censorship · civilization · cleveland · clothing · cluster · coalition · collaboration · collapse · color · comics · commented · communication · community · congress · consumerism · containers · cryptography · database · debt · decline · democracy · design · directory · disaster · distributed-systems · distributions · documentation · education · energy · environment · essays · faith · filibuster · finance · financial-industry · fonts · food · for:jomaxz · formal-methods · free-software · games · geek · government · grid · hardware · health-industry · humor · hypocrisy · images · immigration · influence · internet · interviews · investing · jobs · journalism · language · laptop · laptops · law · libraries · licensing · linux · lisp · list · lobbying · mathematics · media · middle_east · military · morality · networking · news · nostalgia · ontologies · organization · paper-airplanes · parsing · personal · philosophy · photography · poetry · politicians · politics · portal · poverty · prayer · presentation · prison-industry · prisoners · productivity · products · programming · propaganda · prophecy · queue · racism · rdf-source · recommended-reading · reference · research · resistance · security · service · shell · social-networking · software-engineering · specifications · storage · sysadmin · t-shirts · technology · television · tracking · transportation · typesetting · unicode · unix · version-control · video · volunteering · voting · wallpapers · wealth · weather · web · webhosting · wireless · word-processing
Justice
exploitation
history
In Afghanistan, a Threat of Plunder
"Afghanistan is part of the last frontier for resource discovery — one of the 60 most impoverished countries, which account for around a quarter of the earth’s land but which have barely been prospected. Over the next decade, given high world commodity prices, the last frontier will be explored, creating more opportunities like that in Afghanistan. All these countries will need to resist the kind of plunder that has characterized resource-rich countries with weak governance."
Lewis Lapham on "the end of capitalism"
"Q: Historically, what do you see as the dominant characteristics of America? A: It’s faith in the spirit and mechanics and moral value of capitalism. It is a country of expectant millionaires." "The capitalist idea is to turn loot to a productive purpose — to yoke it to the wheels of industry. ... We shape our tools, and our tools shape us. And by that shaping us, they shape our attitudes, our moral sense, our sense of self-interest. Competition is the spirit elixir of capitalism." "It’s the impertinent dynamism of ‘more’. It is a voracious, devouring appetite for more. And if we’re not careful, unless we get control of it, it will devour the earth. Capitalism had a particularly fertile soil in America because there was so much land available. People could just go west. Take land from the Indians by force. The same thing in Mexico. Call it Manifest Destiny, but it essentially was the seizure of property."
"Well, the people with money, the elite, decided, hey, we need to do something here to divide them. "So that's when they made black people servants for life. That's when they put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That's when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And they -- it started working so well, they said, gosh, looks like we've come up on something here that can last generations -- and here we are. Over 400 years later, and it's still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us." See <http://www.colorofchange.org/shirley/message.html> if you want to take action.
corporatism
Conservatives Try To Bash USDA Anti-Racism Suit, Shirley Sherrod
"It's not clear whether Brietbart's release of the video was specifically intended to hurt the chances of other African-America farmers to receive recompense from decades of discrimination that caused them to lose their farms, but conservatives immediately used the video to attack the settlement."
In the Shadow of the Serengeti
"In recent years, there have been a number of government-orchestrated forcible dispossessions related to high-end safari ventures in northern Tanzania"
Prospects Abound Among the Kurds
"Critics say these former officials are cashing in on a costly and contentious war they played a role in. The way they see it, though, they have every right to fulfill the American dream after having left their government posts."
Don't forget Shirley Sherrod's original message
"Low-income Americans have it incredibly tough, and the suffering engendered by not having enough money may be the most serious issue we face right now. But given the opportunity to talk about wealth, we talked, yet again, about race."
Exclusive: Blackwater Wins Piece of $10 Billion Mercenary Deal
"Never mind the dead civilians. Forget about the stolen guns. Get over the murder arrests, the fraud allegations, and the accusations of guards pumping themselves up with steroids and cocaine. Through a “joint venture,” the notorious private-security firm Blackwater has won a piece of a five-year State Department contract worth up to $10 billion, Danger Room has learned. Apparently, there is no misdeed so big that it can keep guns-for-hire from working for the government. And this is despite a 2008 campaign pledge from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to ban the company from federal contracts."
Smartphones: Blood stains at our fingertips
"About 80 per cent of the world’s coltan is in Africa, and the vast majority of that store resides in war-torn Eastern Congo. With an estimated $25-trillion in potential value, Congo is, in terms of untapped mineral wealth, perhaps the richest country on Earth. However the country’s mineral trade is a complex and violent web. Rebel groups from within the Congo and neighbouring countries have set up shop around the coltan mines, sometimes with the implicit support of the local military – which experts note are sometimes little more than criminal warlords in uniform."
The Iraq withdrawal: An Orwellian success
«Along these lines, officials have been boasting about the massive U.S. embassy in Baghdad. "Along with the Great Wall of China," said Ambassador Hill, "its one of those things you can see with the naked eye from outer space. I mean, it’s huge." Indeed. At 104 acres, it is the largest U.S. embassy in the world. In addition to six apartment buildings, it has a luxury pool, as well as a water and sewage treatment plant. Stop for a second and reflect on these last two amenities. They give you some measure of what American officials really know but aren’t saying about the state of drinking water and sanitation in Iraq.»
Tropical forests were the primary sources of new agricultural land in the 1980s and 1990s
"Global demand for agricultural products such as food, feed, and fuel is now a major driver of cropland and pasture expansion across much of the developing world. Whether these new agricultural lands replace forests, degraded forests, or grasslands greatly influences the environmental consequences of expansion. Although the general pattern is known, there still is no definitive quantification of these land-cover changes. ... Across the tropics, we find that between 1980 and 2000 more than 55% of new agricultural land came at the expense of intact forests, and another 28% came from disturbed forests. This study underscores the potential consequences of unabated agricultural expansion for forest conservation and carbon emissions."
Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech
"I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer - not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition - a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave."
history
Congo: The Sucking Vortex Where Africa's Heart Should Be
It is, of course, important to note the facts of the United States's imperial actions during the Cold War, but it is also extremely interesting to note Alex Perry's reactions in the comments. Also see <http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003328.html> for a synthesis.
For China, Will Money Bring Power?
"Uncle Sam did arm, of course, during the conflict with Spain and World War I, creating an outstanding Navy. But for the most part, the nation’s business was business."
In Afghanistan, a Threat of Plunder
"Afghanistan is part of the last frontier for resource discovery — one of the 60 most impoverished countries, which account for around a quarter of the earth’s land but which have barely been prospected. Over the next decade, given high world commodity prices, the last frontier will be explored, creating more opportunities like that in Afghanistan. All these countries will need to resist the kind of plunder that has characterized resource-rich countries with weak governance."
Lewis Lapham on "the end of capitalism"
"Q: Historically, what do you see as the dominant characteristics of America? A: It’s faith in the spirit and mechanics and moral value of capitalism. It is a country of expectant millionaires." "The capitalist idea is to turn loot to a productive purpose — to yoke it to the wheels of industry. ... We shape our tools, and our tools shape us. And by that shaping us, they shape our attitudes, our moral sense, our sense of self-interest. Competition is the spirit elixir of capitalism." "It’s the impertinent dynamism of ‘more’. It is a voracious, devouring appetite for more. And if we’re not careful, unless we get control of it, it will devour the earth. Capitalism had a particularly fertile soil in America because there was so much land available. People could just go west. Take land from the Indians by force. The same thing in Mexico. Call it Manifest Destiny, but it essentially was the seizure of property."
The Early American Foreign Service Database
"The Early American Foreign Service Database ... traces the U.S. Foreign Service from its early attempts at supplying the Continental Army during the American Revolution through the establishment of U.S. embassies in South America."
"Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources."
The Man Who Shattered Our Economy
"Some guys have all the luck, particularly when they supply the dice."
"[S]uccessive American administrations would blindly head down the very path that had led the Soviets to ruin. They would serially agree that, in a world without significant enemies, the key to US global power still was the care and feeding of the American military and the military-industrial complex that went with it. As the years passed, that military would be sent ever more regularly into the far reaches of the planet to fight frontier wars, establish military bases, and finally impose a global Pax Americana on the planet."
"Despite regular expectations that the United States will enjoy a peace dividend, we continue to spend more on the military than the countries with the next 15 largest military budgets combined. Such perpetual growth seems to confirm Eisenhower’s concern about the size and influence of the military."
"Well, the people with money, the elite, decided, hey, we need to do something here to divide them. "So that's when they made black people servants for life. That's when they put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That's when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And they -- it started working so well, they said, gosh, looks like we've come up on something here that can last generations -- and here we are. Over 400 years later, and it's still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us." See <http://www.colorofchange.org/shirley/message.html> if you want to take action.
Will the great recession lead to World War IV?
"Instead, elites on both sides of the Atlantic hope that the great recession will turn out to have been merely a particularly nasty business cycle downturn. They pray that soon we can return to something like the illusory prosperity of the late 1990s and 2000s without having to engage in any radical rethinking or reform. Our political and opinion leaders think they are leading us back home. They haven’t noticed, or refuse to admit, that what used to be home is now a large, smoking crater."
corporatism
A jailed banker explains why banks still run the world
"[P]erhaps he is there to remind the senators and representatives he left behind on Capitol Hill how rewarding retirement can be for politicians who take care of the banks. ... Amazingly, many politicians who claim to represent the public interest take this money. Ken Silverstein, who has diligently followed the economic and political depredations of UBS for years, asked the most pertinent question long ago: Why would any decent elected official in this country still accept a dime from this outfit?"
A national anthem for healthcare reform
"[T]he biggest health insurers are lobbying like mad against reform because they like things just the way they are. They can squeeze the public and the public has no alternative but to pay up."
"In fact, our failure to confront global warming is more than simply political incompetence. Over the past year, the corporations and special interests most responsible for climate change waged an all-out war to prevent Congress from cracking down on carbon pollution in time for Copenhagen. The oil and coal industries deployed an unprecedented army of lobbyists, spent millions on misleading studies and engaged in outright deception to derail climate legislation."
"In 2003, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service considered mandating the devices, but decided against it under pressure from oil companies that complained that the $500,000 devices were too burdensome." 'It shouldn't take a spill of this magnitude to remind us that we are still far from "beyond petroleum." No amount of rebranding can change that.'
Banks, Bankers, and the New Political Economy
"Thinkers across the political spectrum ... can recognize the critical role of political connectedness in driving bankers’ compensation."
Barack Obama: The oligarchs' president
"If the two parties both lie down for Wall Street in roughly equal measure, but fight viciously over other issues, it is possible to construct a stable strategic equilibrium. ... [T]he Democrats avoid the epic confrontation that would surely ensue if they were to take on the financial sector, which would retaliate with a massively funded effort. Instead, the two parties fight furiously, or at least pretend to fight furiously, about a wide range of other social issues that affect many voters deeply -- abortion, gay rights, gun control, stem cell research, creationism, global warming, health insurance and so on. Each side can credibly warn its base that if it deserts the party, apocalypse may follow. So, while some citizens may register as independents, or stop voting, or stop donating to the system, the entrenched establishments of both parties will remain safe."
Billionaire self-pity and the Koch brothers
"There's no question in my mind that the unrestrained power over the political process and both political parties enjoyed by oligarchs is the single greatest political problem the country faces"
Busted: Stories of the Financial Crisis
"The evident irony is that greed—the self-interest of individuals, spread across the society—is exactly what's supposed to make capitalism work."
Can Obama Bypass Republicans on Health?
"it seems clear that the filibuster is a convenient excuse Democrats use to justify their inaction"
Can a Supreme Court seat be bought?
"For now, it seems possible that a group could pour an unlimited amount of money into a judicial nomination fight without any oversight whatsoever -- meaning that, were one to ask for recusal at a later date, it would be very difficult to prove what had been spent in the first place."
Citizens trump BP shareholders
"Get it? There's no conflict between Britain and the United States. The conflict is between two kinds of interests -- shareholder interests and citizen interests."
Conservatives Try To Bash USDA Anti-Racism Suit, Shirley Sherrod
"It's not clear whether Brietbart's release of the video was specifically intended to hurt the chances of other African-America farmers to receive recompense from decades of discrimination that caused them to lose their farms, but conservatives immediately used the video to attack the settlement."
Did top Obama donor carry Israeli message to W.H.?
"[A] top Israeli general traveled to Chicago to ask a top Obama contributor and supporter of Israel, billionaire Lester Crown, to pressure the White House to take a tougher line on Iran."
Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force
"A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress."
"Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families."
For China, Will Money Bring Power?
"Uncle Sam did arm, of course, during the conflict with Spain and World War I, creating an outstanding Navy. But for the most part, the nation’s business was business."
"Why the secrecy? And what was the national security requirement that dictated avoiding competition? Did Mina's source for fuel have anything to do with it?"
Getting Serious About Ending Bailouts
"If there are no changes to the rules that brought us the too big to fail problem, there is no reason to think that another bailout wouldn’t happen again."
Goldman Sachs' best friends in politics
'It may be that McMahon, in taking a position that was so favorable to the banking industry, really believed his Op-Ed's headline: "Misunderstanding derivatives endangers Main Street." Or maybe he just knew where his bread was buttered.'
Healthcare industry stocks explode as bill progresses
"[T]he White House's strategy from the start was to negotiate in secret with those very special interests in order to craft a bill that they liked and that benefits them."
How Senator Vitter Battled the EPA Over Formaldehyde’s Link to Cancer
'As long as the studies continue, the EPA will still list formaldehyde as a "probable" rather than a "known" carcinogen, even though three major scientific reviews now link it to leukemia and have strengthened its ties to other forms of cancer. The chemical industry is fighting to avoid that designation, because it could lead to tighter regulations and require costly pollution controls.'
"From the perspective of what the People want, or even the perspective of what the political parties say they want, the Fundraising Congress is misfiring in every dimension."
I'm From The Government, And I'm Here To Scare You.
«It's also a marker of what Radley Balko refers to as the media's "statist" bias, which doesn't take place along a clear left-right spectrum but rather represents "bia[s] toward power and authority, automatically turning to politicians for solutions to every perceived problem."»
In School Outreach, BP and NOAA Dispel Myths' About Dispersants, Subsurface Oil
"[R]epresentatives of BP and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have reached out to local schools to “dispel myths” about dispersants and subsurface oil ... During one demonstration, reported the Tri-Parish Times, a BP representative asked the students questions about the oil spill. Students who answered correctly received a BP hat or pen as a prize."
In the Shadow of the Serengeti
"In recent years, there have been a number of government-orchestrated forcible dispossessions related to high-end safari ventures in northern Tanzania"
Judge Blocks Obama's Moratorium on Deep-Water Drilling
'Citing potential economic harm to businesses and workers, Judge Feldman wrote that the Obama administration had failed to justify the need for such “a blanket, generic, indeed punitive, moratorium” on deep-water oil and gas drilling.'
Ken Salazar, corporatism and the BP oil spill
"Yet who did Obama choose to head the Interior Department? Ken Salazar, notorious for being beholden to the very industries he would be regulating."
Lobbyists and Lawmakers Bond During Springsteen Concerts
"Lawmakers continue to enjoy free and easy access to events that aren’t available to most Americans. And lobbyists and wealthy business leaders are still partying with lawmakers who can directly affect their bottom line."
Medical Interests Spent $876 Million on Reform
"Medical interests alone shelled out more than $876 million in lobbying expenses during the 15 months beginning in January 2009 and ending in March, when Congress passed the sweeping overhaul."
Michael Bloomberg offers "middle way" to glorious new Gilded Age
«Bloomberg is peddling pure, naked corporatism, masquerading as "grown-up" non-ideological common sense. I'm guessing a lot of well-off self-proclaimed centrists will eat it up.»
Murkowski Blocks Bill to Raise Oil Companies' Liability for Spills
Here is another shard of evidence demonstrating how corporations (in this case the oil industry) influence government.
"[T]he corruption of today is in plain sight. The mechanism of its reach is displayed to everyone. It is the simple and pervasive economy of influence that buys access and more through campaign cash. And then without explicit recognition, the actions of our government are guided by the understanding of how those acts will affect the opportunity to raise money. I'm sure no one in the White House had a second thought about how bizarre it was that the first deals the administration struck to get health care reform was with the insurance lobby and the pharmaceutical companies. Yet how many of the 69,456,987 votes that Obama received came from them? And so why is it so obvious that they get the first seats in the negotiation of what could be Obama's most important (and only?) significant legislative victory?"
Our incredible shrinking democracy
"It seems as if more and more decisions that should be made democratically are being shunted off somewhere to a few people who make them in back rooms."
Pressure Limits Efforts to Police Drilling for Gas
«“It was like the science didn’t matter,” Carla Greathouse, the author of the study, said in a recent interview. “The industry was going to get what it wanted, and we were not supposed to stand in the way.”»
Private prison industry helped draft Arizona immigration law
"[N]o one should be surprised that the private prison industry is in part responsible for the Arizona immigration law that requires state law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law (read: lock up anyone suspected of being Hispanic until and unless they can prove their citizenship)."
Prospects Abound Among the Kurds
"Critics say these former officials are cashing in on a costly and contentious war they played a role in. The way they see it, though, they have every right to fulfill the American dream after having left their government posts."
Q&A: Leaked War Logs Raise Questions of Accountability for Military Contractors
'It would appear that the only Geneva Convention mercenary test that these combatants fail is test (d): one is a mercenary according to that test if, in addition to passing the other tests, one “is neither a national of a Party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict”. So the only thing standing between, say, Blackwater (oh, sorry, Xe Services) combat employees and a legal status of mercenary is their US citizenship, and evidence indicates that companies like this do hire some non-citizens.'
«Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”»
Steven G. Brant: The United Corporate States Of America
'While those "evil" corporations planning to take over our country are making their plans, "we the people" will use the power of consumer dollars to transform those "evil" corporations into "good" corporations. We will do that by changing the value system underlying the choices all corporations make.'
"THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD is a screwball true story about two gonzo political activists who, posing as top executives of giant corporations, lie their way into big business conferences and pull off the world's most outrageous pranks. This peer-to-peer special edition of the film is unique: it is preceded by an EXCLUSIVE VIDEO of the Yes Men impersonating the United States Chamber of Commerce. Because the Yes Men are being sued for this stunt, p2p is the only way that this film will get seen. Please spread the word!"
The Democratic Party's deceitful game
"This is what the Democratic Party does; it's who they are. They're willing to feign support for anything their voters want just as long as there's no chance that they can pass it."
"Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources."
The Legacy of Billy Tauzin: The White House-PhRMA Deal
"How they did it ... is a testament to how ingrained the grip of special interests remains in Washington."
The Man Who Shattered Our Economy
"Some guys have all the luck, particularly when they supply the dice."
The Peak Oil Crisis: Is $50 Oil in the Offing?
"For Americans, the middle name of our civilization is growth - in jobs, population, economic production, and more importantly personal and public wealth. To imply that the future, both immediate and distant, has anything in store but a return to endless economic growth is the worst kind of heresy. In some circles, the mantra of growth at any costs approaches an intensity unknown outside of religious fanaticism."
The Real Housewives of Wall Street
"In early April, in an attempt to learn exactly how much Mack and Karches made on the TALF deals, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa wrote a letter to Waterfall asking 21 detailed questions about the transactions. In addition, Sen. Sanders has personally asked Fed chief Bernanke to provide more complete information on the TALF loans given not only to Christy Mack but to gazillionaires like former Miami Dolphins owner H. Wayne Huizenga and hedge-fund shark John Paulson. But Bernanke bluntly refused to provide the information — and the Fed has similarly stonewalled other oversight agencies, including the General Accounting Office and TARP's special inspector general."
The Spill, The Scandal and the President | Rolling Stone Politics
"But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled--so they, too, started to take the checks."
The alleged Wall Street e-mail that went viral
"A whole class of people put their faith in a market fundamentalist ideology that declared the pursuit of profit and the indulgence of greed to be the a right and proper way to organize a society. And now, well, it kinda seems like they were wrong."
The bigger Clarence Thomas scandal
"Many experts, such as Gillers, think Scalia should have recused himself in the energy task force case, but -- in violation of the principle that no one can be his own judge -- Scalia got to decide that he thinks he's perfectly impartial, thank you very much. And that was that."
The billionaire Koch brothers' war against Obama
«A 2004 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, described the Kochs’ foundations as being self-serving, concluding, “These foundations give money to nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that impact the profit margin of Koch Industries.”»
The business of America is kleptocracy
"A spirit of shared sacrifice, dismissed as hopelessly naïve, has been replaced by a form of tribalized privatization in which insiders find ways to profit no matter what."
The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq
"[N]ow when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years."
"I worry much more about the people than the money. Let the banks spend money. But when you've got 54 former staffers from the relevant committees and 33 former chiefs of staff and more than 200 former congressmen, you're talking about something much more effective than spending: You're talking about social relationships. People return e-mails and take calls and listen closely to the people they know."
The sanctity of military spending
"It's time for "everyone" to sacrifice and suffer some more -- as long as "everyone" excludes our vast military industry, the permanent power factions inside the Pentagon and intelligence community, our Surveillance and National Security State, and the imperial policies of perpetual war which feed them while further draining the lifeblood out of the country."
"Why would commercial banks hold $1 trillion more than they legally had to in reserves at the Fed, earning only 0.25 percent interest per year, and why would the Fed buy more than $1 trillion of mortgage securities of undisclosed quality in the marketplace?"
The underlying divisions in the healthcare debate
"Our laws are written not by elected representatives but, literally, by the largest and richest corporations. At the level of the most concentrated power, large corporate interests and government actions are basically inseparable."
The warning signs of trouble ahead
"I strongly encourage you to consider the related factors of a culture of growth, particularly economic growth, which can be seen as an uncompromising goal throughout the history of oligarchy; finite energy and other natural resources; and political instability."
There is job hysteria for a reason
"it's not as if the government hasn't directly created jobs before"
Time for a Wall Street-Washington divorce
"Even as Congress debates legislation to tame it, Wall Street is conducting a bidding war between the parties for its continued beneficence."
Wall Street owners angry with their purchase
"Wall Street executives are angry that, after duly purchasing the Democrats (they have receipts and everything), the Obama White House is now rousing the dirty rabble with their anti-banker rhetoric"
«For Assange in 2006, then, the public benefit of leaked information is not the first-order good of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world (free information is its own reward), nor is it the second-order good of the muckrakers (free information will lead the people to demand change). What Assange asks of leaked information is that it supply a third-order public good: he wants it to demonstrate that secrets cannot be securely held, and he wants it to do this so that the currency of all secrets will be debased. He wants governments-cum-conspiracies to be rendered paranoid by the leaks and therefore be left with little energy to pursue its externally focused aims. In his words, “We can marginalise a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to, its environment.”»
What the whistleblower prosecution says about the Obama DOJ
"Drake's leaks to Gorman exposed serious wrongdoing on the part of (a) the NSA and its illegal domestic spying activities and (b) the vast private intelligence and defense industry that has all but formally merged with the CIA, NSA and Pentagon to become the public-private National Security and Surveillance State that exercises more power, by far, than any single faction in the country."
While Whacking Critics, Obama Gets Facts Wrong
«But, Obama's fairly large rounding error aside, the public option was not simply a matter of enrollees. What the president conspicuously disregarded was that the central point of the public option was that its existence would exert enormous competitive pressure on the private insurance system. The goal was not to serve a particularly large number of people directly -- that would only happen if the private offerings were terribly inadequate. The goal was to keep the private sector honest. So no matter how many people it enrolled, "the provision," as Obama put it "would have affected" tens of millions.»
White House as helpless victim on healthcare
"The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives."
Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?
«"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."»
growth
"Ecocide": The Fifth War Crime?
«Reaction from the pro-growth community has been predictably volatile. As one alarmed commentator on the conservative RedState.com saw it, the proposal was nothing less than an “activist’s war on private property, industrialization and the Free Market” that would impose “a restriction on our rights to personal wealth” and might even, God forbid, “prevent over-production and over-consumption.”»
"And, yes, we are talking about sacrifices. Anyone who doubts the suffering caused by slashing spending in a weak economy should look at the catastrophic effects of austerity programs in Greece and Ireland."
Archbishop Tutu warns greed threatens environmental progress
«"Our desire to consume everything of value, to extract every precious stone, every drop of oil and every creature from the sea knows no bounds," said the Archbishop. "This quest for profit subverts our present and our future. There are too many people who are getting better and better at exploiting the environmental heritage which belongs to us all. We are not heading for an environmental disaster - we have already created one."»
Bernanke says U.S. economy needs more time to heal
"The U.S. economy is not fully recovered from its deep recession, with housing still weighing on growth, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Friday in a speech spelling out ways the U.S. central bank has studied lower income communities."
Bernanke signals no rush to reverse stimulus
«In a fresh quarterly forecast, the Fed revised down its growth estimate for 2011 to between 3.1 percent and 3.3 percent from the 3.4 percent to 3.9 percent it saw in January. It said the recovery was proceeding at a "moderate pace," a shift from March when it said it was on "firmer footing."»
"With an unemployment rate over 8 percent, the United States needs growth as desperately as at any moment since the early 1980s."
Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
"The mission of CASSE is to advance the steady state economy, with stabilized population and consumption, as a policy goal with widespread public support."
Changes may spur Middle East growth if populism set aside
"The changes that have swept across the Arab world could usher in a new era of economic growth after years of inequality and joblessness, economists say, if leaders can resist pressure from the very protesters whose rage has reshaped the region."
Declining Energy Quality Could Be a Root Cause of Current Recession
«"If we aren't fundamentally changing the way we produce or consume energy now, don't expect the economy to grow as much as the past two decades," he says.» Ha! Good luck with that.
Does anyone actually know how to fix the economy?
"Four major positions are represented in the debate: supply-side conservatives, fiscal conservatives, neoliberals and progressives. The last three -- fiscal conservatives, neoliberals and progressives -- make valid and important points. But none has a persuasive vision of how to promote long-term American growth and equity."
Earthquake Damage at Plants Affects Quarterly Income at Texas Instruments
"The chip maker Texas Instruments said Monday that production setbacks linked to the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan curbed its first-quarter net income and would cut into second-quarter growth."
"While economic growth is an important and necessary condition for the reduction of unemployment, it is not sufficient in and of itself. In order to work for full employment and restrain inflation, it is also necessary to adopt more specific programs and policies targeted toward particular aspects of the unemployment problem"
Economic growth slows, inflation surges
"Economic growth braked sharply in the first quarter as higher food and gasoline prices dampened consumer spending and sent inflation rising at its fastest pace in 2-1/2 years."
Exponential Growth Rate of US Stocks since 1871
Also see the same data graphed on a logarithmic scale at <http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2010/10/29/us-stocks-roaring-20s/>.
G20 eyes anti-crisis plan, mulls recovery risks
«"Despite the risks in oil, the financial challenges still facing parts of Europe, despite what's happened in Japan ... what you see is gradual healing, gradual strengthening in confidence that the world economy is going to be growing at a reasonable rate," he insisted.»
G20 tackles global economy; China unswayed on yuan
"The challenge of getting the Group of 20 to agree on how to spot and fix dangers to global growth comes as policymakers are worried about more immediate threats -- high oil prices, huge debts in some rich nations and unrest in the Middle East."
Got Food? Consider yourself lucky
«We have unconsciously sacrificed our collective humanity and devalued our lives on the altar of a counterfeit economy that picks “winners” and “losers” based on global forces that are far beyond our immediate control. The never ending demands placed on us in an economy deemed “too big to fail” and too presumptuous to think it could ever stop growing, have now pushed America to a critical point in history.»
Happiness is a growing economy
"Steady as she goes. As anticipation builds over Friday's jobs report from the U.S. government, more data is emerging pointing to what looks like sustainable growth in the real U.S. economy."
Inflation in China Poses Big Threat to Global Trade
"Because China is now the world’s second largest economy, after the United States, and because the country has been a leading source of global growth during the last two years, money problems here can reverberate from Wal-Mart to Wall Street and the world beyond."
It's official: The economy is set to starve
Looking for a single good quote in this article is hard, because almost the entire article is quote worthy. You need to read this article!
Jobless claims fall, retail sales stronger
"New claims for jobless benefits fell last week and retailers racked up much stronger-than-expected sales in March, signs that high fuel prices have not knocked the economy off its growth path."
Joblessness, rising prices could spark war within
The end of this article has a rapid-fire exposition about growth that could be useful.
Kicking the economy when it is down
“Which brings us to a point that many government number crunchers are seizing upon: Cutbacks in government spending -- local, state and federal -- shaved 1.09 percent off the growth rate. Plug that spending back in and you've got almost 3.0 percent GDP growth, which is perfectly respectable.”
"Bond vigilantes are investors who pull the plug on governments they perceive as unable or unwilling to pay their debts. Now there’s no question that countries can suffer crises of confidence (see Greece, debt of). But what the advocates of austerity claim is that (a) the bond vigilantes are about to attack America, and (b) spending anything more on stimulus will set them off."
«But for all the troubling questions it raises, there's one thing you can say about steady-state thinking: It is almost cosmically ambitious. Given how numb and static the world's economic arguments have become, no-growth theory is a rare beast: a vision of social change that is genuinely radical, almost jaw-droppingly so. Even talking about such ideas, Victor admits in his book, "could make a politician unelectable."»
Obama: Republicans push vision of "shrunken America"
«"We've got a lot of work to do to continue to lower the unemployment rate and grow the economy," Obama said.»
«In the case of the US empire, it has not continued to expand by territorial acquisition. The last territory acquired was the Marshall Islands in 1947, which then became a UN Trust Territory, followed by Independence in 1986. What has continued to expand is the presence of US military installations all over the world. As the recently deceased analyst Chalmers Johnson explained, the US is an “empire of bases”, not an empire of colonies. The US has 800-1000 foreign military bases and 4-5000 bases in the US.»
Remarks by the President After Meeting with House Republican and Senate Democratic Leadership
"We’re not going to cut those things that we think are absolutely vital to the growth of the American economy and putting people back to work."
Royal wedding no tonic for fragile UK recovery
"Investec economist Philip Shaw reckons the royal nuptials will knock a quarter of a percentage point off second-quarter GDP growth -- not good news given that Britain's economy has essentially stagnated since September."
Slow Payers Hinder Trade in Europe
"With much of Europe still caught in an economic slump and several countries weighing down the bloc’s growth prospects because of huge sovereign debt problems of their own, E.U. officials are starting to circulate proposals for fixing this comparatively simple problem, in hopes of yielding a quick, cost-free stimulus to Europe’s financial health."
Stimulus by Fed Is Disappointing, Economists Say
"The Fed generally encourages growth by pushing down interest rates."
The Peak Oil Crisis: Is $50 Oil in the Offing?
"For Americans, the middle name of our civilization is growth - in jobs, population, economic production, and more importantly personal and public wealth. To imply that the future, both immediate and distant, has anything in store but a return to endless economic growth is the worst kind of heresy. In some circles, the mantra of growth at any costs approaches an intensity unknown outside of religious fanaticism."
«Did he have to praise Congress for enacting “the largest annual spending cut in our history,” as if shortsighted budget cuts in the face of high unemployment — cuts that will slow growth and increase unemployment — are actually a good idea?»
U.S. Economic Growth Slows to 1.8% Rate in Quarter
"American economic expansion slowed to a crawl in the first quarter, but economists are hopeful that the setback will be temporary. Total output grew at an annual rate of 1.8 percent from January through March, the Commerce Department said Thursday, after expanding at a 3.1 percent pace in the fourth quarter of 2010."
Vandana Shiva and Maude Barlow on the Rights of Mother Earth
"And this is so-called green economy, as it is seen by the powerful in our world, is basically no change, continued unlimited growth, continued unlimited free trade agreements, continued unregulated investment of the type that’s taking place with the land grab in Africa, but with a green technology. So we’ll just substitute that dirty old technology, which of course they’re not, because the tar sands is the dirty old technology, and that’s what they’re building it on. So it’s just language around caring for the earth."
"Despite regular expectations that the United States will enjoy a peace dividend, we continue to spend more on the military than the countries with the next 15 largest military budgets combined. Such perpetual growth seems to confirm Eisenhower’s concern about the size and influence of the military."
World trade to carry crisis scars into 2012: WTO
"World trade will carry the scars of the financial crisis into 2012, the World Trade Organization said on Thursday, predicting 6.5 percent growth for this year, a rate much more modest than last."
sustainability
"Off the Grid": The growing appeal of going off the grid
"It’s a desire to get out from under the thumb of corporate America. You look around for things that you can do to make your world a better place and as an environmentalist, everything that's green is likely to be greenwashed. Every corporation seems to be telling us that we can be green if we use their product and deep down we know it’s nonsense."
'Peak Oil Demand,' Yes... But Not the Nice Kind: Why There Will Be No Recovery
"Energy is the only real currency." "Clearly, we can't all be net energy importers."
300 YEARS OF FOSSIL-FUELED ADDICTION IN 5 MINUTES
"It's all hands on deck!"
50 Simple Ways to Get Off | Derrick Jensen | Orion Magazine
"If you're in love with the world, fall in love with trying to save it"
A Food Manifesto for the Future
"you can’t sell garbage while telling people not to eat it"
Archbishop Tutu warns greed threatens environmental progress
«"Our desire to consume everything of value, to extract every precious stone, every drop of oil and every creature from the sea knows no bounds," said the Archbishop. "This quest for profit subverts our present and our future. There are too many people who are getting better and better at exploiting the environmental heritage which belongs to us all. We are not heading for an environmental disaster - we have already created one."»
"Most people, including the billions of exploited poor, have been impressed with the story that they just need to work hard and cut a deal in order to be elevated to the exploiting class; or the less pleasant version of the story that tells them that even if they can't get that high, they still need to compete tooth and nail with their neighbors; or, at the most brutal edge of the story, that they will face displacement or murder (their choice) if they don't get out of the way of progress."
"The report contains some surprises. Transportation is the smallest piece of the food system energy pie. Even farming isn’t a particularly big contributor. The big energy users turn out to be food processing, packaging, selling, and preparation. Our kitchens command the biggest slice of the pie, using twice as much energy as the farms that grew the food in the first place."
"Forget cap-and trade. This is a climate bill you can love."
Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
"The mission of CASSE is to advance the steady state economy, with stabilized population and consumption, as a policy goal with widespread public support."
City of Cleveland :: Sustainable Cleveland 2019 (SC2019)
"Cleveland will become a model of sustainability and will become a leader in the emerging green economy over the next nine years through the efforts of Sustainable Cleveland 2019."
"[M]y students were learning to think, an aspiration reputedly revered but actually despised at all the large, research-oriented institutions with which I am familiar. Real education makes people dangerous. They might go so far as to question the obedience-at-home, oppression-abroad mentality requisite to propping up an empire."
«Side by side with these three crises – climate crisis, biodiversity crisis, energy crisis - goes the food crisis: In the global South, 1 billion people are currently suffering from undernourishment. Ironically, 2 billion people in the rich countries are suffering from diseases linked to eating unhealthy food in excessive quantities. Meanwhile, corporate pressure continues to impose consumer monoculture and monocultural agro-industrial practices that accelerate greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation and desertification processes and thus cause huge biodiversity losses, with terrible impacts on the lives of self-sufficient peoples and tribes who often are forced off their native land and into consumer lifestyles in the growing townships and suburbs. The new law for small farmers is “grow and get into debt or else perish”. It seems that we have a cultural problem. And this problem might be a civilisation problem.» Food sovereignty!
"END:CIV examines our culture's addiction to systematic violence and environmental exploitation, and probes the resulting epidemic of poisoned landscapes and shell-shocked nations."
"Given the overwhelming harm being done to the world’s environment and to its people, it is essential today to consider how we might organize a truly ecological civilization—one that exists in harmony with natural systems—instead of trying to overwhelm and dominate nature. This is not just an ethical issue; it is essential for our survival as a species and the survival of many other species that we reverse the degradation of the earth’s life support systems that once provided dependable climate, clean air, clean water (fresh and ocean), bountiful oceans, and healthy and productive soils."
Experts rally to defense of climate science
"There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend."
"The Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) is a growing network of sustainable communities and initiatives that bridge different cultures, countries, and continents. GEN serves as umbrella organization for ecovillages, transition town initiatives, intentional communities, and ecologically-minded individuals worldwide."
Got Food? Consider yourself lucky
«We have unconsciously sacrificed our collective humanity and devalued our lives on the altar of a counterfeit economy that picks “winners” and “losers” based on global forces that are far beyond our immediate control. The never ending demands placed on us in an economy deemed “too big to fail” and too presumptuous to think it could ever stop growing, have now pushed America to a critical point in history.»
Hot Plate: An Interview With Anna Lappé
"[I]t’s important to add that we also need to go beyond just voting with our forks. We can do a lot as individuals, but individual action can’t, say, build a new energy infrastructure based on green fuel and mass transit through individual action. We need policy change to do that, and that will take working together collectively as citizens."
Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply
"Contrary to the widely held belief that food production must be increased to feed the growing population, experimental and correlational data indicate that human population growth varies as a function of food availability. By increasing food production for humans, at the expense of other species, the biologically determined effect has been, and continues to be, an increase in the human population. Understanding the relationship between food increases and population increases is proposed as a necessary first step in addressing this global problem."
Immigration and Food/Water Politics
"... or if I'm a hunter-gatherer who lives on a river, fishing and hunting to feed myself, like a Native American or other aboriginal people, then it reads just like what civilization has been doing to the uncivilized since someone first thought civilization was a good idea ..."
In Deep Water: Can we afford to spill any oil?
«I think it would be illuminating to include, along with that “proven reserves” circle, a circle on the same scale showing “total oil consumed, ever”. Based on the EIA’s World Petroleum Consumption, 1960-2007 table, the total oil consumed between 1960 and 2007 was 1,039,575 million barrels of oil.»
It's the end of the world, again
"Stop me if you've heard this one before: Rapid environmental degradation, in combination with a rising population, declining agricultural output, and the depletion of oil and other resources, is straining human civilization. Soon, things will get much worse. Economies will decline and people will get poorer. Starvation will grow. So will war, famine, disease, and terror. Basically, to use a familiar phrase, it's the end of the world as we know it."
James Howard Kunstler: The old American dream is a nightmare
The whole interview is excellent.
"Local Food Cleveland is an action network for everyone who is passionate about growing a thriving local food economy and culture around Cleveland, OH."
"The community-built resource that focuses on alternative, clean, practical, renewable energy solutions."
"Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself. The relative pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being."
«But for all the troubling questions it raises, there's one thing you can say about steady-state thinking: It is almost cosmically ambitious. Given how numb and static the world's economic arguments have become, no-growth theory is a rare beast: a vision of social change that is genuinely radical, almost jaw-droppingly so. Even talking about such ideas, Victor admits in his book, "could make a politician unelectable."»
On Being a 21st Century Peasant - Reason Magazine
"McKibben sees retreat from modernity as our only option because he believes that humanity has reached the limits of our creativity."
Peak Oil And Population Decline
"Peak oil basically means peak food. Without mechanization, irrigation, and synthetic fertilizer, crop yields drop considerably, and famine is inevitable. Over the next few decades, the survivors will be those who have mastered the art of subsistence farming. Ultimately, however, it may be that the Paleolithic practice of foraging, with a greatly reduced population, is the only way of life that can be extended for millennia."
Personal web site of John E. Ikerd
Author of "A Revolution of the Middle... and The Pursuit of Happiness", "Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense", "Small Farms are Real Farms: Sustaining People Through Agriculture", "Return to Common Sense", and "Crisis and Opportunity: Sustainability in American Agriculture".
Prosperity without Growth? - The transition to a sustainable economy
"Prosperity Without Growth? says that the current global recession should be the occasion to forge a new economic system equipped to avoid the shocks and negative impacts associated with our reliance on growth."
A visualization of "The Pressures of Consumption and Global Urbanization on Planetary Limits"
Saul Griffith: Climate Change Recalculated
"Engineer, environmentalist, and entrepreneur Saul Griffith examines the numerical reality of the fight against climate change."
StreetBank - Lending, Giving Away, Skills
"Streetbank is a site that helps you share and borrow things from your neighbours."
Tainter's law: where is the physics?
"You want to know what are the inner mechanisms that make civilisations evolve towards higher complexity. What is the physics of collapse?"
The City that Ended Hunger :: Belo Horizonte, Brazil
"Through most of human evolution—except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years—Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm."
"If you are searching for the perfect metaphor to describe humanity's 21st century plight -- an energy-hungry and energy-dependent civilization occupying a resource-constrained planet -- then you need look no further than at a satellite photo of the giant spreading oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico. That massive hydrocarbon stain is our collective scarlet letter, the price we pay for a lifestyle of extraordinary affluence and comfort -- at least as compared to most of the humans who have ever lived."
"Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources."
The Peak Oil Crisis: Is $50 Oil in the Offing?
"For Americans, the middle name of our civilization is growth - in jobs, population, economic production, and more importantly personal and public wealth. To imply that the future, both immediate and distant, has anything in store but a return to endless economic growth is the worst kind of heresy. In some circles, the mantra of growth at any costs approaches an intensity unknown outside of religious fanaticism."
The Peak Oil Crisis: The Future of Government
"What all those calling for reduced government fail to grasp, however, is that 200 years of cheap abundant fossil fuel energy has transformed this country into something completely different. Take food as an example, 200 years ago, some 90+ percent of us were involved in its raising or otherwise procuring food -- or we would simply not eat. Now, thanks to cheap fossil fuels, less than 3 percent of us are engaged in agricultural endeavors and I suspect only a fraction of our "farmers" still have all the requisite skills to feed themselves and their families in the style to which they have become accustomed. Take away the diesel for the tractors and farming is going to become mighty different. Has anyone yoked an ox lately?"
The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq
"[N]ow when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years."
"THAT A DISTINCTION can usefully be drawn between wants and needs seems obvious. Mainstream economics, however, refuses to countenance such a distinction."
Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution
'What kind of life do you want, and what are you willing to do to get it? Keith Farnish, author of Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis, sees industrial civilization as the most destructive way of living yet devised by humans. And it’s over: environmental degradation and depletion tell us it can’t continue. The system has myriad ways to make us believe we can’t live without it. But Keith believes we can - there are countless ways to move forward into contented, happy, and full lives. We can “disengage” and reconnect with the natural world, ourselves, and others.' This guy gets it.
Tipping Point: Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production - Part 1 - Summary
"We have passed or are close to passing the peak of global oil production. Our civilisation is structurally unstable to an energy withdrawal. There is a high probability that our integrated and globalised civilisation is on the cusp of a fast and near-term collapse."
"Transition Network's role is to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities as they self-organise around the transition model, creating initiatives that rebuild resilience, reduce CO2 emissions."
US military warns oil output may dip causing massive shortages by 2015
"The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact."
Urge Obama to say “peak oil” on April 20
"[A]s the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill approaches on April 20, America’s biggest ever environmental disaster makes clear that from now on, oil will become more difficult to find and more expensive and risky to produce."
Vandana Shiva and Maude Barlow on the Rights of Mother Earth
"And this is so-called green economy, as it is seen by the powerful in our world, is basically no change, continued unlimited growth, continued unlimited free trade agreements, continued unregulated investment of the type that’s taking place with the land grab in Africa, but with a green technology. So we’ll just substitute that dirty old technology, which of course they’re not, because the tar sands is the dirty old technology, and that’s what they’re building it on. So it’s just language around caring for the earth."
Welcome to the Permanent Recession – Food and Transportation Prices Rising
"Victory Gardens provided much food to Britons and Americans during World War II, and Dmitri Orlov has said that home gardens saved a lot of Russians following the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should all be developing some self-sufficiency skills."
What happens when energy resources deplete?
"If only one or two small governments default on debt, the world can probably accommodate the defaults pretty easily. But if problems spread to a large number of big countries (UK, United States, and Japan, for example), then international trade is likely to be disrupted, because many sellers of goods will find themselves without payment."
What if there’s much less coal than we think?
"Now, for those of you without a calendar: 2011 is soon! Think about it: 40 years from now, despite growth in population and energy demand, there will be about half as much coal available as there is now. That's a big relief for the atmosphere but serious trouble for, y'know, people."
When Will the Food Bubble Burst?
"The average temperature in Moscow for July was a scarcely believable 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm. Watching the heat wave play out over the seven-week period on the TV evening news, with the thousands of fires and smoke everywhere, was like watching a horror film. Over 56,000 people died in the extreme heat. Russia's 140 million people were in shock, traumatized by what was happening to them and their country."
Zen and the art of protecting the planet
"He is seeking to create a spiritual revival that replaces our consumption-based lives with a return to a simpler, kinder world based on deep respect for each other and the environment."
justfortheloveofit.org | Promoting Skillsharing
"The Freeconomy Community's aim is to help reconnect people in their local communities through the simple act of sharing."
war
A Middle East peace that could happen (but won't)
"These Israeli naval attacks began shortly after the discovery by the BG (British Gas) Group of what appear to be quite sizeable natural gas fields in Gaza's territorial waters."
America Is Detached From the War
"Now it's the United States whose UAVs are ever more powerfully weaponized. It's the United States that is developing a twenty-two-ton tail-less drone twenty times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. It's the Pentagon that is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700 percent over the next decade."
"Since World War I, it's been civilians who have most often born the disproportionate brunt of modern warfare. It's been ordinary people who have lived with war day after day."
Despite Drive to Cut Costs, Defense Programs Deemed Unnecessary May Prove Difficult to Kill
"Particularly in Ohio, where the vehicle would’ve been produced, lawmakers of both parties voiced opposition to the cuts, reported the Columbus Dispatch"
Did top Obama donor carry Israeli message to W.H.?
"[A] top Israeli general traveled to Chicago to ask a top Obama contributor and supporter of Israel, billionaire Lester Crown, to pressure the White House to take a tougher line on Iran."
Exclusive: Blackwater Wins Piece of $10 Billion Mercenary Deal
"Never mind the dead civilians. Forget about the stolen guns. Get over the murder arrests, the fraud allegations, and the accusations of guards pumping themselves up with steroids and cocaine. Through a “joint venture,” the notorious private-security firm Blackwater has won a piece of a five-year State Department contract worth up to $10 billion, Danger Room has learned. Apparently, there is no misdeed so big that it can keep guns-for-hire from working for the government. And this is despite a 2008 campaign pledge from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to ban the company from federal contracts."
For China, Will Money Bring Power?
"Uncle Sam did arm, of course, during the conflict with Spain and World War I, creating an outstanding Navy. But for the most part, the nation’s business was business."
"We can’t afford to forget now that the single biggest legacy of the Iraq war at home was to codify the illusion that Americans can have it all at no cost. We willed ourselves to believe Paul Wolfowitz when he made the absurd prediction that Iraq’s oil wealth would foot America’s post-invasion bills. We were delighted to accept tax cuts, borrow other countries’ money, and run up the federal deficit long after the lure of a self-financing war was unmasked as a hoax. The cultural synergy between the heedless irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq and our economic collapse at home could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down mortgage holders on Main Street and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that governed the fight-now-pay-later war. "
'We acknowledge our part in the deaths and injuries of your loved ones as we tell Americans what we were trained to do and what we carried out in the name of "god and country". The soldier in the video said that your husband shouldn't have brought your children to battle, but we are acknowledging our responsibility for bringing the battle to your neighborhood, and to your family. We did unto you what we would not want done to us.'
«In the case of the US empire, it has not continued to expand by territorial acquisition. The last territory acquired was the Marshall Islands in 1947, which then became a UN Trust Territory, followed by Independence in 1986. What has continued to expand is the presence of US military installations all over the world. As the recently deceased analyst Chalmers Johnson explained, the US is an “empire of bases”, not an empire of colonies. The US has 800-1000 foreign military bases and 4-5000 bases in the US.»
Prospects Abound Among the Kurds
"Critics say these former officials are cashing in on a costly and contentious war they played a role in. The way they see it, though, they have every right to fulfill the American dream after having left their government posts."
Q&A: Leaked War Logs Raise Questions of Accountability for Military Contractors
'It would appear that the only Geneva Convention mercenary test that these combatants fail is test (d): one is a mercenary according to that test if, in addition to passing the other tests, one “is neither a national of a Party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict”. So the only thing standing between, say, Blackwater (oh, sorry, Xe Services) combat employees and a legal status of mercenary is their US citizenship, and evidence indicates that companies like this do hire some non-citizens.'
The Iraq withdrawal: An Orwellian success
«Along these lines, officials have been boasting about the massive U.S. embassy in Baghdad. "Along with the Great Wall of China," said Ambassador Hill, "its one of those things you can see with the naked eye from outer space. I mean, it’s huge." Indeed. At 104 acres, it is the largest U.S. embassy in the world. In addition to six apartment buildings, it has a luxury pool, as well as a water and sewage treatment plant. Stop for a second and reflect on these last two amenities. They give you some measure of what American officials really know but aren’t saying about the state of drinking water and sanitation in Iraq.»
That poorly-edited sentence should instead read: "Oppressive regimes (that would be us) cannot tolerate even the idea that their rule is bad."
"[S]uccessive American administrations would blindly head down the very path that had led the Soviets to ruin. They would serially agree that, in a world without significant enemies, the key to US global power still was the care and feeding of the American military and the military-industrial complex that went with it. As the years passed, that military would be sent ever more regularly into the far reaches of the planet to fight frontier wars, establish military bases, and finally impose a global Pax Americana on the planet."
"Despite regular expectations that the United States will enjoy a peace dividend, we continue to spend more on the military than the countries with the next 15 largest military budgets combined. Such perpetual growth seems to confirm Eisenhower’s concern about the size and influence of the military."
«Moral culpability? It doesn't apply. Not to Americans—not unless they leak military secrets. None of the men responsible will ever look at their hands and experience an "out, damned spot!" moment. That's a guarantee. However, a young man who, it seems, saw the blood and didn't want it on his hands, who found himself "actively involved in something that I was completely against," who had an urge to try to end two terrible wars, hoping his act would cause "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms," will pay the price for them. He will be another body not to count in the collateral damage their wars have caused. He will also be collateral damage to the Afghan antiwar movement that wasn't.»
Will our generals ever shut up?
"In Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, you can see that Pentagon version of an American foreign policy straining to be born. In the end ... it could be stillborn, but it could also become an all-enveloping system offering Americans a ... vision of a world constantly at war and of the importance of planning for more of the same. To the extent that it now exists, it is dominated by the vision of figures who ... have a particularly constrained sense of American priorities, have been deeply immersed in the imperial mayhem that our wars have created, have left us armed to the teeth and flailing at ghosts and demons, and are still enmeshed in the process by which American treasure has been squandered to worse than no purpose in distant lands. Nothing in the record indicates that anyone should listen to what these men have to say. Nothing in the record indicates that Washington won't be all ears, the media won't remain an enthusiastic conduit, and Americans won't follow their lead."
Will the great recession lead to World War IV?
"Instead, elites on both sides of the Atlantic hope that the great recession will turn out to have been merely a particularly nasty business cycle downturn. They pray that soon we can return to something like the illusory prosperity of the late 1990s and 2000s without having to engage in any radical rethinking or reform. Our political and opinion leaders think they are leading us back home. They haven’t noticed, or refuse to admit, that what used to be home is now a large, smoking crater."
scan
Archbishop Tutu warns greed threatens environmental progress
«"Our desire to consume everything of value, to extract every precious stone, every drop of oil and every creature from the sea knows no bounds," said the Archbishop. "This quest for profit subverts our present and our future. There are too many people who are getting better and better at exploiting the environmental heritage which belongs to us all. We are not heading for an environmental disaster - we have already created one."»
Bernanke says U.S. economy needs more time to heal
"The U.S. economy is not fully recovered from its deep recession, with housing still weighing on growth, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Friday in a speech spelling out ways the U.S. central bank has studied lower income communities."
Bernanke signals no rush to reverse stimulus
«In a fresh quarterly forecast, the Fed revised down its growth estimate for 2011 to between 3.1 percent and 3.3 percent from the 3.4 percent to 3.9 percent it saw in January. It said the recovery was proceeding at a "moderate pace," a shift from March when it said it was on "firmer footing."»
"With an unemployment rate over 8 percent, the United States needs growth as desperately as at any moment since the early 1980s."
Changes may spur Middle East growth if populism set aside
"The changes that have swept across the Arab world could usher in a new era of economic growth after years of inequality and joblessness, economists say, if leaders can resist pressure from the very protesters whose rage has reshaped the region."
Does anyone actually know how to fix the economy?
"Four major positions are represented in the debate: supply-side conservatives, fiscal conservatives, neoliberals and progressives. The last three -- fiscal conservatives, neoliberals and progressives -- make valid and important points. But none has a persuasive vision of how to promote long-term American growth and equity."
Earthquake Damage at Plants Affects Quarterly Income at Texas Instruments
"The chip maker Texas Instruments said Monday that production setbacks linked to the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan curbed its first-quarter net income and would cut into second-quarter growth."
Economic growth slows, inflation surges
"Economic growth braked sharply in the first quarter as higher food and gasoline prices dampened consumer spending and sent inflation rising at its fastest pace in 2-1/2 years."
G20 eyes anti-crisis plan, mulls recovery risks
«"Despite the risks in oil, the financial challenges still facing parts of Europe, despite what's happened in Japan ... what you see is gradual healing, gradual strengthening in confidence that the world economy is going to be growing at a reasonable rate," he insisted.»
G20 tackles global economy; China unswayed on yuan
"The challenge of getting the Group of 20 to agree on how to spot and fix dangers to global growth comes as policymakers are worried about more immediate threats -- high oil prices, huge debts in some rich nations and unrest in the Middle East."
Happiness is a growing economy
"Steady as she goes. As anticipation builds over Friday's jobs report from the U.S. government, more data is emerging pointing to what looks like sustainable growth in the real U.S. economy."
Inflation in China Poses Big Threat to Global Trade
"Because China is now the world’s second largest economy, after the United States, and because the country has been a leading source of global growth during the last two years, money problems here can reverberate from Wal-Mart to Wall Street and the world beyond."
Jobless claims fall, retail sales stronger
"New claims for jobless benefits fell last week and retailers racked up much stronger-than-expected sales in March, signs that high fuel prices have not knocked the economy off its growth path."
Joblessness, rising prices could spark war within
The end of this article has a rapid-fire exposition about growth that could be useful.
Kicking the economy when it is down
“Which brings us to a point that many government number crunchers are seizing upon: Cutbacks in government spending -- local, state and federal -- shaved 1.09 percent off the growth rate. Plug that spending back in and you've got almost 3.0 percent GDP growth, which is perfectly respectable.”
Obama: Republicans push vision of "shrunken America"
«"We've got a lot of work to do to continue to lower the unemployment rate and grow the economy," Obama said.»
Remarks by the President After Meeting with House Republican and Senate Democratic Leadership
"We’re not going to cut those things that we think are absolutely vital to the growth of the American economy and putting people back to work."
Royal wedding no tonic for fragile UK recovery
"Investec economist Philip Shaw reckons the royal nuptials will knock a quarter of a percentage point off second-quarter GDP growth -- not good news given that Britain's economy has essentially stagnated since September."
Slow Payers Hinder Trade in Europe
"With much of Europe still caught in an economic slump and several countries weighing down the bloc’s growth prospects because of huge sovereign debt problems of their own, E.U. officials are starting to circulate proposals for fixing this comparatively simple problem, in hopes of yielding a quick, cost-free stimulus to Europe’s financial health."
Stimulus by Fed Is Disappointing, Economists Say
"The Fed generally encourages growth by pushing down interest rates."
«Did he have to praise Congress for enacting “the largest annual spending cut in our history,” as if shortsighted budget cuts in the face of high unemployment — cuts that will slow growth and increase unemployment — are actually a good idea?»
U.S. Economic Growth Slows to 1.8% Rate in Quarter
"American economic expansion slowed to a crawl in the first quarter, but economists are hopeful that the setback will be temporary. Total output grew at an annual rate of 1.8 percent from January through March, the Commerce Department said Thursday, after expanding at a 3.1 percent pace in the fourth quarter of 2010."
Vandana Shiva and Maude Barlow on the Rights of Mother Earth
"And this is so-called green economy, as it is seen by the powerful in our world, is basically no change, continued unlimited growth, continued unlimited free trade agreements, continued unregulated investment of the type that’s taking place with the land grab in Africa, but with a green technology. So we’ll just substitute that dirty old technology, which of course they’re not, because the tar sands is the dirty old technology, and that’s what they’re building it on. So it’s just language around caring for the earth."
World trade to carry crisis scars into 2012: WTO
"World trade will carry the scars of the financial crisis into 2012, the World Trade Organization said on Thursday, predicting 6.5 percent growth for this year, a rate much more modest than last."
utility
Rich, no frills code pasting collaboration utility
"We wanted to illustrate something that people in rural America have known for a long time: family farms are being replaced by factory farms, and these facilities are overwhelming some regions of the country."
Freshmeat is a software directory.
"The Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) is a growing network of sustainable communities and initiatives that bridge different cultures, countries, and continents. GEN serves as umbrella organization for ecovillages, transition town initiatives, intentional communities, and ecologically-minded individuals worldwide."
"At Hello Congress, every Senator and Representative gets their own site where their staff can request research, search our briefing room of over 2000 documents and talking points, and track the priorities of their constituents in one simple dashboard."
"Local Food Cleveland is an action network for everyone who is passionate about growing a thriving local food economy and culture around Cleveland, OH."
OneLook provides dictionary search across a number of online dictionaries, as well as a reverse dictionary (look up a word by its definition).
"The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web."
Sam Spade provides a suite of network probing tools for manual, web-based use.
StreetBank - Lending, Giving Away, Skills
"Streetbank is a site that helps you share and borrow things from your neighbours."
The Diceware Passphrase Home Page
"This page offers a better way to create a strong, yet easy to remember passphrase for use with encryption and security programs."
The Early American Foreign Service Database
"The Early American Foreign Service Database ... traces the U.S. Foreign Service from its early attempts at supplying the Continental Army during the American Revolution through the establishment of U.S. embassies in South America."
"The Freecycle Network™ ... [is] a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns."
The ultimate climate change FAQ
"Building the definitive guide to climate change, covering science, politics and economics"
"Transition Network's role is to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities as they self-organise around the transition model, creating initiatives that rebuild resilience, reduce CO2 emissions."
Transparency: What Is the Easiest Way to Power a Lightbulb
"How much energy—whether electric, coal, nuclear, or otherwise—is required for a 100-watt lightbulb to run for a year, 24 hours a day? See the answer in our latest infographic."
"White House 2 is a multi-partisan network ... imagining how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people over the internet."
"The WordReference Dictionaries are free online translation dictionaries." ... for Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese
justfortheloveofit.org | Promoting Skillsharing
"The Freeconomy Community's aim is to help reconnect people in their local communities through the simple act of sharing."
Faith
"A searchable online Bible in over 35 languages and 50 versions."
The Blue Letter Bible provides online Biblical research tools.
New Advent provides access to an assortment of historical Christian writing as well as regularly updated news in an accessible manner.
Benedictine Order of Cleveland
"This site has over 5,800 Christian hymns & Gospel songs from many denominations."
Theological Clowning ...a website dedicated to JPII's theology of the body
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
This site includes Catholic news and access to the Bible and the Catechism.
This site organizes and presents the daily Liturgy of the Hours.
"Worshipping (literally, putting our trust in) Jesus should and can open up a whole new way of life to Christians."
Cleveland
Farm to grow crops, economic development in Cleveland's Ohio City
"Six vacant acres of Cleveland's West Side neighborhood, just blocks from cutting-edge restaurants and the venerated West Side Market, are turning to a fresh food project and a plow."
Crafts
Art
Shirotsuki is a manga deviantARTist with a great sense of warmth, light, and texture, and a strong emotional expressivity to her characters.
daily
Center for Investigative Reporting
"Founded in 1977, the Center for Investigative Reporting is the nation's oldest nonprofit investigative news organization, producing multimedia reporting that has impact and is relevant to people's lives."
"GovTrack Insider takes you inside the legislative process on Capitol Hill."
Planet Open Government Open Source Hacking
"This site aggregates blogs from the open government technology community and public sector bloggers on related topics in the United States."
A collection of feeds from a variety of commentators on RDF-related issues.
A collection of feeds from a variety of commentators on XML-related issues.
ProPublica - Journalism in the Public Interest
'ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.'
"Thomson Reuters is the world's largest international multimedia news agency, providing investing news, world news, business news, technology news, headline news, small business news, news alerts, personal finance, stock market, and mutual funds information available on Reuters.com, video, mobile, and interactive television platforms. Thomson Reuters journalists are subject to an Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests."
"SecurityFocus is a vendor-neutral site that provides objective, timely and comprehensive security information to all members of the security community ..."
Talking Points Memo | Breaking News and Analysis
"The site specializes in original reporting on government and politics and offers breaking news coverage, investigative reporting, high profile guest bloggers and a book club."
Tracking news, views, and conversations in 11,860 towns and neighborhoods
This site organizes and presents the daily Liturgy of the Hours.
Entertainment
"The art of film and television music"
News on movies, DVD releases, and related events.
"the web's best television resource"
Software
1060 NetKernel is a resource oriented microkernel and RESTful application server created from the convergence and unification of the powerful fundamental concepts found in the World Wide Web and Unix.
A Legal Issues Primer forOpen Source and Free Software Projects
AbiWord is a Freed Software word-processing application.
"AirSnort is a wireless LAN (WLAN) tool which recovers encryption keys. AirSnort operates by passively monitoring transmissions, computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered."
Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN)
"The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network is the authoritative place to find TeX-related material for download."
Conglomerate: XML For Everyone
"Conglomerate aims to be an XML editor that everyone can use."
"With FUSE it is possible to implement a fully functional filesystem in a userspace program."
Facebook Seattle Engineering Road Show: Mike Shroepfer on Engineering at Scale at Facebook
Freshmeat is a software directory.
"Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows."
This is the web site for Inkscape, a Free Software vector graphics utility.
Insecure.org - The nmap homepage
"Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free open source utility for network exploration or security auditing."
"Jabber: Open Instant Messaging and a Whole Lot More, Powered by XMPP"
"KNOPPIX is a bootable Live system on CD or DVD, consisting of a representative collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals."
"The keychain script makes handling RSA and DSA keys both convenient and secure. It acts as a front-end to ssh-agent, allowing you to easily have one long-running ssh-agent process per system, rather than per login session."
"Kismet is an 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system."
"Knoppix.net is a resource for users, developers, and testers of Knoppix."
"You can use LaTeX to typeset letters, both personal and business. The letter document style is designed to make a number of letters at once, although you can make just one if you so desire."
"MOSIX is a management system that allows a Linux cluster or a Grid to perform like a single computer with multiple processors."
This is the homepage for ReiserFS and a number of other resources surrounding the technical aspects of naming and resource management.
"The 'Nessus' Project aims to provide to the Internet community a free, powerful, up-to-date and easy to use remote security scanner."
"OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project."
This is the home page of John the Ripper, Openwall GNU/*/Linux, and several other pieces of security-related software.
PVS Specification and Verification System
"PVS is a verification system: that is, a specification language integrated with support tools and a theorem prover. It is intended to capture the state-of-the-art in mechanized formal methods ..."
"a stealthy system for network authentication across closed ports"
"PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system."
RDFHomepage generates a web site from a set of RDF sources, including FOAF.
"Web-based presentation software."
"Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events."
'The SYSLINUX Project covers lightweight bootloaders for floppy media (SYSLINUX), network booting (PXELINUX), and bootable "El Torito" CD-ROMs (ISOLINUX).'
Subversion is version control software that is similar to CVS in many concepts, but is easier and cleaner to use.
TaskJuggler: Project Manager's Delight
TaskJuggler is Free Software for managing time and effort allocations for project workflow.
TeX4ht: LaTeX and TeX for Hypertext
"TeX4ht is a highly configurable TeX-based authoring system for producing hypertext."
"Terminator is a cross-platform GPL terminal emulator with advanced features not yet found elsewhere."
"DB2LaTeX are a set of XSLT stylesheets which generate high level LaTeX2e from your docbook document."
"GnuPG is the GNU project's complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC2440."
The High-Availability Linux Project
"The basic goal of the High Availability Linux project is to provide a high-availability (clustering) solution for Linux which promotes reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) through a community development effort."
"Twisted is an event-driven networking framework written in Python and licensed under the MIT license."
Unison is an excellent cross-platform backup and synchronization utility.
Version Control with Subversion
"This is the online home of Version Control with Subversion, a free book about Subversion, a new version control system designed to supplant CVS."
"If Vim is your main text editor, and if you do a lot of XML editing, then this howto might help you to make that even more fun."
"VimOutliner's purpose is to give Linux users a fast and productive outliner in a reasonable timeframe."
"Wireshark is one of the world's foremost network protocol analyzers ..."
This is the home page for the XMLmind XML Editor, which is a powerful, proprietary, general-purpose front-end for human editing of XML documents. It provides a CSS-styled view of documents being edited.
irssi: the client of the future
"Irssi is a terminal based IRC client for UNIX systems."
mairix - email index and search tool
"mairix is a program for indexing and searching email messages stored in Maildir (see the documentation section below), MH or mbox folders."
runit - a UNIX init scheme with service supervision
"runit is a cross-platform Unix init scheme with service supervision, a replacement for sysvinit, and other init schemes."
Computers
"A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on techniques and benefits of designing with web standards."
"An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting"
Alan Cox on writing better software
Alan Cox provides a high-level perspective on a number of items that could be useful for producing better software.
Applied Computer Security Associates (ACSA)
This is the ACSA website; it also covers their annual conference - the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC). This website provides several good security resources and references.
Art of Assembly Language Programming and HLA by Randall Hyde
"This page shows common errors that Bash programmers make."
Bibliographic Ontology Specification
"The Bibliographic Ontology Specification provides main concepts and properties for describing citations and bibliographic references (i.e. quotes, books, articles, etc) on the Semantic Web." This project started on 2007-04-14.
Big Picture of the XML Family of Specifications by Ken Sall
This is a graphical map depicting the various members of the XML family of specifications.
A set of free fonts from the Gnome project.
"This document attempts to answer Frequently Asked Questions about Compact Disc Recordable technology and related fields."
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures from MITRE
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is a list of standardized names for vulnerabilities and other information security exposures..."
"The following is a large collection of stories and anecdotes about clueless computer users."
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Python
"This book is about the fundamentals of data structures and algorithms... The algorithms and data structures in the book are presented in the Python programming language."
DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide
This is a thorough manual for using and customizing the DocBook XSL software.
"This is the official home page for DocBook: The Definitive Guide."
Document/schema association proposal
This is a message from James Clark describing a proposal for a language for associating an XML document with a schema.
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
Dublic Core provides a set of RDF schemata for basic and broad concepts.
"Information Technology News, Computer Networking & Security"
InterPlaNetary Internet Project
"The objective of [this] project is to define the architecture and protocols necessary to permit interoperation of the Internet resident on Earth with other remotely located internets resident on other planets or spacecraft in transit."
'The purpose of iusmentis.com is, put briefly, "to explain the law to techies, and tech to laywers."'
Joint Task Force - Global Network Operations
"The JTF-GNO directs the operation and defense of the Global Information Grid across strategic, operational, and tactical boundaries in support of DoD’s full spectrum of war fighting, intelligence, and business operations."
"KernelTrap is a web community devoted to sharing the latest in kernel development news."
"LWN.net aims to be the premier news and information source for the free software community."
"The Original Monthly Magazine of the Linux Community"
"The Central Voice for Linux and Open Source Security News"
This is "an index of information and documentation of interest to those who now use or are considering using Linux on a notebook or laptop computer."
This site gathers information and references about Literate Programming.
"The MARC formats are standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form."
Network Sorcery provides an index to Internet specifications, including RFCs.
"The OASIS PKI Member Section was established ... to foster support for standards-based, interoperable public-key infrastructure (PKI) as a foundation for secure transactions in e-business applications."
"PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML."
Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems research group at MIT CSAIL
"Python® is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development."
RELAX NG is a schema language for XML.
Sam Spade provides a suite of network probing tools for manual, web-based use.
"SecurityFocus is a vendor-neutral site that provides objective, timely and comprehensive security information to all members of the security community ..."
SemWebCentral: Open Source Tools for the Semantic Web
"SemWebCentral is an Open Source development web site for the Semantic Web."
Softpanorama: (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society
"This is a self-education oriented CS site that contains resources for the independent study in computer science and programming."
"Security Response provides ... world-class analysis and protection from viruses, blended threats, security risks and vulnerabilities."
TDWG PublicationCitation LSID Ontology
"Ontology describing the metadata returned for LSIDs that are used for publication citations."
Ten easy ways to attract women to your free software project
The Diceware Passphrase Home Page
"This page offers a better way to create a strong, yet easy to remember passphrase for use with encryption and security programs."
"The DocBook Project supports the open-source development of a variety of DocBook resources; in particular, the DocBook XSL stylesheets."
The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP)
TLDP organizes the development of a large body Freed Documentation about computing, and Linux in particular.
"Wiretapped is an archive of software and information covering the areas of host, network and information security, network operations, cryptography and privacy, among others."
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
The W3C is a standards body responsible for development of specifications for basic Web technologies.
Commerce
Remaining bookmarks
Africa
Smartphones: Blood stains at our fingertips
"About 80 per cent of the world’s coltan is in Africa, and the vast majority of that store resides in war-torn Eastern Congo. With an estimated $25-trillion in potential value, Congo is, in terms of untapped mineral wealth, perhaps the richest country on Earth. However the country’s mineral trade is a complex and violent web. Rebel groups from within the Congo and neighbouring countries have set up shop around the coltan mines, sometimes with the implicit support of the local military – which experts note are sometimes little more than criminal warlords in uniform."
In Afghanistan, a Threat of Plunder
"Afghanistan is part of the last frontier for resource discovery — one of the 60 most impoverished countries, which account for around a quarter of the earth’s land but which have barely been prospected. Over the next decade, given high world commodity prices, the last frontier will be explored, creating more opportunities like that in Afghanistan. All these countries will need to resist the kind of plunder that has characterized resource-rich countries with weak governance."
Congo: The Sucking Vortex Where Africa's Heart Should Be
It is, of course, important to note the facts of the United States's imperial actions during the Cold War, but it is also extremely interesting to note Alex Perry's reactions in the comments. Also see <http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003328.html> for a synthesis.
In the Shadow of the Serengeti
"In recent years, there have been a number of government-orchestrated forcible dispossessions related to high-end safari ventures in northern Tanzania"
America
The Early American Foreign Service Database
"The Early American Foreign Service Database ... traces the U.S. Foreign Service from its early attempts at supplying the Continental Army during the American Revolution through the establishment of U.S. embassies in South America."
BSD
CSAIL
Dictionaries
"The WordReference Dictionaries are free online translation dictionaries." ... for Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese
OneLook provides dictionary search across a number of online dictionaries, as well as a reverse dictionary (look up a word by its definition).
The Jargon File is a collection of definitions of critical terms for geeks everywhere.
DocBook
"The DocBook Project supports the open-source development of a variety of DocBook resources; in particular, the DocBook XSL stylesheets."
"This is the official home page for DocBook: The Definitive Guide."
"DB2LaTeX are a set of XSLT stylesheets which generate high level LaTeX2e from your docbook document."
DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide
This is a thorough manual for using and customizing the DocBook XSL software.
Documentation
Version Control with Subversion
"This is the online home of Version Control with Subversion, a free book about Subversion, a new version control system designed to supplant CVS."
The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP)
TLDP organizes the development of a large body Freed Documentation about computing, and Linux in particular.
Haskell
IRC
irssi: the client of the future
"Irssi is a terminal based IRC client for UNIX systems."
Indiana
"Daniel McGowan is an environmental and social justice activist from New York City. He was charged in federal court on counts of arson, property destruction and conspiracy, all relating to two actions in Oregon in 2001." Also see <http://www.thenation.com/article/159161/gitmo-heartland> and the documentary "If A Tree Falls".
Java
Music
"The art of film and television music"
"This site has over 5,800 Christian hymns & Gospel songs from many denominations."
NAT
OS
Ohio
Despite Drive to Cut Costs, Defense Programs Deemed Unnecessary May Prove Difficult to Kill
"Particularly in Ohio, where the vehicle would’ve been produced, lawmakers of both parties voiced opposition to the cuts, reported the Columbus Dispatch"
PHP
"PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML."
Python
"Python Challenge is a game in which each level can be solved by a bit of (Python) programming."
"Python® is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development."
"Twisted is an event-driven networking framework written in Python and licensed under the MIT license."
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Python
"This book is about the fundamentals of data structures and algorithms... The algorithms and data structures in the book are presented in the Python programming language."
RDF
Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer
A lightweight, subject concept reference structure for the Web
"The mission of UniProt is to provide the scientific community with a comprehensive, high-quality and freely accessible resource of protein sequence and functional information." This is their new beta site, which includes excellent access to taxonomic RDF
Bibliographic Ontology Specification
"The Bibliographic Ontology Specification provides main concepts and properties for describing citations and bibliographic references (i.e. quotes, books, articles, etc) on the Semantic Web." This project started on 2007-04-14.
TDWG PublicationCitation LSID Ontology
"Ontology describing the metadata returned for LSIDs that are used for publication citations."
"Share your RDF documents with the World!"
SemWebCentral: Open Source Tools for the Semantic Web
"SemWebCentral is an Open Source development web site for the Semantic Web."
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
Dublic Core provides a set of RDF schemata for basic and broad concepts.
Dan Connolly discusses the Semantic Web and other Web Architectural issues.
RDFHomepage generates a web site from a set of RDF sources, including FOAF.
A collection of feeds from a variety of commentators on RDF-related issues.
SCOTUS
Can a Supreme Court seat be bought?
"For now, it seems possible that a group could pour an unlimited amount of money into a judicial nomination fight without any oversight whatsoever -- meaning that, were one to ask for recusal at a later date, it would be very difficult to prove what had been spent in the first place."
Science
The ultimate climate change FAQ
"Building the definitive guide to climate change, covering science, politics and economics"
«In the case of the US empire, it has not continued to expand by territorial acquisition. The last territory acquired was the Marshall Islands in 1947, which then became a UN Trust Territory, followed by Independence in 1986. What has continued to expand is the presence of US military installations all over the world. As the recently deceased analyst Chalmers Johnson explained, the US is an “empire of bases”, not an empire of colonies. The US has 800-1000 foreign military bases and 4-5000 bases in the US.»
Declining Energy Quality Could Be a Root Cause of Current Recession
«"If we aren't fundamentally changing the way we produce or consume energy now, don't expect the economy to grow as much as the past two decades," he says.» Ha! Good luck with that.
SearchEngines
South-America
The City that Ended Hunger :: Belo Horizonte, Brazil
"Through most of human evolution—except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years—Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm."
Supreme-Court
The bigger Clarence Thomas scandal
"Many experts, such as Gillers, think Scalia should have recused himself in the energy task force case, but -- in violation of the principle that no one can be his own judge -- Scalia got to decide that he thinks he's perfectly impartial, thank you very much. And that was that."
TODO
Despite Drive to Cut Costs, Defense Programs Deemed Unnecessary May Prove Difficult to Kill
"Particularly in Ohio, where the vehicle would’ve been produced, lawmakers of both parties voiced opposition to the cuts, reported the Columbus Dispatch"
City of Cleveland :: Sustainable Cleveland 2019 (SC2019)
"Cleveland will become a model of sustainability and will become a leader in the emerging green economy over the next nine years through the efforts of Sustainable Cleveland 2019."
The-Daily-Show
The Daily Show with Jon Steward - 2010-10-07 - Foreclosure Crisis
"Apparently now we have a foreclosure-based economy. We are fucked. And, the sad part is, Rube Goldberg himself could not have designed a more convoluted method to, in fact, fuck us."
URI
[RFC 3986] Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax
This document describes the general URI syntax.
VIM
"VimOutliner's purpose is to give Linux users a fast and productive outliner in a reasonable timeframe."
"If Vim is your main text editor, and if you do a lot of XML editing, then this howto might help you to make that even more fun."
XML
Conglomerate: XML For Everyone
"Conglomerate aims to be an XML editor that everyone can use."
"The DocBook Project supports the open-source development of a variety of DocBook resources; in particular, the DocBook XSL stylesheets."
"This is the official home page for DocBook: The Definitive Guide."
1060 NetKernel is a resource oriented microkernel and RESTful application server created from the convergence and unification of the powerful fundamental concepts found in the World Wide Web and Unix.
"DB2LaTeX are a set of XSLT stylesheets which generate high level LaTeX2e from your docbook document."
DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide
This is a thorough manual for using and customizing the DocBook XSL software.
Document/schema association proposal
This is a message from James Clark describing a proposal for a language for associating an XML document with a schema.
Big Picture of the XML Family of Specifications by Ken Sall
This is a graphical map depicting the various members of the XML family of specifications.
"If Vim is your main text editor, and if you do a lot of XML editing, then this howto might help you to make that even more fun."
RELAX NG is a schema language for XML.
This is the home page for the XMLmind XML Editor, which is a powerful, proprietary, general-purpose front-end for human editing of XML documents. It provides a CSS-styled view of documents being edited.
A collection of feeds from a variety of commentators on XML-related issues.
activism
Glenn Beck, economic terrorist
"Lerner talks about a coordinated week of protests against banks, culminating in civil disobedience at a J.P. Morgan Chase annual shareholder meeting. He also advises students and homeowners who want to renegotiate high interest rates or unfair terms to simply stop paying their loans -- 10 percent of people whose mortgages are more than their equity are spontaneously doing just that, judging that delays in foreclosures might keep them in their homes longer while they figure out what to do. Lerner also suggest states and cities, prodded by public workers, should likewise negotiate with banks for lower interest rates, rather than laying off workers."
"Daniel McGowan is an environmental and social justice activist from New York City. He was charged in federal court on counts of arson, property destruction and conspiracy, all relating to two actions in Oregon in 2001." Also see <http://www.thenation.com/article/159161/gitmo-heartland> and the documentary "If A Tree Falls".
Urge Obama to say “peak oil” on April 20
"[A]s the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill approaches on April 20, America’s biggest ever environmental disaster makes clear that from now on, oil will become more difficult to find and more expensive and risky to produce."
"I think it's very important that we use a general understanding of injustice to form a continuous community of resistance, though, so know that I do stand in solidarity with you as you protest."
Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
"The mission of CASSE is to advance the steady state economy, with stabilized population and consumption, as a policy goal with widespread public support."
A Conversation with Greenpeace's Kumi Naidoo
"I don't think environmental organizations will win the challenge of environmental justice on their own. I think it will only be won if environmental activism becomes more broad-based activism where environmentalism is located in a broader framework of social justice, economic justice and so on. The uncomfortable reality is that if we are to deliver the quality of life that folks in the US and other developed countries enjoy, and that the elites in other developing countries enjoy, we would need eight planets. Six to eight planets. Just think about that for a minute. Because even we in the progressive movement need to realize that if we are serious about creating a sustainable and just world for our kids and grandkids, we have to realize that we also have to challenge certain assumptions we have about our consumption patterns. And the inequality of consumption of stuff is just overwhelming."
A loving comment on "Online Petitions are a Sham"
'What these "low barrier to entry" actions do is allow people who care about an issue, but not enough to dedicate hours let alone years to it, a quick way to weigh in and be counted.'
We're Hot As Hell and We're Not Going to Take It Any More
"[W]e have to ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might possibly be able to get. If we're going to slow global warming in the very short time available to us, then we don't actually need an incredibly complicated legislative scheme that gives door prizes to every interested industry and turns the whole operation over to Goldman Sachs to run. We need a stiff price on carbon, set by the scientific understanding that we can't still be burning black rocks a couple of decades hence. That undoubtedly means upending the future business plans of Exxon and BP, Peabody Coal and Duke Energy, not to speak of everyone else who's made a fortune by treating the atmosphere as an open sewer for the byproducts of their main business."
"THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD is a screwball true story about two gonzo political activists who, posing as top executives of giant corporations, lie their way into big business conferences and pull off the world's most outrageous pranks. This peer-to-peer special edition of the film is unique: it is preceded by an EXCLUSIVE VIDEO of the Yes Men impersonating the United States Chamber of Commerce. Because the Yes Men are being sued for this stunt, p2p is the only way that this film will get seen. Please spread the word!"
"Who can deny that our American world is in trouble? Or that our troubles, like our wars, have a momentum of their own against which we generally no longer raise our voices in protest; that we have, in a sense, been disarmed as citizens? ... If the policies of these two disparate figures often have a tweedledum-and-tweedledee-ish look to them, then what we face is not specific party politics or individual style, but a system with its own steamroller force, and its own set of narrow, repetitive “solutions” to our problems. We also face an increasingly militarized, privatized government, its wheels greased by the funds of giant corporations, that now regularly seems to go about the business of creating new Katrinas."
'We acknowledge our part in the deaths and injuries of your loved ones as we tell Americans what we were trained to do and what we carried out in the name of "god and country". The soldier in the video said that your husband shouldn't have brought your children to battle, but we are acknowledging our responsibility for bringing the battle to your neighborhood, and to your family. We did unto you what we would not want done to us.'
Cassandra, the Ignored Prophet of Doom, Is a Woman for Our Times
"We are living in an age of Cassandra, in which experts and ordinary people are regularly grabbing the appropriate authorities by the lapels and warning them of impending disasters — almost invariably to no avail."
apple
assembler
audio
"Five reporters stumbled on what seems like a basic question: What is money? The unsettling answer they found: Money is fiction."
"The Spoken Alexandria Project is creating a free library of spoken word recordings, consisting of classics in the public domain and modern works (with permission)."
"LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain."
backup
"Strongspace is a secure place to gather, store, back-up and share any type of file with your co-workers, friends and family. You can upload, download and manage your files over SFTP (Secure FTP) or with any modern web browser."
Unison is an excellent cross-platform backup and synchronization utility.
banking
"Why would commercial banks hold $1 trillion more than they legally had to in reserves at the Fed, earning only 0.25 percent interest per year, and why would the Fed buy more than $1 trillion of mortgage securities of undisclosed quality in the marketplace?"
banking-industry
The Daily Show with Jon Steward - 2010-10-07 - Foreclosure Crisis
"Apparently now we have a foreclosure-based economy. We are fucked. And, the sad part is, Rube Goldberg himself could not have designed a more convoluted method to, in fact, fuck us."
bash
"This page shows common errors that Bash programmers make."
"An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting"
History of visited directories in BASH
This document describes a Bash shell script which enhances the `cd` command to allow for easy selection of a new directory based upon a history of previous working directories.
Power Shell Usage: Bash Tips & Tricks
Power Shell Usage is a presentation which describes how to get more out of day-to-day use of the bash shell.
bibliographies
Bibliographic Ontology Specification
"The Bibliographic Ontology Specification provides main concepts and properties for describing citations and bibliographic references (i.e. quotes, books, articles, etc) on the Semantic Web." This project started on 2007-04-14.
TDWG PublicationCitation LSID Ontology
"Ontology describing the metadata returned for LSIDs that are used for publication citations."
"The MARC formats are standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form."
biking
biology
"The mission of UniProt is to provide the scientific community with a comprehensive, high-quality and freely accessible resource of protein sequence and functional information." This is their new beta site, which includes excellent access to taxonomic RDF
bookmark-management
books
"Off the Grid": The growing appeal of going off the grid
"It’s a desire to get out from under the thumb of corporate America. You look around for things that you can do to make your world a better place and as an environmentalist, everything that's green is likely to be greenwashed. Every corporation seems to be telling us that we can be green if we use their product and deep down we know it’s nonsense."
"The Flooded Earth": Which of our cities can be saved?
"In his new book ... Peter D. Ward, a professor of biology and earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, takes a look at what the latest predictions in sea rise will mean for the future of human civilization. In the coming decades, he argues, vast swaths of agricultural land will be ruined by encroaching salt water; the increasingly ice-free lands of Greenland and Antarctica will become contested and ever-more valuable, and our coastal cities' spiraling preservation costs will bleed our economies dry. The book is a beautifully written, thoroughly researched and relentlessly terrifying work, and a must-read for anybody with an interest in the environment or the future of our planet."
"The Spoken Alexandria Project is creating a free library of spoken word recordings, consisting of classics in the public domain and modern works (with permission)."
"LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain."
Book Search and Price Comparison
bootloader
'The SYSLINUX Project covers lightweight bootloaders for floppy media (SYSLINUX), network booting (PXELINUX), and bootable "El Torito" CD-ROMs (ISOLINUX).'
brief
The Struggles of New Graduates
A summary of "the problems new college graduates face in their first software development job."
capitalism
Lewis Lapham on "the end of capitalism"
"Q: Historically, what do you see as the dominant characteristics of America? A: It’s faith in the spirit and mechanics and moral value of capitalism. It is a country of expectant millionaires." "The capitalist idea is to turn loot to a productive purpose — to yoke it to the wheels of industry. ... We shape our tools, and our tools shape us. And by that shaping us, they shape our attitudes, our moral sense, our sense of self-interest. Competition is the spirit elixir of capitalism." "It’s the impertinent dynamism of ‘more’. It is a voracious, devouring appetite for more. And if we’re not careful, unless we get control of it, it will devour the earth. Capitalism had a particularly fertile soil in America because there was so much land available. People could just go west. Take land from the Indians by force. The same thing in Mexico. Call it Manifest Destiny, but it essentially was the seizure of property."
cataloging
censorship
"I think it's very important that we use a general understanding of injustice to form a continuous community of resistance, though, so know that I do stand in solidarity with you as you protest."
civilization
Where Was Luke Skywalker On September 11?
«When Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star, and James Bond killed the head villain, and Islamic secret agents, as the story goes, took down the World Trade Center, they were mythically enacting the same dark ritual that civilized humans have performed on natural humans, nonhumans, and each other for all of "history" and we're still not slowing down. It's the ritual performed in every war and genocide you could name, even the "war on illiteracy." It was performed on your soul by parents, teachers, employers, and television, or else you wouldn't be fit for this little world.»
cleveland
"Local Food Cleveland is an action network for everyone who is passionate about growing a thriving local food economy and culture around Cleveland, OH."
City of Cleveland :: Sustainable Cleveland 2019 (SC2019)
"Cleveland will become a model of sustainability and will become a leader in the emerging green economy over the next nine years through the efforts of Sustainable Cleveland 2019."
clothing
cluster
The High-Availability Linux Project
"The basic goal of the High Availability Linux project is to provide a high-availability (clustering) solution for Linux which promotes reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) through a community development effort."
"MOSIX is a management system that allows a Linux cluster or a Grid to perform like a single computer with multiple processors."
coalition
"Look at the list of things they agree on: Opposing corporate control of government, bloated military budgets, undeclared wars, corporate bailouts, invasion of civil liberties and civil rights, opposition to the USA PATRIOT Act, trade deals like NAFTA and WTO, stronger whistleblower protections, support for WikiLeaks, opposition to runaway deficits, and bringing transparency to the actions of the Federal Reserve and putting it under democratic control."
collaboration
"White House 2 is a multi-partisan network ... imagining how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people over the internet."
Rich, no frills code pasting collaboration utility
collapse
Zen and the art of protecting the planet
"He is seeking to create a spiritual revival that replaces our consumption-based lives with a return to a simpler, kinder world based on deep respect for each other and the environment."
The onset of catabolic collapse
«That’s the way civilizations end, and that’s the way ours is ending. The phrasing is deliberate: "is ending," not "will end." If I’m right, we’re already half a lifetime into the decline and fall of industrial civilization.»
color
comics
DC Comics Wiki
Marvel Comics Wiki
commented
Can gas prices doom the president?
"As we can see from that second graph, that tremendous and ongoing slide is not because we conscientiously decided to stop parasitically bleeding the Earth of the most versatile finite source of energy available so that we can hop in the car to catch a movie or buy sandals or basically enjoy whatever we want. No, now we make up the difference between our current production and our current consumption, a difference of about 12 million barrels per day, by ensuring that we get a smooth flow from the rest of the world. And we can see how that's going."
"What is the basis for our moral perspective on these facets of our existence? Does something uphold that moral perspective other than a belief?"
In Deep Water: Can we afford to spill any oil?
«I think it would be illuminating to include, along with that “proven reserves” circle, a circle on the same scale showing “total oil consumed, ever”. Based on the EIA’s World Petroleum Consumption, 1960-2007 table, the total oil consumed between 1960 and 2007 was 1,039,575 million barrels of oil.»
Proof Obama is not caving on regulation: The EPA
"Thus, depending on economic growth for societal stability while trying to put an upper limit on the amount of greenhouse gases that we emit are two fundamentally contradictory goals, and trying to base decisions on contradictory goals such as these will continue to lead to both economic and ecological disasters. We must resolve these contradictions before we can implement reasonable public policy."
The warning signs of trouble ahead
"I strongly encourage you to consider the related factors of a culture of growth, particularly economic growth, which can be seen as an uncompromising goal throughout the history of oligarchy; finite energy and other natural resources; and political instability."
"I think it's very important that we use a general understanding of injustice to form a continuous community of resistance, though, so know that I do stand in solidarity with you as you protest."
"Worshipping (literally, putting our trust in) Jesus should and can open up a whole new way of life to Christians."
Q&A: Leaked War Logs Raise Questions of Accountability for Military Contractors
'It would appear that the only Geneva Convention mercenary test that these combatants fail is test (d): one is a mercenary according to that test if, in addition to passing the other tests, one “is neither a national of a Party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict”. So the only thing standing between, say, Blackwater (oh, sorry, Xe Services) combat employees and a legal status of mercenary is their US citizenship, and evidence indicates that companies like this do hire some non-citizens.'
Immigration and Food/Water Politics
"... or if I'm a hunter-gatherer who lives on a river, fishing and hunting to feed myself, like a Native American or other aboriginal people, then it reads just like what civilization has been doing to the uncivilized since someone first thought civilization was a good idea ..."
'Thus we see that the terrifying problem of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the even larger problem of reducing our "dependence on petroleum" and "coal energy" are both symptoms of the still larger problem: a deeply rooted sense that we are entitled to exploit the world and one another in order to get ahead. This is what we must fight, with everything that we have.'
"Most people, including the billions of exploited poor, have been impressed with the story that they just need to work hard and cut a deal in order to be elevated to the exploiting class; or the less pleasant version of the story that tells them that even if they can't get that high, they still need to compete tooth and nail with their neighbors; or, at the most brutal edge of the story, that they will face displacement or murder (their choice) if they don't get out of the way of progress."
That poorly-edited sentence should instead read: "Oppressive regimes (that would be us) cannot tolerate even the idea that their rule is bad."
communication
irssi: the client of the future
"Irssi is a terminal based IRC client for UNIX systems."
mairix - email index and search tool
"mairix is a program for indexing and searching email messages stored in Maildir (see the documentation section below), MH or mbox folders."
"Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows."
"Jabber: Open Instant Messaging and a Whole Lot More, Powered by XMPP"
community
"Worshipping (literally, putting our trust in) Jesus should and can open up a whole new way of life to Christians."
«Side by side with these three crises – climate crisis, biodiversity crisis, energy crisis - goes the food crisis: In the global South, 1 billion people are currently suffering from undernourishment. Ironically, 2 billion people in the rich countries are suffering from diseases linked to eating unhealthy food in excessive quantities. Meanwhile, corporate pressure continues to impose consumer monoculture and monocultural agro-industrial practices that accelerate greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation and desertification processes and thus cause huge biodiversity losses, with terrible impacts on the lives of self-sufficient peoples and tribes who often are forced off their native land and into consumer lifestyles in the growing townships and suburbs. The new law for small farmers is “grow and get into debt or else perish”. It seems that we have a cultural problem. And this problem might be a civilisation problem.» Food sovereignty!
Online comments need moderation, not "real names"
"When you opened up comments, was it really about having a conversation with the readers? Then have that conversation!"
congress
"Even with his mistake, the Republicans are filibustering twice as often as Democrats have in any previous Congress - so they clearly are abusing the system."
The Democratic Party's deceitful game
"This is what the Democratic Party does; it's who they are. They're willing to feign support for anything their voters want just as long as there's no chance that they can pass it."
Senate sitting on 290 bills already passed by House; tension mounts
"Exasperated House Democratic leaders have compiled a list showing that they have passed 290 bills that have stalled in the Senate."
So You Wanna Reform The Filibuster? Here's How
"Here's the good news: reforming the filibuster -- technically speaking -- isn't that hard."
Why Washington Loves The Filibuster
"The belief that the filibuster is okay, but minority parties should just use it less often and start acting nicer is the equivalent of the belief that the financial system was totally fine, there just needs to be less greed and more caution."
What stands in the way of "forcing" a filibuster?
'[W]hile a "real" filibuster can result, all of the costs fall on the majority.'
"There's a lot of anger at the Senate"
"House Democrats think they've figured out the problem with healthcare reform: The Senate"
Filibuster 2.0: How 41 Senators Control The Country Without Actually Filibustering
'Majority Leader Harry Reid's office has studied the issue and concluded that a filibustering senator "can be forced to sit on the [Senate] floor to keep us from voting on that legislation for a finite period of time according to existing rules but he/she can't be forced to keep talking for an indefinite period of time."'
Why the filibuster is OK for Democrats but not for Republicans
"What's most striking, though, are the many cases in which the filibustering Senate minority has actually represented a majority of Americans."
Don't give in to media-inspired fatalism
'Not only has total paralysis been theoretically achieved, but our allegedly liberal "mainstream" news media treats it as entirely normal.'
consumerism
'Today, ... building budgets dwarf charitable budgets, and Jesus is portrayed as a genial suburban dude. “When we gather in our church building to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshipping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead, we may be worshipping ourselves.”'
containers
cryptography
"The OASIS PKI Member Section was established ... to foster support for standards-based, interoperable public-key infrastructure (PKI) as a foundation for secure transactions in e-business applications."
"GnuPG is the GNU project's complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC2440."
database
"PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system."
debt
Neither Krugman nor the targets of his criticism correctly identify the depth of the problems with debt.
"And, yes, we are talking about sacrifices. Anyone who doubts the suffering caused by slashing spending in a weak economy should look at the catastrophic effects of austerity programs in Greece and Ireland."
"Bond vigilantes are investors who pull the plug on governments they perceive as unable or unwilling to pay their debts. Now there’s no question that countries can suffer crises of confidence (see Greece, debt of). But what the advocates of austerity claim is that (a) the bond vigilantes are about to attack America, and (b) spending anything more on stimulus will set them off."
decline
“Those who care to look can easily turn up plenty of evidence that the value of every type of financial asset, not just fiat currency or debt instruments, is unsupported. Its value derives from the goods and services provided by a functioning global industrial economy, which is quickly running out of every type of resource it requires; not just high-EROEI fossil fuels, but also metals, rare earth elements, phosphate, irrigation water and arable land.”
democracy
"At Hello Congress, every Senator and Representative gets their own site where their staff can request research, search our briefing room of over 2000 documents and talking points, and track the priorities of their constituents in one simple dashboard."
"White House 2 is a multi-partisan network ... imagining how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people over the internet."
"Your Guide to the Money in U.S. Elections"
"The Nation's most complete resource for information on money in state politics"
Center for Media and Democracy
"[The CMD] include[s] PR Watch, a quarterly investigative journal; six books by CMD staff; Spin of the Day; the Weekly Spin listserv; and, Congresspedia and SourceWatch"
design
"A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on techniques and benefits of designing with web standards."
directory
"The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web."
Freshmeat is a software directory.
disaster
Hungary's toxic sludge of aluminum doom
"Bauxite, the ore from which aluminum is derived, is one of Hungary's main natural resources, and the state has been smelting the metal on an industrial scale since World War II. And no matter who runs the show, commissar or CEO, there's no getting around the fact that processing bauxite ore into aluminum is a nasty, nasty business, and has been so since the 1880s, when the Austrian chemist Karl Bayer figured out an efficient way to do so."
distributed-systems
distributions
"Knoppix.net is a resource for users, developers, and testers of Knoppix."
"KNOPPIX is a bootable Live system on CD or DVD, consisting of a representative collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals."
documentation
"The way that I would like to represent a program is something more like a hypertext story."
This site gathers information and references about Literate Programming.
education
In School Outreach, BP and NOAA Dispel Myths' About Dispersants, Subsurface Oil
"[R]epresentatives of BP and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have reached out to local schools to “dispel myths” about dispersants and subsurface oil ... During one demonstration, reported the Tri-Parish Times, a BP representative asked the students questions about the oil spill. Students who answered correctly received a BP hat or pen as a prize."
"[M]y students were learning to think, an aspiration reputedly revered but actually despised at all the large, research-oriented institutions with which I am familiar. Real education makes people dangerous. They might go so far as to question the obedience-at-home, oppression-abroad mentality requisite to propping up an empire."
Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech
"I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer - not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition - a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave."
Mutual Fund Education Alliance - Investor's Center
"The Mutual Fund INVESTOR'S CENTER™ is designed to serve as an important resource for investors who want to use mutual funds to reach their financial goals."
"a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world"
energy
ZUBRIN: Rising oil prices threaten economic crash
Paragraph 4 provides an excellent synopsis of the links between energy and the economy. Then paragraph 9 draws a terrible (and very common) conclusion.
In Deep Water: Can we afford to spill any oil?
«I think it would be illuminating to include, along with that “proven reserves” circle, a circle on the same scale showing “total oil consumed, ever”. Based on the EIA’s World Petroleum Consumption, 1960-2007 table, the total oil consumed between 1960 and 2007 was 1,039,575 million barrels of oil.»
Got Food? Consider yourself lucky
«We have unconsciously sacrificed our collective humanity and devalued our lives on the altar of a counterfeit economy that picks “winners” and “losers” based on global forces that are far beyond our immediate control. The never ending demands placed on us in an economy deemed “too big to fail” and too presumptuous to think it could ever stop growing, have now pushed America to a critical point in history.»
Urge Obama to say “peak oil” on April 20
"[A]s the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill approaches on April 20, America’s biggest ever environmental disaster makes clear that from now on, oil will become more difficult to find and more expensive and risky to produce."
High Food Prices Threaten Growth of Energy Crops in Britain
"WSP calculated that planting energy crops on a fifth of Britain’s arable land would meet just 10 percent of the British heating demand."
Peak Oil And Population Decline
"Peak oil basically means peak food. Without mechanization, irrigation, and synthetic fertilizer, crop yields drop considerably, and famine is inevitable. Over the next few decades, the survivors will be those who have mastered the art of subsistence farming. Ultimately, however, it may be that the Paleolithic practice of foraging, with a greatly reduced population, is the only way of life that can be extended for millennia."
It's official: The economy is set to starve
Looking for a single good quote in this article is hard, because almost the entire article is quote worthy. You need to read this article!
Transparency: What Is the Easiest Way to Power a Lightbulb
"How much energy—whether electric, coal, nuclear, or otherwise—is required for a 100-watt lightbulb to run for a year, 24 hours a day? See the answer in our latest infographic."
Declining Energy Quality Could Be a Root Cause of Current Recession
«"If we aren't fundamentally changing the way we produce or consume energy now, don't expect the economy to grow as much as the past two decades," he says.» Ha! Good luck with that.
Charles Maxwell Forecasts Peak Oil in Seven Years
From the referenced article: "We're obviously in an unsustainable situation. We are now using up a greater number of barrels that we have found in the recent past and that we have reserved in the ground. We are now beginning to use it up relatively quickly--with scary consequences for the future."
The Peak Oil Crisis: Is $50 Oil in the Offing?
"For Americans, the middle name of our civilization is growth - in jobs, population, economic production, and more importantly personal and public wealth. To imply that the future, both immediate and distant, has anything in store but a return to endless economic growth is the worst kind of heresy. In some circles, the mantra of growth at any costs approaches an intensity unknown outside of religious fanaticism."
German Military Study Warns of Potential Energy Crisis
"This week a study on peak oil by a German military think tank was leaked on the Internet. The document shows that the German government is closely studying the issue of peak oil, and is aware of the potential for serious consequences as oil production declines."
"Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself. The relative pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being."
What if there’s much less coal than we think?
"Now, for those of you without a calendar: 2011 is soon! Think about it: 40 years from now, despite growth in population and energy demand, there will be about half as much coal available as there is now. That's a big relief for the atmosphere but serious trouble for, y'know, people."
Big Oil Makes War on the Earth
"If you live on the Gulf Coast, welcome to the real world of oil—and just know that you're not alone. In the Niger Delta and the Ecuadorian Amazon, among other places, your emerging hell has been the living hell of local populations for decades."
Prospects Abound Among the Kurds
"Critics say these former officials are cashing in on a costly and contentious war they played a role in. The way they see it, though, they have every right to fulfill the American dream after having left their government posts."
"Losing Our Cool": The high price of staying cool
"Nine out of 10 new homes in this country are built with central air conditioning, and Americans now use as much electricity to power our A.C. as the entire continent of Africa uses for, well, everything."
What happens when energy resources deplete?
"If only one or two small governments default on debt, the world can probably accommodate the defaults pretty easily. But if problems spread to a large number of big countries (UK, United States, and Japan, for example), then international trade is likely to be disrupted, because many sellers of goods will find themselves without payment."
"THAT A DISTINCTION can usefully be drawn between wants and needs seems obvious. Mainstream economics, however, refuses to countenance such a distinction."
Citizens trump BP shareholders
"Get it? There's no conflict between Britain and the United States. The conflict is between two kinds of interests -- shareholder interests and citizen interests."
Ken Salazar, corporatism and the BP oil spill
"Yet who did Obama choose to head the Interior Department? Ken Salazar, notorious for being beholden to the very industries he would be regulating."
Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force
"A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress."
"Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources."
Murkowski Blocks Bill to Raise Oil Companies' Liability for Spills
Here is another shard of evidence demonstrating how corporations (in this case the oil industry) influence government.
"If you are searching for the perfect metaphor to describe humanity's 21st century plight -- an energy-hungry and energy-dependent civilization occupying a resource-constrained planet -- then you need look no further than at a satellite photo of the giant spreading oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico. That massive hydrocarbon stain is our collective scarlet letter, the price we pay for a lifestyle of extraordinary affluence and comfort -- at least as compared to most of the humans who have ever lived."
"In 2003, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service considered mandating the devices, but decided against it under pressure from oil companies that complained that the $500,000 devices were too burdensome." 'It shouldn't take a spill of this magnitude to remind us that we are still far from "beyond petroleum." No amount of rebranding can change that.'
environment
Pressure Limits Efforts to Police Drilling for Gas
«“It was like the science didn’t matter,” Carla Greathouse, the author of the study, said in a recent interview. “The industry was going to get what it wanted, and we were not supposed to stand in the way.”»
In Deep Water: Can we afford to spill any oil?
«I think it would be illuminating to include, along with that “proven reserves” circle, a circle on the same scale showing “total oil consumed, ever”. Based on the EIA’s World Petroleum Consumption, 1960-2007 table, the total oil consumed between 1960 and 2007 was 1,039,575 million barrels of oil.»
Saul Griffith: Climate Change Recalculated
"Engineer, environmentalist, and entrepreneur Saul Griffith examines the numerical reality of the fight against climate change."
Proof Obama is not caving on regulation: The EPA
"Thus, depending on economic growth for societal stability while trying to put an upper limit on the amount of greenhouse gases that we emit are two fundamentally contradictory goals, and trying to base decisions on contradictory goals such as these will continue to lead to both economic and ecological disasters. We must resolve these contradictions before we can implement reasonable public policy."
Egyptian Unrest: Why the Egyptian Uprising is Extremely Bad ...
"[W]hat's happening in Egypt right now is only a preview of things to come, and people need to understand the world that's just around the corner."
The ultimate climate change FAQ
"Building the definitive guide to climate change, covering science, politics and economics"
"Ecocide": The Fifth War Crime?
«Reaction from the pro-growth community has been predictably volatile. As one alarmed commentator on the conservative RedState.com saw it, the proposal was nothing less than an “activist’s war on private property, industrialization and the Free Market” that would impose “a restriction on our rights to personal wealth” and might even, God forbid, “prevent over-production and over-consumption.”»
'Thus we see that the terrifying problem of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the even larger problem of reducing our "dependence on petroleum" and "coal energy" are both symptoms of the still larger problem: a deeply rooted sense that we are entitled to exploit the world and one another in order to get ahead. This is what we must fight, with everything that we have.'
A visualization of "The Pressures of Consumption and Global Urbanization on Planetary Limits"
Hungary's toxic sludge of aluminum doom
"Bauxite, the ore from which aluminum is derived, is one of Hungary's main natural resources, and the state has been smelting the metal on an industrial scale since World War II. And no matter who runs the show, commissar or CEO, there's no getting around the fact that processing bauxite ore into aluminum is a nasty, nasty business, and has been so since the 1880s, when the Austrian chemist Karl Bayer figured out an efficient way to do so."
In School Outreach, BP and NOAA Dispel Myths' About Dispersants, Subsurface Oil
"[R]epresentatives of BP and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have reached out to local schools to “dispel myths” about dispersants and subsurface oil ... During one demonstration, reported the Tri-Parish Times, a BP representative asked the students questions about the oil spill. Students who answered correctly received a BP hat or pen as a prize."
A Conversation with Greenpeace's Kumi Naidoo
"I don't think environmental organizations will win the challenge of environmental justice on their own. I think it will only be won if environmental activism becomes more broad-based activism where environmentalism is located in a broader framework of social justice, economic justice and so on. The uncomfortable reality is that if we are to deliver the quality of life that folks in the US and other developed countries enjoy, and that the elites in other developing countries enjoy, we would need eight planets. Six to eight planets. Just think about that for a minute. Because even we in the progressive movement need to realize that if we are serious about creating a sustainable and just world for our kids and grandkids, we have to realize that we also have to challenge certain assumptions we have about our consumption patterns. And the inequality of consumption of stuff is just overwhelming."
Tropical forests were the primary sources of new agricultural land in the 1980s and 1990s
"Global demand for agricultural products such as food, feed, and fuel is now a major driver of cropland and pasture expansion across much of the developing world. Whether these new agricultural lands replace forests, degraded forests, or grasslands greatly influences the environmental consequences of expansion. Although the general pattern is known, there still is no definitive quantification of these land-cover changes. ... Across the tropics, we find that between 1980 and 2000 more than 55% of new agricultural land came at the expense of intact forests, and another 28% came from disturbed forests. This study underscores the potential consequences of unabated agricultural expansion for forest conservation and carbon emissions."
What if there’s much less coal than we think?
"Now, for those of you without a calendar: 2011 is soon! Think about it: 40 years from now, despite growth in population and energy demand, there will be about half as much coal available as there is now. That's a big relief for the atmosphere but serious trouble for, y'know, people."
Millions Of Barrels Of Oil Safely Reach Port In Major Environmental Catastrophe
"Experts are saying the oil tanker safely reaching port could lead to dire ecological consequences on multiple levels, including rising temperatures, disappearing shorelines, the eradication of countless species, extreme weather events, complete economic collapse, droughts that surpass the Dust Bowl, disease, wildfires, widespread human starvation, and endless, bloody wars fought over increasingly scarce resources."
"Since 1950, the study found, the oceans have lost 40 percent of their phytoplankton. As these organisms account for the production of half the earth’s organic matter, this is not good. It’s like finding out that there’s half as much money in all the earth’s banks as we thought there was. But of course it’s worse than that. No one knows for sure what happens when the oceans are diminished like this—that’s the point. We’re in a new and dangerous place, without a clue."
We're Hot As Hell and We're Not Going to Take It Any More
"[W]e have to ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might possibly be able to get. If we're going to slow global warming in the very short time available to us, then we don't actually need an incredibly complicated legislative scheme that gives door prizes to every interested industry and turns the whole operation over to Goldman Sachs to run. We need a stiff price on carbon, set by the scientific understanding that we can't still be burning black rocks a couple of decades hence. That undoubtedly means upending the future business plans of Exxon and BP, Peabody Coal and Duke Energy, not to speak of everyone else who's made a fortune by treating the atmosphere as an open sewer for the byproducts of their main business."
Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution
'What kind of life do you want, and what are you willing to do to get it? Keith Farnish, author of Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis, sees industrial civilization as the most destructive way of living yet devised by humans. And it’s over: environmental degradation and depletion tell us it can’t continue. The system has myriad ways to make us believe we can’t live without it. But Keith believes we can - there are countless ways to move forward into contented, happy, and full lives. We can “disengage” and reconnect with the natural world, ourselves, and others.' This guy gets it.
Big Oil Makes War on the Earth
"If you live on the Gulf Coast, welcome to the real world of oil—and just know that you're not alone. In the Niger Delta and the Ecuadorian Amazon, among other places, your emerging hell has been the living hell of local populations for decades."
The science behind climate science
"The urgent need to act cannot be overstated. Climate change caused by humans is already affecting our lives and livelihoods — with extreme storms, unusual floods and droughts, intense heat waves, rising seas and many changes in biological systems — as climate scientists have projected."
"The Flooded Earth": Which of our cities can be saved?
"In his new book ... Peter D. Ward, a professor of biology and earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, takes a look at what the latest predictions in sea rise will mean for the future of human civilization. In the coming decades, he argues, vast swaths of agricultural land will be ruined by encroaching salt water; the increasingly ice-free lands of Greenland and Antarctica will become contested and ever-more valuable, and our coastal cities' spiraling preservation costs will bleed our economies dry. The book is a beautifully written, thoroughly researched and relentlessly terrifying work, and a must-read for anybody with an interest in the environment or the future of our planet."
"Losing Our Cool": The high price of staying cool
"Nine out of 10 new homes in this country are built with central air conditioning, and Americans now use as much electricity to power our A.C. as the entire continent of Africa uses for, well, everything."
Judge Blocks Obama's Moratorium on Deep-Water Drilling
'Citing potential economic harm to businesses and workers, Judge Feldman wrote that the Obama administration had failed to justify the need for such “a blanket, generic, indeed punitive, moratorium” on deep-water oil and gas drilling.'
Citizens trump BP shareholders
"Get it? There's no conflict between Britain and the United States. The conflict is between two kinds of interests -- shareholder interests and citizen interests."
Hot Plate: An Interview With Anna Lappé
"[I]t’s important to add that we also need to go beyond just voting with our forks. We can do a lot as individuals, but individual action can’t, say, build a new energy infrastructure based on green fuel and mass transit through individual action. We need policy change to do that, and that will take working together collectively as citizens."
"In fact, our failure to confront global warming is more than simply political incompetence. Over the past year, the corporations and special interests most responsible for climate change waged an all-out war to prevent Congress from cracking down on carbon pollution in time for Copenhagen. The oil and coal industries deployed an unprecedented army of lobbyists, spent millions on misleading studies and engaged in outright deception to derail climate legislation."
The Spill, The Scandal and the President | Rolling Stone Politics
Ken Salazar, corporatism and the BP oil spill
"Yet who did Obama choose to head the Interior Department? Ken Salazar, notorious for being beholden to the very industries he would be regulating."
Experts rally to defense of climate science
"There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend."
"All of the collected fees would then be distributed to the public. Prudent people would use their dividend wisely, adjusting their lifestyle, choice of vehicle and so on. Those who do better than average in choosing less-polluting goods would receive more in the dividend than they pay in added costs."
"But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled--so they, too, started to take the checks."
"The community-built resource that focuses on alternative, clean, practical, renewable energy solutions."
‘Net Energy’ Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society
Sustainable Energy - without the hot air, by David MacKay
"to those who will not have the benefit of two billion years' accumulated energy reserves"
A Brighter Shade of Green: Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21st Century
The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq
"[N]ow when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years."
"Through credible and trusted scientific resources, Global Cool is determined to become your one-stop-shop for a cleaner, more energy efficient life – for many many years to come."
"The Freecycle Network™ ... [is] a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns."
"An Inconvenient Truth" is a Movie, a Book, a Political Platform, and an extremely important Message about the frightening reality of Global Warming that calls us all to action.
essays
Kicking the economy when it is down
“Which brings us to a point that many government number crunchers are seizing upon: Cutbacks in government spending -- local, state and federal -- shaved 1.09 percent off the growth rate. Plug that spending back in and you've got almost 3.0 percent GDP growth, which is perfectly respectable.”
Can gas prices doom the president?
"As we can see from that second graph, that tremendous and ongoing slide is not because we conscientiously decided to stop parasitically bleeding the Earth of the most versatile finite source of energy available so that we can hop in the car to catch a movie or buy sandals or basically enjoy whatever we want. No, now we make up the difference between our current production and our current consumption, a difference of about 12 million barrels per day, by ensuring that we get a smooth flow from the rest of the world. And we can see how that's going."
Does anyone actually know how to fix the economy?
"Four major positions are represented in the debate: supply-side conservatives, fiscal conservatives, neoliberals and progressives. The last three -- fiscal conservatives, neoliberals and progressives -- make valid and important points. But none has a persuasive vision of how to promote long-term American growth and equity."
“Those who care to look can easily turn up plenty of evidence that the value of every type of financial asset, not just fiat currency or debt instruments, is unsupported. Its value derives from the goods and services provided by a functioning global industrial economy, which is quickly running out of every type of resource it requires; not just high-EROEI fossil fuels, but also metals, rare earth elements, phosphate, irrigation water and arable land.”
«No one looking for sensible rather than sentimental or ideological reasons to believe in the possibility of human progress need look any further than the fact that, for the first time in human history, it is possible to imagine the end of famine. … To be sure, there are also many other things to say, other questions to ask--most notably why, if we are now so competent at dealing with famine, we are so incompetent at dealing with chronic malnutrition, which is getting no better, and in some cases is actually getting worse, even in democratic countries such as India that seem to have banished famine. The other three horsemen of the apocalypse will likely always be with us. But the possibility that we have seen the fourth horseman off for good is a reason for the most profound thankfulness.»
"With an unemployment rate over 8 percent, the United States needs growth as desperately as at any moment since the early 1980s."
«Did he have to praise Congress for enacting “the largest annual spending cut in our history,” as if shortsighted budget cuts in the face of high unemployment — cuts that will slow growth and increase unemployment — are actually a good idea?»
Glenn Beck, economic terrorist
"Lerner talks about a coordinated week of protests against banks, culminating in civil disobedience at a J.P. Morgan Chase annual shareholder meeting. He also advises students and homeowners who want to renegotiate high interest rates or unfair terms to simply stop paying their loans -- 10 percent of people whose mortgages are more than their equity are spontaneously doing just that, judging that delays in foreclosures might keep them in their homes longer while they figure out what to do. Lerner also suggest states and cities, prodded by public workers, should likewise negotiate with banks for lower interest rates, rather than laying off workers."
Billionaire self-pity and the Koch brothers
"There's no question in my mind that the unrestrained power over the political process and both political parties enjoyed by oligarchs is the single greatest political problem the country faces"
Got Food? Consider yourself lucky
«We have unconsciously sacrificed our collective humanity and devalued our lives on the altar of a counterfeit economy that picks “winners” and “losers” based on global forces that are far beyond our immediate control. The never ending demands placed on us in an economy deemed “too big to fail” and too presumptuous to think it could ever stop growing, have now pushed America to a critical point in history.»
Proof Obama is not caving on regulation: The EPA
"Thus, depending on economic growth for societal stability while trying to put an upper limit on the amount of greenhouse gases that we emit are two fundamentally contradictory goals, and trying to base decisions on contradictory goals such as these will continue to lead to both economic and ecological disasters. We must resolve these contradictions before we can implement reasonable public policy."
A Food Manifesto for the Future
"you can’t sell garbage while telling people not to eat it"
Egyptian Unrest: Why the Egyptian Uprising is Extremely Bad ...
"[W]hat's happening in Egypt right now is only a preview of things to come, and people need to understand the world that's just around the corner."
The warning signs of trouble ahead
"I strongly encourage you to consider the related factors of a culture of growth, particularly economic growth, which can be seen as an uncompromising goal throughout the history of oligarchy; finite energy and other natural resources; and political instability."
'Most disturbing to me, as a journalist who'd long worked for many of the same magazines and newspapers pushing the scandal but who lived in Arkansas, was realizing that the "mainstream media" had acquired property rights in the bogus narrative. Correcting the record was seen as vandalism.'
"Ecocide": The Fifth War Crime?
«Reaction from the pro-growth community has been predictably volatile. As one alarmed commentator on the conservative RedState.com saw it, the proposal was nothing less than an “activist’s war on private property, industrialization and the Free Market” that would impose “a restriction on our rights to personal wealth” and might even, God forbid, “prevent over-production and over-consumption.”»
"Despite regular expectations that the United States will enjoy a peace dividend, we continue to spend more on the military than the countries with the next 15 largest military budgets combined. Such perpetual growth seems to confirm Eisenhower’s concern about the size and influence of the military."
While Whacking Critics, Obama Gets Facts Wrong
«But, Obama's fairly large rounding error aside, the public option was not simply a matter of enrollees. What the president conspicuously disregarded was that the central point of the public option was that its existence would exert enormous competitive pressure on the private insurance system. The goal was not to serve a particularly large number of people directly -- that would only happen if the private offerings were terribly inadequate. The goal was to keep the private sector honest. So no matter how many people it enrolled, "the provision," as Obama put it "would have affected" tens of millions.»
Michael Bloomberg offers "middle way" to glorious new Gilded Age
«Bloomberg is peddling pure, naked corporatism, masquerading as "grown-up" non-ideological common sense. I'm guessing a lot of well-off self-proclaimed centrists will eat it up.»
The Peak Oil Crisis: The Future of Government
"What all those calling for reduced government fail to grasp, however, is that 200 years of cheap abundant fossil fuel energy has transformed this country into something completely different. Take food as an example, 200 years ago, some 90+ percent of us were involved in its raising or otherwise procuring food -- or we would simply not eat. Now, thanks to cheap fossil fuels, less than 3 percent of us are engaged in agricultural endeavors and I suspect only a fraction of our "farmers" still have all the requisite skills to feed themselves and their families in the style to which they have become accustomed. Take away the diesel for the tractors and farming is going to become mighty different. Has anyone yoked an ox lately?"
Happiness is a growing economy
"Steady as she goes. As anticipation builds over Friday's jobs report from the U.S. government, more data is emerging pointing to what looks like sustainable growth in the real U.S. economy."
The Man Who Shattered Our Economy
"Some guys have all the luck, particularly when they supply the dice."
«But for all the troubling questions it raises, there's one thing you can say about steady-state thinking: It is almost cosmically ambitious. Given how numb and static the world's economic arguments have become, no-growth theory is a rare beast: a vision of social change that is genuinely radical, almost jaw-droppingly so. Even talking about such ideas, Victor admits in his book, "could make a politician unelectable."»
"Camden is the poster child of postindustrial decay. It stands as a warning of what huge pockets of the United States could turn into as we cement into place a permanent underclass of the unemployed, slash state and federal services in a desperate bid to cut massive deficits, watch cities and states go bankrupt and struggle to adjust to a stark neofeudalism in which the working and middle classes are decimated." I also found this dramatic and extremely telling: "The city is busily cannibalizing itself in a desperate bid to generate revenue. ... There are about twenty scrap merchants in the city, and they have created a market for the metal guts of apartments and houses. ... Its huge shredding machines in the port can chop up automobiles and stoves into chunks the size of a baseball. Ships from Turkey, China and India pull into the port and take the scrap back to smelters in their countries." As our cities fall, others will literally mine them for their literally embodied resources.
Neither Krugman nor the targets of his criticism correctly identify the depth of the problems with debt.
Barack Obama: The oligarchs' president
"If the two parties both lie down for Wall Street in roughly equal measure, but fight viciously over other issues, it is possible to construct a stable strategic equilibrium. ... [T]he Democrats avoid the epic confrontation that would surely ensue if they were to take on the financial sector, which would retaliate with a massively funded effort. Instead, the two parties fight furiously, or at least pretend to fight furiously, about a wide range of other social issues that affect many voters deeply -- abortion, gay rights, gun control, stem cell research, creationism, global warming, health insurance and so on. Each side can credibly warn its base that if it deserts the party, apocalypse may follow. So, while some citizens may register as independents, or stop voting, or stop donating to the system, the entrenched establishments of both parties will remain safe."
"Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families."
"You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes."
The Peak Oil Crisis: Is $50 Oil in the Offing?
"For Americans, the middle name of our civilization is growth - in jobs, population, economic production, and more importantly personal and public wealth. To imply that the future, both immediate and distant, has anything in store but a return to endless economic growth is the worst kind of heresy. In some circles, the mantra of growth at any costs approaches an intensity unknown outside of religious fanaticism."
Where Was Luke Skywalker On September 11?
«When Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star, and James Bond killed the head villain, and Islamic secret agents, as the story goes, took down the World Trade Center, they were mythically enacting the same dark ritual that civilized humans have performed on natural humans, nonhumans, and each other for all of "history" and we're still not slowing down. It's the ritual performed in every war and genocide you could name, even the "war on illiteracy." It was performed on your soul by parents, teachers, employers, and television, or else you wouldn't be fit for this little world.»
"[T]he corruption of today is in plain sight. The mechanism of its reach is displayed to everyone. It is the simple and pervasive economy of influence that buys access and more through campaign cash. And then without explicit recognition, the actions of our government are guided by the understanding of how those acts will affect the opportunity to raise money. I'm sure no one in the White House had a second thought about how bizarre it was that the first deals the administration struck to get health care reform was with the insurance lobby and the pharmaceutical companies. Yet how many of the 69,456,987 votes that Obama received came from them? And so why is it so obvious that they get the first seats in the negotiation of what could be Obama's most important (and only?) significant legislative victory?"
Will our generals ever shut up?
"In Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, you can see that Pentagon version of an American foreign policy straining to be born. In the end ... it could be stillborn, but it could also become an all-enveloping system offering Americans a ... vision of a world constantly at war and of the importance of planning for more of the same. To the extent that it now exists, it is dominated by the vision of figures who ... have a particularly constrained sense of American priorities, have been deeply immersed in the imperial mayhem that our wars have created, have left us armed to the teeth and flailing at ghosts and demons, and are still enmeshed in the process by which American treasure has been squandered to worse than no purpose in distant lands. Nothing in the record indicates that anyone should listen to what these men have to say. Nothing in the record indicates that Washington won't be all ears, the media won't remain an enthusiastic conduit, and Americans won't follow their lead."
'Today, ... building budgets dwarf charitable budgets, and Jesus is portrayed as a genial suburban dude. “When we gather in our church building to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshipping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead, we may be worshipping ourselves.”'
"We can’t afford to forget now that the single biggest legacy of the Iraq war at home was to codify the illusion that Americans can have it all at no cost. We willed ourselves to believe Paul Wolfowitz when he made the absurd prediction that Iraq’s oil wealth would foot America’s post-invasion bills. We were delighted to accept tax cuts, borrow other countries’ money, and run up the federal deficit long after the lure of a self-financing war was unmasked as a hoax. The cultural synergy between the heedless irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq and our economic collapse at home could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down mortgage holders on Main Street and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that governed the fight-now-pay-later war. "
Busted: Stories of the Financial Crisis
"The evident irony is that greed—the self-interest of individuals, spread across the society—is exactly what's supposed to make capitalism work."
For China, Will Money Bring Power?
"Uncle Sam did arm, of course, during the conflict with Spain and World War I, creating an outstanding Navy. But for the most part, the nation’s business was business."
"Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself. The relative pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being."
"And, yes, we are talking about sacrifices. Anyone who doubts the suffering caused by slashing spending in a weak economy should look at the catastrophic effects of austerity programs in Greece and Ireland."
A loving comment on "Online Petitions are a Sham"
'What these "low barrier to entry" actions do is allow people who care about an issue, but not enough to dedicate hours let alone years to it, a quick way to weigh in and be counted.'
"Technology is essentially a form of service. We work to make the world better. Our inventions can ease burdens, reduce poverty and suffering, and sometimes even bring new forms of beauty into the world. We can give people more options to act morally, because people with medicine, housing and agriculture can more easily afford to be kind than those who are sick, cold and starving."
"[M]y students were learning to think, an aspiration reputedly revered but actually despised at all the large, research-oriented institutions with which I am familiar. Real education makes people dangerous. They might go so far as to question the obedience-at-home, oppression-abroad mentality requisite to propping up an empire."
We're Hot As Hell and We're Not Going to Take It Any More
"[W]e have to ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might possibly be able to get. If we're going to slow global warming in the very short time available to us, then we don't actually need an incredibly complicated legislative scheme that gives door prizes to every interested industry and turns the whole operation over to Goldman Sachs to run. We need a stiff price on carbon, set by the scientific understanding that we can't still be burning black rocks a couple of decades hence. That undoubtedly means upending the future business plans of Exxon and BP, Peabody Coal and Duke Energy, not to speak of everyone else who's made a fortune by treating the atmosphere as an open sewer for the byproducts of their main business."
«Moral culpability? It doesn't apply. Not to Americans—not unless they leak military secrets. None of the men responsible will ever look at their hands and experience an "out, damned spot!" moment. That's a guarantee. However, a young man who, it seems, saw the blood and didn't want it on his hands, who found himself "actively involved in something that I was completely against," who had an urge to try to end two terrible wars, hoping his act would cause "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms," will pay the price for them. He will be another body not to count in the collateral damage their wars have caused. He will also be collateral damage to the Afghan antiwar movement that wasn't.»
Filibusters and arcane obstructions in the Senate
"Many of the Senate’s antique rules and precedents have been warped beyond recognition by the modern pressures of partisanship."
Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech
"I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer - not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition - a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave."
Don't forget Shirley Sherrod's original message
"Low-income Americans have it incredibly tough, and the suffering engendered by not having enough money may be the most serious issue we face right now. But given the opportunity to talk about wealth, we talked, yet again, about race."
Big Oil Makes War on the Earth
"If you live on the Gulf Coast, welcome to the real world of oil—and just know that you're not alone. In the Niger Delta and the Ecuadorian Amazon, among other places, your emerging hell has been the living hell of local populations for decades."
In Afghanistan, a Threat of Plunder
"Afghanistan is part of the last frontier for resource discovery — one of the 60 most impoverished countries, which account for around a quarter of the earth’s land but which have barely been prospected. Over the next decade, given high world commodity prices, the last frontier will be explored, creating more opportunities like that in Afghanistan. All these countries will need to resist the kind of plunder that has characterized resource-rich countries with weak governance."
The science behind climate science
"The urgent need to act cannot be overstated. Climate change caused by humans is already affecting our lives and livelihoods — with extreme storms, unusual floods and droughts, intense heat waves, rising seas and many changes in biological systems — as climate scientists have projected."
"Since World War I, it's been civilians who have most often born the disproportionate brunt of modern warfare. It's been ordinary people who have lived with war day after day."
"Bond vigilantes are investors who pull the plug on governments they perceive as unable or unwilling to pay their debts. Now there’s no question that countries can suffer crises of confidence (see Greece, debt of). But what the advocates of austerity claim is that (a) the bond vigilantes are about to attack America, and (b) spending anything more on stimulus will set them off."
America Is Detached From the War
"Now it's the United States whose UAVs are ever more powerfully weaponized. It's the United States that is developing a twenty-two-ton tail-less drone twenty times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. It's the Pentagon that is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700 percent over the next decade."
What happens when energy resources deplete?
"If only one or two small governments default on debt, the world can probably accommodate the defaults pretty easily. But if problems spread to a large number of big countries (UK, United States, and Japan, for example), then international trade is likely to be disrupted, because many sellers of goods will find themselves without payment."
"[S]uccessive American administrations would blindly head down the very path that had led the Soviets to ruin. They would serially agree that, in a world without significant enemies, the key to US global power still was the care and feeding of the American military and the military-industrial complex that went with it. As the years passed, that military would be sent ever more regularly into the far reaches of the planet to fight frontier wars, establish military bases, and finally impose a global Pax Americana on the planet."
"THAT A DISTINCTION can usefully be drawn between wants and needs seems obvious. Mainstream economics, however, refuses to countenance such a distinction."
Citizens trump BP shareholders
"Get it? There's no conflict between Britain and the United States. The conflict is between two kinds of interests -- shareholder interests and citizen interests."
The City that Ended Hunger :: Belo Horizonte, Brazil
"Through most of human evolution—except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years—Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm."
"In fact, our failure to confront global warming is more than simply political incompetence. Over the past year, the corporations and special interests most responsible for climate change waged an all-out war to prevent Congress from cracking down on carbon pollution in time for Copenhagen. The oil and coal industries deployed an unprecedented army of lobbyists, spent millions on misleading studies and engaged in outright deception to derail climate legislation."
Ken Salazar, corporatism and the BP oil spill
"Yet who did Obama choose to head the Interior Department? Ken Salazar, notorious for being beholden to the very industries he would be regulating."
"Who can deny that our American world is in trouble? Or that our troubles, like our wars, have a momentum of their own against which we generally no longer raise our voices in protest; that we have, in a sense, been disarmed as citizens? ... If the policies of these two disparate figures often have a tweedledum-and-tweedledee-ish look to them, then what we face is not specific party politics or individual style, but a system with its own steamroller force, and its own set of narrow, repetitive “solutions” to our problems. We also face an increasingly militarized, privatized government, its wheels greased by the funds of giant corporations, that now regularly seems to go about the business of creating new Katrinas."
It's the end of the world, again
"Stop me if you've heard this one before: Rapid environmental degradation, in combination with a rising population, declining agricultural output, and the depletion of oil and other resources, is straining human civilization. Soon, things will get much worse. Economies will decline and people will get poorer. Starvation will grow. So will war, famine, disease, and terror. Basically, to use a familiar phrase, it's the end of the world as we know it."
"Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources."
"I worry much more about the people than the money. Let the banks spend money. But when you've got 54 former staffers from the relevant committees and 33 former chiefs of staff and more than 200 former congressmen, you're talking about something much more effective than spending: You're talking about social relationships. People return e-mails and take calls and listen closely to the people they know."
Who are the real winners in Europe's bailout?
"So in both the subprime crisis and now the sovereign debt crisis, the banks loaned too much money to inferior debtors with too much bank leverage based solely on the opinion of a rating agency."
Will the great recession lead to World War IV?
"Instead, elites on both sides of the Atlantic hope that the great recession will turn out to have been merely a particularly nasty business cycle downturn. They pray that soon we can return to something like the illusory prosperity of the late 1990s and 2000s without having to engage in any radical rethinking or reform. Our political and opinion leaders think they are leading us back home. They haven’t noticed, or refuse to admit, that what used to be home is now a large, smoking crater."
Flying Blind in Policy Reforms: Scientific American
"As a start toward better policy making, the administration should put forward a detailed analysis justifying each major proposed policy change. That white paper could form the basis for coherent public debate and reflection, along with Web sites where outside experts would be invited to share opinions accessible to the public. The public, too, would be invited to blog about that position paper."
"If you are searching for the perfect metaphor to describe humanity's 21st century plight -- an energy-hungry and energy-dependent civilization occupying a resource-constrained planet -- then you need look no further than at a satellite photo of the giant spreading oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico. That massive hydrocarbon stain is our collective scarlet letter, the price we pay for a lifestyle of extraordinary affluence and comfort -- at least as compared to most of the humans who have ever lived."
The alleged Wall Street e-mail that went viral
"A whole class of people put their faith in a market fundamentalist ideology that declared the pursuit of profit and the indulgence of greed to be the a right and proper way to organize a society. And now, well, it kinda seems like they were wrong."
"Why would commercial banks hold $1 trillion more than they legally had to in reserves at the Fed, earning only 0.25 percent interest per year, and why would the Fed buy more than $1 trillion of mortgage securities of undisclosed quality in the marketplace?"
A Middle East peace that could happen (but won't)
"These Israeli naval attacks began shortly after the discovery by the BG (British Gas) Group of what appear to be quite sizeable natural gas fields in Gaza's territorial waters."
Can a Supreme Court seat be bought?
"For now, it seems possible that a group could pour an unlimited amount of money into a judicial nomination fight without any oversight whatsoever -- meaning that, were one to ask for recusal at a later date, it would be very difficult to prove what had been spent in the first place."
Time for a Wall Street-Washington divorce
"Even as Congress debates legislation to tame it, Wall Street is conducting a bidding war between the parties for its continued beneficence."
Goldman Sachs' best friends in politics
'It may be that McMahon, in taking a position that was so favorable to the banking industry, really believed his Op-Ed's headline: "Misunderstanding derivatives endangers Main Street." Or maybe he just knew where his bread was buttered.'
The business of America is kleptocracy
"A spirit of shared sacrifice, dismissed as hopelessly naïve, has been replaced by a form of tribalized privatization in which insiders find ways to profit no matter what."
A jailed banker explains why banks still run the world
"[P]erhaps he is there to remind the senators and representatives he left behind on Capitol Hill how rewarding retirement can be for politicians who take care of the banks. ... Amazingly, many politicians who claim to represent the public interest take this money. Ken Silverstein, who has diligently followed the economic and political depredations of UBS for years, asked the most pertinent question long ago: Why would any decent elected official in this country still accept a dime from this outfit?"
Republican senator hints "bailout" charge is false
"But Corker did not appear terribly embarrassed by his own contortions. He told Gannett News that he feels "energized" and "liberated." He can help to write a bill and then sign a letter threatening to filibuster that same bill, while acknowledging that the stated reasons for the filibuster are untrue. Nobody in the national press corps will call him to account for that glaring contradiction. And nobody in the press corps will ask McConnell to explain why the Republican senator with the most expertise on this bill has said, as diplomatically as possible, that McConnell is lying."
Cassandra, the Ignored Prophet of Doom, Is a Woman for Our Times
"We are living in an age of Cassandra, in which experts and ordinary people are regularly grabbing the appropriate authorities by the lapels and warning them of impending disasters — almost invariably to no avail."
What the whistleblower prosecution says about the Obama DOJ
"Drake's leaks to Gorman exposed serious wrongdoing on the part of (a) the NSA and its illegal domestic spying activities and (b) the vast private intelligence and defense industry that has all but formally merged with the CIA, NSA and Pentagon to become the public-private National Security and Surveillance State that exercises more power, by far, than any single faction in the country."
Online comments need moderation, not "real names"
"When you opened up comments, was it really about having a conversation with the readers? Then have that conversation!"
On Being a 21st Century Peasant - Reason Magazine
"McKibben sees retreat from modernity as our only option because he believes that humanity has reached the limits of our creativity."
"All of the collected fees would then be distributed to the public. Prudent people would use their dividend wisely, adjusting their lifestyle, choice of vehicle and so on. Those who do better than average in choosing less-polluting goods would receive more in the dividend than they pay in added costs."
"Forget cap-and trade. This is a climate bill you can love."
What Happens When Congress Fails to Do Its Job?
"Obstructionism is a good minority strategy as long as it actually works to stymie the majority's agenda and return you to power. But if it just means you sit out the work of governance while the majority legislates around you, your constituents and interest groups will eventually begin demanding that you include them in the process. And that's as it should be: we hire legislators to legislate. We need a system that encourages them to do so."
'Peak Oil Demand,' Yes... But Not the Nice Kind: Why There Will Be No Recovery
"Energy is the only real currency." "Clearly, we can't all be net energy importers."
"Even more useful than the books or activities, though, is the principle behind libraries, that we and our neighbours can pool our resources and hold things in common that all of us occasionally need. Most of the Western World, however, adopted this principle for books and then stopped, never extending it to other obvious areas of life."
"Imagining the future of libraries"
50 Simple Ways to Get Off | Derrick Jensen | Orion Magazine
"If you're in love with the world, fall in love with trying to save it"
"But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled--so they, too, started to take the checks."
Can Obama Bypass Republicans on Health?
"it seems clear that the filibuster is a convenient excuse Democrats use to justify their inaction"
The Democratic Party's deceitful game
"This is what the Democratic Party does; it's who they are. They're willing to feign support for anything their voters want just as long as there's no chance that they can pass it."
Methods of Work: It Didn't Happen If You Didn't Write It Down
"If you think of a good idea and don’t record it somewhere, you’ll forget it. Inevitably. If you need something done by a certain time and don’t record it somewhere, you’ll miss it. If you learn something while roaming through code, or exploring a new tool, write your experiences down. You’ll thank yourself later."
So You Wanna Reform The Filibuster? Here's How
"Here's the good news: reforming the filibuster -- technically speaking -- isn't that hard."
Why Washington Loves The Filibuster
"The belief that the filibuster is okay, but minority parties should just use it less often and start acting nicer is the equivalent of the belief that the financial system was totally fine, there just needs to be less greed and more caution."
What stands in the way of "forcing" a filibuster?
'[W]hile a "real" filibuster can result, all of the costs fall on the majority.'
Filibuster 2.0: How 41 Senators Control The Country Without Actually Filibustering
'Majority Leader Harry Reid's office has studied the issue and concluded that a filibustering senator "can be forced to sit on the [Senate] floor to keep us from voting on that legislation for a finite period of time according to existing rules but he/she can't be forced to keep talking for an indefinite period of time."'
Why the filibuster is OK for Democrats but not for Republicans
"What's most striking, though, are the many cases in which the filibustering Senate minority has actually represented a majority of Americans."
Don't give in to media-inspired fatalism
'Not only has total paralysis been theoretically achieved, but our allegedly liberal "mainstream" news media treats it as entirely normal.'
A national anthem for healthcare reform
"[T]he biggest health insurers are lobbying like mad against reform because they like things just the way they are. They can squeeze the public and the public has no alternative but to pay up."
Wall Street owners angry with their purchase
"Wall Street executives are angry that, after duly purchasing the Democrats (they have receipts and everything), the Obama White House is now rousing the dirty rabble with their anti-banker rhetoric"
There is job hysteria for a reason
"it's not as if the government hasn't directly created jobs before"
"From the perspective of what the People want, or even the perspective of what the political parties say they want, the Fundraising Congress is misfiring in every dimension."
Our incredible shrinking democracy
"It seems as if more and more decisions that should be made democratically are being shunted off somewhere to a few people who make them in back rooms."
A congressman writes to his constituents: "Thank God for gerrymandering"
Ian Bicking: a blog :: Toward a new self-definition for open source
Ian Bicking reflects on Free Software, how it should define itself, and what its ideas could mean for the rest of humanity.
faith
Archbishop Tutu warns greed threatens environmental progress
«"Our desire to consume everything of value, to extract every precious stone, every drop of oil and every creature from the sea knows no bounds," said the Archbishop. "This quest for profit subverts our present and our future. There are too many people who are getting better and better at exploiting the environmental heritage which belongs to us all. We are not heading for an environmental disaster - we have already created one."»
"What is the basis for our moral perspective on these facets of our existence? Does something uphold that moral perspective other than a belief?"
Zen and the art of protecting the planet
"He is seeking to create a spiritual revival that replaces our consumption-based lives with a return to a simpler, kinder world based on deep respect for each other and the environment."
"While economic growth is an important and necessary condition for the reduction of unemployment, it is not sufficient in and of itself. In order to work for full employment and restrain inflation, it is also necessary to adopt more specific programs and policies targeted toward particular aspects of the unemployment problem"
filibuster
Filibusters and arcane obstructions in the Senate
"Many of the Senate’s antique rules and precedents have been warped beyond recognition by the modern pressures of partisanship."
Republican senator hints "bailout" charge is false
"But Corker did not appear terribly embarrassed by his own contortions. He told Gannett News that he feels "energized" and "liberated." He can help to write a bill and then sign a letter threatening to filibuster that same bill, while acknowledging that the stated reasons for the filibuster are untrue. Nobody in the national press corps will call him to account for that glaring contradiction. And nobody in the press corps will ask McConnell to explain why the Republican senator with the most expertise on this bill has said, as diplomatically as possible, that McConnell is lying."
What Happens When Congress Fails to Do Its Job?
"Obstructionism is a good minority strategy as long as it actually works to stymie the majority's agenda and return you to power. But if it just means you sit out the work of governance while the majority legislates around you, your constituents and interest groups will eventually begin demanding that you include them in the process. And that's as it should be: we hire legislators to legislate. We need a system that encourages them to do so."
"The new-school filibuster would preserve minority rights in the Senate, while imposing significant costs on obstructionist members, changing the calculus that causes today’s logjam."
"Even with his mistake, the Republicans are filibustering twice as often as Democrats have in any previous Congress - so they clearly are abusing the system."
Can Obama Bypass Republicans on Health?
"it seems clear that the filibuster is a convenient excuse Democrats use to justify their inaction"
The Democratic Party's deceitful game
"This is what the Democratic Party does; it's who they are. They're willing to feign support for anything their voters want just as long as there's no chance that they can pass it."
So You Wanna Reform The Filibuster? Here's How
"Here's the good news: reforming the filibuster -- technically speaking -- isn't that hard."
Why Washington Loves The Filibuster
"The belief that the filibuster is okay, but minority parties should just use it less often and start acting nicer is the equivalent of the belief that the financial system was totally fine, there just needs to be less greed and more caution."
What stands in the way of "forcing" a filibuster?
'[W]hile a "real" filibuster can result, all of the costs fall on the majority.'
"There's a lot of anger at the Senate"
"House Democrats think they've figured out the problem with healthcare reform: The Senate"
Filibuster 2.0: How 41 Senators Control The Country Without Actually Filibustering
'Majority Leader Harry Reid's office has studied the issue and concluded that a filibustering senator "can be forced to sit on the [Senate] floor to keep us from voting on that legislation for a finite period of time according to existing rules but he/she can't be forced to keep talking for an indefinite period of time."'
Why the filibuster is OK for Democrats but not for Republicans
"What's most striking, though, are the many cases in which the filibustering Senate minority has actually represented a majority of Americans."
Don't give in to media-inspired fatalism
'Not only has total paralysis been theoretically achieved, but our allegedly liberal "mainstream" news media treats it as entirely normal.'
finance
“Those who care to look can easily turn up plenty of evidence that the value of every type of financial asset, not just fiat currency or debt instruments, is unsupported. Its value derives from the goods and services provided by a functioning global industrial economy, which is quickly running out of every type of resource it requires; not just high-EROEI fossil fuels, but also metals, rare earth elements, phosphate, irrigation water and arable land.”
The Real Housewives of Wall Street
"In early April, in an attempt to learn exactly how much Mack and Karches made on the TALF deals, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa wrote a letter to Waterfall asking 21 detailed questions about the transactions. In addition, Sen. Sanders has personally asked Fed chief Bernanke to provide more complete information on the TALF loans given not only to Christy Mack but to gazillionaires like former Miami Dolphins owner H. Wayne Huizenga and hedge-fund shark John Paulson. But Bernanke bluntly refused to provide the information — and the Fed has similarly stonewalled other oversight agencies, including the General Accounting Office and TARP's special inspector general."
"Five reporters stumbled on what seems like a basic question: What is money? The unsettling answer they found: Money is fiction."
Who are the real winners in Europe's bailout?
"So in both the subprime crisis and now the sovereign debt crisis, the banks loaned too much money to inferior debtors with too much bank leverage based solely on the opinion of a rating agency."
The alleged Wall Street e-mail that went viral
"A whole class of people put their faith in a market fundamentalist ideology that declared the pursuit of profit and the indulgence of greed to be the a right and proper way to organize a society. And now, well, it kinda seems like they were wrong."
financial-industry
The Man Who Shattered Our Economy
"Some guys have all the luck, particularly when they supply the dice."
fonts
A set of free fonts from the Gnome project.
food
«No one looking for sensible rather than sentimental or ideological reasons to believe in the possibility of human progress need look any further than the fact that, for the first time in human history, it is possible to imagine the end of famine. … To be sure, there are also many other things to say, other questions to ask--most notably why, if we are now so competent at dealing with famine, we are so incompetent at dealing with chronic malnutrition, which is getting no better, and in some cases is actually getting worse, even in democratic countries such as India that seem to have banished famine. The other three horsemen of the apocalypse will likely always be with us. But the possibility that we have seen the fourth horseman off for good is a reason for the most profound thankfulness.»
"The report contains some surprises. Transportation is the smallest piece of the food system energy pie. Even farming isn’t a particularly big contributor. The big energy users turn out to be food processing, packaging, selling, and preparation. Our kitchens command the biggest slice of the pie, using twice as much energy as the farms that grew the food in the first place."
Got Food? Consider yourself lucky
«We have unconsciously sacrificed our collective humanity and devalued our lives on the altar of a counterfeit economy that picks “winners” and “losers” based on global forces that are far beyond our immediate control. The never ending demands placed on us in an economy deemed “too big to fail” and too presumptuous to think it could ever stop growing, have now pushed America to a critical point in history.»
A Food Manifesto for the Future
"you can’t sell garbage while telling people not to eat it"
Egyptian Unrest: Why the Egyptian Uprising is Extremely Bad ...
"[W]hat's happening in Egypt right now is only a preview of things to come, and people need to understand the world that's just around the corner."
When Will the Food Bubble Burst?
"The average temperature in Moscow for July was a scarcely believable 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm. Watching the heat wave play out over the seven-week period on the TV evening news, with the thousands of fires and smoke everywhere, was like watching a horror film. Over 56,000 people died in the extreme heat. Russia's 140 million people were in shock, traumatized by what was happening to them and their country."
High Food Prices Threaten Growth of Energy Crops in Britain
"WSP calculated that planting energy crops on a fifth of Britain’s arable land would meet just 10 percent of the British heating demand."
"We wanted to illustrate something that people in rural America have known for a long time: family farms are being replaced by factory farms, and these facilities are overwhelming some regions of the country."
Tropical forests were the primary sources of new agricultural land in the 1980s and 1990s
"Global demand for agricultural products such as food, feed, and fuel is now a major driver of cropland and pasture expansion across much of the developing world. Whether these new agricultural lands replace forests, degraded forests, or grasslands greatly influences the environmental consequences of expansion. Although the general pattern is known, there still is no definitive quantification of these land-cover changes. ... Across the tropics, we find that between 1980 and 2000 more than 55% of new agricultural land came at the expense of intact forests, and another 28% came from disturbed forests. This study underscores the potential consequences of unabated agricultural expansion for forest conservation and carbon emissions."
"Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself. The relative pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being."
"With global wheat prices expected to spike following an export ban in Russia due to fires destroying millions of hectares of crops, a new study measuring global food security has identified the food supplies of Afghanistan and nine Africa states as the countries which are most at risk and vulnerable to rising costs."
Farm to grow crops, economic development in Cleveland's Ohio City
"Six vacant acres of Cleveland's West Side neighborhood, just blocks from cutting-edge restaurants and the venerated West Side Market, are turning to a fresh food project and a plow."
The City that Ended Hunger :: Belo Horizonte, Brazil
"Through most of human evolution—except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years—Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm."
Personal web site of John E. Ikerd
Author of "A Revolution of the Middle... and The Pursuit of Happiness", "Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense", "Small Farms are Real Farms: Sustaining People Through Agriculture", "Return to Common Sense", and "Crisis and Opportunity: Sustainability in American Agriculture".
Hot Plate: An Interview With Anna Lappé
"[I]t’s important to add that we also need to go beyond just voting with our forks. We can do a lot as individuals, but individual action can’t, say, build a new energy infrastructure based on green fuel and mass transit through individual action. We need policy change to do that, and that will take working together collectively as citizens."
Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply
"Contrary to the widely held belief that food production must be increased to feed the growing population, experimental and correlational data indicate that human population growth varies as a function of food availability. By increasing food production for humans, at the expense of other species, the biologically determined effect has been, and continues to be, an increase in the human population. Understanding the relationship between food increases and population increases is proposed as a necessary first step in addressing this global problem."
The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq
"[N]ow when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years."
for:jomaxz
Edgar Allan Poe's The Philosophy of Composition as applied to software engineering
On Lisp and software engineering
formal-methods
PVS Specification and Verification System
"PVS is a verification system: that is, a specification language integrated with support tools and a theorem prover. It is intended to capture the state-of-the-art in mechanized formal methods ..."
free-software
Ian Bicking: a blog :: Toward a new self-definition for open source
Ian Bicking reflects on Free Software, how it should define itself, and what its ideas could mean for the rest of humanity.
games
"Python Challenge is a game in which each level can be solved by a bit of (Python) programming."
"Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve."
PullThePlug Wargames, including Vortex, Catalyst, Semtex, and Blackhole
The PullThePlug Wargames are a set of live reverse engineering and exploit development exercises.
geek
Jamie Zawinski's personal web site.
"You know what it means. It's the normal state of the world. Ain't it wonderful?"
The Jargon File is a collection of definitions of critical terms for geeks everywhere.
government
«Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”»
The bigger Clarence Thomas scandal
"Many experts, such as Gillers, think Scalia should have recused himself in the energy task force case, but -- in violation of the principle that no one can be his own judge -- Scalia got to decide that he thinks he's perfectly impartial, thank you very much. And that was that."
The warning signs of trouble ahead
"I strongly encourage you to consider the related factors of a culture of growth, particularly economic growth, which can be seen as an uncompromising goal throughout the history of oligarchy; finite energy and other natural resources; and political instability."
While Whacking Critics, Obama Gets Facts Wrong
«But, Obama's fairly large rounding error aside, the public option was not simply a matter of enrollees. What the president conspicuously disregarded was that the central point of the public option was that its existence would exert enormous competitive pressure on the private insurance system. The goal was not to serve a particularly large number of people directly -- that would only happen if the private offerings were terribly inadequate. The goal was to keep the private sector honest. So no matter how many people it enrolled, "the provision," as Obama put it "would have affected" tens of millions.»
«For Assange in 2006, then, the public benefit of leaked information is not the first-order good of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world (free information is its own reward), nor is it the second-order good of the muckrakers (free information will lead the people to demand change). What Assange asks of leaked information is that it supply a third-order public good: he wants it to demonstrate that secrets cannot be securely held, and he wants it to do this so that the currency of all secrets will be debased. He wants governments-cum-conspiracies to be rendered paranoid by the leaks and therefore be left with little energy to pursue its externally focused aims. In his words, “We can marginalise a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to, its environment.”»
Barack Obama: The oligarchs' president
"If the two parties both lie down for Wall Street in roughly equal measure, but fight viciously over other issues, it is possible to construct a stable strategic equilibrium. ... [T]he Democrats avoid the epic confrontation that would surely ensue if they were to take on the financial sector, which would retaliate with a massively funded effort. Instead, the two parties fight furiously, or at least pretend to fight furiously, about a wide range of other social issues that affect many voters deeply -- abortion, gay rights, gun control, stem cell research, creationism, global warming, health insurance and so on. Each side can credibly warn its base that if it deserts the party, apocalypse may follow. So, while some citizens may register as independents, or stop voting, or stop donating to the system, the entrenched establishments of both parties will remain safe."
Filibusters and arcane obstructions in the Senate
"Many of the Senate’s antique rules and precedents have been warped beyond recognition by the modern pressures of partisanship."
Flying Blind in Policy Reforms: Scientific American
"As a start toward better policy making, the administration should put forward a detailed analysis justifying each major proposed policy change. That white paper could form the basis for coherent public debate and reflection, along with Web sites where outside experts would be invited to share opinions accessible to the public. The public, too, would be invited to blog about that position paper."
Can a Supreme Court seat be bought?
"For now, it seems possible that a group could pour an unlimited amount of money into a judicial nomination fight without any oversight whatsoever -- meaning that, were one to ask for recusal at a later date, it would be very difficult to prove what had been spent in the first place."
Time for a Wall Street-Washington divorce
"Even as Congress debates legislation to tame it, Wall Street is conducting a bidding war between the parties for its continued beneficence."
Goldman Sachs' best friends in politics
'It may be that McMahon, in taking a position that was so favorable to the banking industry, really believed his Op-Ed's headline: "Misunderstanding derivatives endangers Main Street." Or maybe he just knew where his bread was buttered.'
The business of America is kleptocracy
"A spirit of shared sacrifice, dismissed as hopelessly naïve, has been replaced by a form of tribalized privatization in which insiders find ways to profit no matter what."
A jailed banker explains why banks still run the world
"[P]erhaps he is there to remind the senators and representatives he left behind on Capitol Hill how rewarding retirement can be for politicians who take care of the banks. ... Amazingly, many politicians who claim to represent the public interest take this money. Ken Silverstein, who has diligently followed the economic and political depredations of UBS for years, asked the most pertinent question long ago: Why would any decent elected official in this country still accept a dime from this outfit?"
Republican senator hints "bailout" charge is false
"But Corker did not appear terribly embarrassed by his own contortions. He told Gannett News that he feels "energized" and "liberated." He can help to write a bill and then sign a letter threatening to filibuster that same bill, while acknowledging that the stated reasons for the filibuster are untrue. Nobody in the national press corps will call him to account for that glaring contradiction. And nobody in the press corps will ask McConnell to explain why the Republican senator with the most expertise on this bill has said, as diplomatically as possible, that McConnell is lying."
What the whistleblower prosecution says about the Obama DOJ
"Drake's leaks to Gorman exposed serious wrongdoing on the part of (a) the NSA and its illegal domestic spying activities and (b) the vast private intelligence and defense industry that has all but formally merged with the CIA, NSA and Pentagon to become the public-private National Security and Surveillance State that exercises more power, by far, than any single faction in the country."
Lobbyists and Lawmakers Bond During Springsteen Concerts
"Lawmakers continue to enjoy free and easy access to events that aren’t available to most Americans. And lobbyists and wealthy business leaders are still partying with lawmakers who can directly affect their bottom line."
How Senator Vitter Battled the EPA Over Formaldehyde’s Link to Cancer
'As long as the studies continue, the EPA will still list formaldehyde as a "probable" rather than a "known" carcinogen, even though three major scientific reviews now link it to leukemia and have strengthened its ties to other forms of cancer. The chemical industry is fighting to avoid that designation, because it could lead to tighter regulations and require costly pollution controls.'
"All of the collected fees would then be distributed to the public. Prudent people would use their dividend wisely, adjusting their lifestyle, choice of vehicle and so on. Those who do better than average in choosing less-polluting goods would receive more in the dividend than they pay in added costs."
"Forget cap-and trade. This is a climate bill you can love."
What Happens When Congress Fails to Do Its Job?
"Obstructionism is a good minority strategy as long as it actually works to stymie the majority's agenda and return you to power. But if it just means you sit out the work of governance while the majority legislates around you, your constituents and interest groups will eventually begin demanding that you include them in the process. And that's as it should be: we hire legislators to legislate. We need a system that encourages them to do so."
Can Obama Bypass Republicans on Health?
"it seems clear that the filibuster is a convenient excuse Democrats use to justify their inaction"
Senate sitting on 290 bills already passed by House; tension mounts
"Exasperated House Democratic leaders have compiled a list showing that they have passed 290 bills that have stalled in the Senate."
So You Wanna Reform The Filibuster? Here's How
"Here's the good news: reforming the filibuster -- technically speaking -- isn't that hard."
Why Washington Loves The Filibuster
"The belief that the filibuster is okay, but minority parties should just use it less often and start acting nicer is the equivalent of the belief that the financial system was totally fine, there just needs to be less greed and more caution."
What stands in the way of "forcing" a filibuster?
'[W]hile a "real" filibuster can result, all of the costs fall on the majority.'
Planet Open Government Open Source Hacking
"This site aggregates blogs from the open government technology community and public sector bloggers on related topics in the United States."
"There's a lot of anger at the Senate"
"House Democrats think they've figured out the problem with healthcare reform: The Senate"
Filibuster 2.0: How 41 Senators Control The Country Without Actually Filibustering
'Majority Leader Harry Reid's office has studied the issue and concluded that a filibustering senator "can be forced to sit on the [Senate] floor to keep us from voting on that legislation for a finite period of time according to existing rules but he/she can't be forced to keep talking for an indefinite period of time."'
Why the filibuster is OK for Democrats but not for Republicans
"What's most striking, though, are the many cases in which the filibustering Senate minority has actually represented a majority of Americans."
Don't give in to media-inspired fatalism
'Not only has total paralysis been theoretically achieved, but our allegedly liberal "mainstream" news media treats it as entirely normal.'
A national anthem for healthcare reform
"[T]he biggest health insurers are lobbying like mad against reform because they like things just the way they are. They can squeeze the public and the public has no alternative but to pay up."
Wall Street owners angry with their purchase
"Wall Street executives are angry that, after duly purchasing the Democrats (they have receipts and everything), the Obama White House is now rousing the dirty rabble with their anti-banker rhetoric"
There is job hysteria for a reason
"it's not as if the government hasn't directly created jobs before"
"From the perspective of what the People want, or even the perspective of what the political parties say they want, the Fundraising Congress is misfiring in every dimension."
Our incredible shrinking democracy
"It seems as if more and more decisions that should be made democratically are being shunted off somewhere to a few people who make them in back rooms."
The sanctity of military spending
"It's time for "everyone" to sacrifice and suffer some more -- as long as "everyone" excludes our vast military industry, the permanent power factions inside the Pentagon and intelligence community, our Surveillance and National Security State, and the imperial policies of perpetual war which feed them while further draining the lifeblood out of the country."
"GovTrack Insider takes you inside the legislative process on Capitol Hill."
The underlying divisions in the healthcare debate
"Our laws are written not by elected representatives but, literally, by the largest and richest corporations. At the level of the most concentrated power, large corporate interests and government actions are basically inseparable."
Healthcare industry stocks explode as bill progresses
"[T]he White House's strategy from the start was to negotiate in secret with those very special interests in order to craft a bill that they liked and that benefits them."
White House as helpless victim on healthcare
"The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives."
"At Hello Congress, every Senator and Representative gets their own site where their staff can request research, search our briefing room of over 2000 documents and talking points, and track the priorities of their constituents in one simple dashboard."
"White House 2 is a multi-partisan network ... imagining how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people over the internet."
"Your Guide to the Money in U.S. Elections"
"The Nation's most complete resource for information on money in state politics"
Center for Media and Democracy
"[The CMD] include[s] PR Watch, a quarterly investigative journal; six books by CMD staff; Spin of the Day; the Weekly Spin listserv; and, Congresspedia and SourceWatch"
MAPLight.org | Money and Politics: Illuminating the Connection
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures from MITRE
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is a list of standardized names for vulnerabilities and other information security exposures..."
Joint Task Force - Global Network Operations
"The JTF-GNO directs the operation and defense of the Global Information Grid across strategic, operational, and tactical boundaries in support of DoD’s full spectrum of war fighting, intelligence, and business operations."
This site provides documentation of the election-methods mailing list, as well as related resources.
The Constitution of the United States
This site presents the U.S. Constitution in a setting maintained by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
GovTrack.us: Tracking the United States Congress
GovTrack publishes and summarizes formalized information about ongoing activities in Congress.
grid
"MOSIX is a management system that allows a Linux cluster or a Grid to perform like a single computer with multiple processors."
hardware
"This document attempts to answer Frequently Asked Questions about Compact Disc Recordable technology and related fields."
health-industry
While Whacking Critics, Obama Gets Facts Wrong
«But, Obama's fairly large rounding error aside, the public option was not simply a matter of enrollees. What the president conspicuously disregarded was that the central point of the public option was that its existence would exert enormous competitive pressure on the private insurance system. The goal was not to serve a particularly large number of people directly -- that would only happen if the private offerings were terribly inadequate. The goal was to keep the private sector honest. So no matter how many people it enrolled, "the provision," as Obama put it "would have affected" tens of millions.»
The Legacy of Billy Tauzin: The White House-PhRMA Deal
"How they did it ... is a testament to how ingrained the grip of special interests remains in Washington."
Medical Interests Spent $876 Million on Reform
"Medical interests alone shelled out more than $876 million in lobbying expenses during the 15 months beginning in January 2009 and ending in March, when Congress passed the sweeping overhaul."
A national anthem for healthcare reform
"[T]he biggest health insurers are lobbying like mad against reform because they like things just the way they are. They can squeeze the public and the public has no alternative but to pay up."
humor
Gap Between Rich And Poor Named 8th Wonder Of The World
"According to anthropologists, untold millions of slaves and serfs toiled their whole lives to complete the gap. Records indicate the work likely began around 10,000 years ago, when the world's first landed elites convinced their subjects that construction of such a monument was the will of a divine authority, a belief still widely held today."
Millions Of Barrels Of Oil Safely Reach Port In Major Environmental Catastrophe
"Experts are saying the oil tanker safely reaching port could lead to dire ecological consequences on multiple levels, including rising temperatures, disappearing shorelines, the eradication of countless species, extreme weather events, complete economic collapse, droughts that surpass the Dust Bowl, disease, wildfires, widespread human starvation, and endless, bloody wars fought over increasingly scarce resources."
"THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD is a screwball true story about two gonzo political activists who, posing as top executives of giant corporations, lie their way into big business conferences and pull off the world's most outrageous pranks. This peer-to-peer special edition of the film is unique: it is preceded by an EXCLUSIVE VIDEO of the Yes Men impersonating the United States Chamber of Commerce. Because the Yes Men are being sued for this stunt, p2p is the only way that this film will get seen. Please spread the word!"
"The following is a large collection of stories and anecdotes about clueless computer users."
Jamie Zawinski's personal web site.
The Jargon File is a collection of definitions of critical terms for geeks everywhere.
hypocrisy
«Moral culpability? It doesn't apply. Not to Americans—not unless they leak military secrets. None of the men responsible will ever look at their hands and experience an "out, damned spot!" moment. That's a guarantee. However, a young man who, it seems, saw the blood and didn't want it on his hands, who found himself "actively involved in something that I was completely against," who had an urge to try to end two terrible wars, hoping his act would cause "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms," will pay the price for them. He will be another body not to count in the collateral damage their wars have caused. He will also be collateral damage to the Afghan antiwar movement that wasn't.»
America Is Detached From the War
"Now it's the United States whose UAVs are ever more powerfully weaponized. It's the United States that is developing a twenty-two-ton tail-less drone twenty times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. It's the Pentagon that is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700 percent over the next decade."
images
Transparency: What Is the Easiest Way to Power a Lightbulb
"How much energy—whether electric, coal, nuclear, or otherwise—is required for a 100-watt lightbulb to run for a year, 24 hours a day? See the answer in our latest infographic."
Exponential Growth Rate of US Stocks since 1871
Also see the same data graphed on a logarithmic scale at <http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2010/10/29/us-stocks-roaring-20s/>.
A visualization of "The Pressures of Consumption and Global Urbanization on Planetary Limits"
immigration
Immigration and Food/Water Politics
"... or if I'm a hunter-gatherer who lives on a river, fishing and hunting to feed myself, like a Native American or other aboriginal people, then it reads just like what civilization has been doing to the uncivilized since someone first thought civilization was a good idea ..."
influence
"You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes."
internet
Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered
"A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year."
interviews
James Howard Kunstler: The old American dream is a nightmare
The whole interview is excellent.
A Conversation with Greenpeace's Kumi Naidoo
"I don't think environmental organizations will win the challenge of environmental justice on their own. I think it will only be won if environmental activism becomes more broad-based activism where environmentalism is located in a broader framework of social justice, economic justice and so on. The uncomfortable reality is that if we are to deliver the quality of life that folks in the US and other developed countries enjoy, and that the elites in other developing countries enjoy, we would need eight planets. Six to eight planets. Just think about that for a minute. Because even we in the progressive movement need to realize that if we are serious about creating a sustainable and just world for our kids and grandkids, we have to realize that we also have to challenge certain assumptions we have about our consumption patterns. And the inequality of consumption of stuff is just overwhelming."
Lewis Lapham on "the end of capitalism"
"Q: Historically, what do you see as the dominant characteristics of America? A: It’s faith in the spirit and mechanics and moral value of capitalism. It is a country of expectant millionaires." "The capitalist idea is to turn loot to a productive purpose — to yoke it to the wheels of industry. ... We shape our tools, and our tools shape us. And by that shaping us, they shape our attitudes, our moral sense, our sense of self-interest. Competition is the spirit elixir of capitalism." "It’s the impertinent dynamism of ‘more’. It is a voracious, devouring appetite for more. And if we’re not careful, unless we get control of it, it will devour the earth. Capitalism had a particularly fertile soil in America because there was so much land available. People could just go west. Take land from the Indians by force. The same thing in Mexico. Call it Manifest Destiny, but it essentially was the seizure of property."
"Off the Grid": The growing appeal of going off the grid
"It’s a desire to get out from under the thumb of corporate America. You look around for things that you can do to make your world a better place and as an environmentalist, everything that's green is likely to be greenwashed. Every corporation seems to be telling us that we can be green if we use their product and deep down we know it’s nonsense."
Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution
'What kind of life do you want, and what are you willing to do to get it? Keith Farnish, author of Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis, sees industrial civilization as the most destructive way of living yet devised by humans. And it’s over: environmental degradation and depletion tell us it can’t continue. The system has myriad ways to make us believe we can’t live without it. But Keith believes we can - there are countless ways to move forward into contented, happy, and full lives. We can “disengage” and reconnect with the natural world, ourselves, and others.' This guy gets it.
investing
Mutual Fund Education Alliance - Investor's Center
"The Mutual Fund INVESTOR'S CENTER™ is designed to serve as an important resource for investors who want to use mutual funds to reach their financial goals."
jobs
Interesting XSLT (and possibly RDF) job
journalism
Mediactive - Creating a User's Guide to Democratized Media
"My goal is to help people become active and informed users of media, as consumers and as creators. We are in a media-saturated age, more so all the time, and we need to find ways to use media to our — and our society’s — best advantage."
'Most disturbing to me, as a journalist who'd long worked for many of the same magazines and newspapers pushing the scandal but who lived in Arkansas, was realizing that the "mainstream media" had acquired property rights in the bogus narrative. Correcting the record was seen as vandalism.'
I'm From The Government, And I'm Here To Scare You.
«It's also a marker of what Radley Balko refers to as the media's "statist" bias, which doesn't take place along a clear left-right spectrum but rather represents "bia[s] toward power and authority, automatically turning to politicians for solutions to every perceived problem."»
Congo: The Sucking Vortex Where Africa's Heart Should Be
It is, of course, important to note the facts of the United States's imperial actions during the Cold War, but it is also extremely interesting to note Alex Perry's reactions in the comments. Also see <http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003328.html> for a synthesis.
language
That poorly-edited sentence should instead read: "Oppressive regimes (that would be us) cannot tolerate even the idea that their rule is bad."
«For Assange in 2006, then, the public benefit of leaked information is not the first-order good of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world (free information is its own reward), nor is it the second-order good of the muckrakers (free information will lead the people to demand change). What Assange asks of leaked information is that it supply a third-order public good: he wants it to demonstrate that secrets cannot be securely held, and he wants it to do this so that the currency of all secrets will be debased. He wants governments-cum-conspiracies to be rendered paranoid by the leaks and therefore be left with little energy to pursue its externally focused aims. In his words, “We can marginalise a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to, its environment.”»
"The WordReference Dictionaries are free online translation dictionaries." ... for Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese
laptop
NotebookReview.com is a site to find links to the latest Notebook Reviews, Laptop Information and Prices and Laptop Discussion.
laptops
NotebookReview.com is a site to find links to the latest Notebook Reviews, Laptop Information and Prices and Laptop Discussion.
law
'The purpose of iusmentis.com is, put briefly, "to explain the law to techies, and tech to laywers."'
libraries
"Even more useful than the books or activities, though, is the principle behind libraries, that we and our neighbours can pool our resources and hold things in common that all of us occasionally need. Most of the Western World, however, adopted this principle for books and then stopped, never extending it to other obvious areas of life."
"Imagining the future of libraries"
licensing
linux
This is the homepage for ReiserFS and a number of other resources surrounding the technical aspects of naming and resource management.
"KernelTrap is a web community devoted to sharing the latest in kernel development news."
"The Original Monthly Magazine of the Linux Community"
This is "an index of information and documentation of interest to those who now use or are considering using Linux on a notebook or laptop computer."
"Knoppix.net is a resource for users, developers, and testers of Knoppix."
"KNOPPIX is a bootable Live system on CD or DVD, consisting of a representative collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals."
Power Shell Usage: Bash Tips & Tricks
Power Shell Usage is a presentation which describes how to get more out of day-to-day use of the bash shell.
lisp
On Lisp and software engineering
list
This site gathers information and references about Literate Programming.
Softpanorama: (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society
"This is a self-education oriented CS site that contains resources for the independent study in computer science and programming."
"Wiretapped is an archive of software and information covering the areas of host, network and information security, network operations, cryptography and privacy, among others."
lobbying
"I worry much more about the people than the money. Let the banks spend money. But when you've got 54 former staffers from the relevant committees and 33 former chiefs of staff and more than 200 former congressmen, you're talking about something much more effective than spending: You're talking about social relationships. People return e-mails and take calls and listen closely to the people they know."
mathematics
"Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve."
media
'Most disturbing to me, as a journalist who'd long worked for many of the same magazines and newspapers pushing the scandal but who lived in Arkansas, was realizing that the "mainstream media" had acquired property rights in the bogus narrative. Correcting the record was seen as vandalism.'
Will our generals ever shut up?
"In Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, you can see that Pentagon version of an American foreign policy straining to be born. In the end ... it could be stillborn, but it could also become an all-enveloping system offering Americans a ... vision of a world constantly at war and of the importance of planning for more of the same. To the extent that it now exists, it is dominated by the vision of figures who ... have a particularly constrained sense of American priorities, have been deeply immersed in the imperial mayhem that our wars have created, have left us armed to the teeth and flailing at ghosts and demons, and are still enmeshed in the process by which American treasure has been squandered to worse than no purpose in distant lands. Nothing in the record indicates that anyone should listen to what these men have to say. Nothing in the record indicates that Washington won't be all ears, the media won't remain an enthusiastic conduit, and Americans won't follow their lead."
middle_east
The Iraq withdrawal: An Orwellian success
«Along these lines, officials have been boasting about the massive U.S. embassy in Baghdad. "Along with the Great Wall of China," said Ambassador Hill, "its one of those things you can see with the naked eye from outer space. I mean, it’s huge." Indeed. At 104 acres, it is the largest U.S. embassy in the world. In addition to six apartment buildings, it has a luxury pool, as well as a water and sewage treatment plant. Stop for a second and reflect on these last two amenities. They give you some measure of what American officials really know but aren’t saying about the state of drinking water and sanitation in Iraq.»
In Afghanistan, a Threat of Plunder
"Afghanistan is part of the last frontier for resource discovery — one of the 60 most impoverished countries, which account for around a quarter of the earth’s land but which have barely been prospected. Over the next decade, given high world commodity prices, the last frontier will be explored, creating more opportunities like that in Afghanistan. All these countries will need to resist the kind of plunder that has characterized resource-rich countries with weak governance."
Prospects Abound Among the Kurds
"Critics say these former officials are cashing in on a costly and contentious war they played a role in. The way they see it, though, they have every right to fulfill the American dream after having left their government posts."
A Middle East peace that could happen (but won't)
"These Israeli naval attacks began shortly after the discovery by the BG (British Gas) Group of what appear to be quite sizeable natural gas fields in Gaza's territorial waters."
Michael J. Totten's Middle East Journal
An independent reporter provides a from-the-ground perspective on events and life in the Middle East.
military
Despite Drive to Cut Costs, Defense Programs Deemed Unnecessary May Prove Difficult to Kill
"Particularly in Ohio, where the vehicle would’ve been produced, lawmakers of both parties voiced opposition to the cuts, reported the Columbus Dispatch"
"Why the secrecy? And what was the national security requirement that dictated avoiding competition? Did Mina's source for fuel have anything to do with it?"
morality
"What is the basis for our moral perspective on these facets of our existence? Does something uphold that moral perspective other than a belief?"
"Our opponents have every right to contend that economists are unwisely idolizing liberty, but they err by saying we sail without a moral North Star."
"Most people, including the billions of exploited poor, have been impressed with the story that they just need to work hard and cut a deal in order to be elevated to the exploiting class; or the less pleasant version of the story that tells them that even if they can't get that high, they still need to compete tooth and nail with their neighbors; or, at the most brutal edge of the story, that they will face displacement or murder (their choice) if they don't get out of the way of progress."
networking
Online comments need moderation, not "real names"
"When you opened up comments, was it really about having a conversation with the readers? Then have that conversation!"
"Twisted is an event-driven networking framework written in Python and licensed under the MIT license."
Sam Spade provides a suite of network probing tools for manual, web-based use.
"a stealthy system for network authentication across closed ports"
Insecure.org - The nmap homepage
"Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free open source utility for network exploration or security auditing."
"AirSnort is a wireless LAN (WLAN) tool which recovers encryption keys. AirSnort operates by passively monitoring transmissions, computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered."
"Kismet is an 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system."
"Wireshark is one of the world's foremost network protocol analyzers ..."
InterPlaNetary Internet Project
"The objective of [this] project is to define the architecture and protocols necessary to permit interoperation of the Internet resident on Earth with other remotely located internets resident on other planets or spacecraft in transit."
Network Sorcery provides an index to Internet specifications, including RFCs.
news
Bernanke says U.S. economy needs more time to heal
"The U.S. economy is not fully recovered from its deep recession, with housing still weighing on growth, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Friday in a speech spelling out ways the U.S. central bank has studied lower income communities."
U.S. Economic Growth Slows to 1.8% Rate in Quarter
"American economic expansion slowed to a crawl in the first quarter, but economists are hopeful that the setback will be temporary. Total output grew at an annual rate of 1.8 percent from January through March, the Commerce Department said Thursday, after expanding at a 3.1 percent pace in the fourth quarter of 2010."
Royal wedding no tonic for fragile UK recovery
"Investec economist Philip Shaw reckons the royal nuptials will knock a quarter of a percentage point off second-quarter GDP growth -- not good news given that Britain's economy has essentially stagnated since September."
Economic growth slows, inflation surges
"Economic growth braked sharply in the first quarter as higher food and gasoline prices dampened consumer spending and sent inflation rising at its fastest pace in 2-1/2 years."
Obama: Republicans push vision of "shrunken America"
«"We've got a lot of work to do to continue to lower the unemployment rate and grow the economy," Obama said.»
Bernanke signals no rush to reverse stimulus
«In a fresh quarterly forecast, the Fed revised down its growth estimate for 2011 to between 3.1 percent and 3.3 percent from the 3.4 percent to 3.9 percent it saw in January. It said the recovery was proceeding at a "moderate pace," a shift from March when it said it was on "firmer footing."»
Vandana Shiva and Maude Barlow on the Rights of Mother Earth
"And this is so-called green economy, as it is seen by the powerful in our world, is basically no change, continued unlimited growth, continued unlimited free trade agreements, continued unregulated investment of the type that’s taking place with the land grab in Africa, but with a green technology. So we’ll just substitute that dirty old technology, which of course they’re not, because the tar sands is the dirty old technology, and that’s what they’re building it on. So it’s just language around caring for the earth."
Stimulus by Fed Is Disappointing, Economists Say
"The Fed generally encourages growth by pushing down interest rates."
Earthquake Damage at Plants Affects Quarterly Income at Texas Instruments
"The chip maker Texas Instruments said Monday that production setbacks linked to the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan curbed its first-quarter net income and would cut into second-quarter growth."
Slow Payers Hinder Trade in Europe
"With much of Europe still caught in an economic slump and several countries weighing down the bloc’s growth prospects because of huge sovereign debt problems of their own, E.U. officials are starting to circulate proposals for fixing this comparatively simple problem, in hopes of yielding a quick, cost-free stimulus to Europe’s financial health."
Inflation in China Poses Big Threat to Global Trade
"Because China is now the world’s second largest economy, after the United States, and because the country has been a leading source of global growth during the last two years, money problems here can reverberate from Wal-Mart to Wall Street and the world beyond."
Changes may spur Middle East growth if populism set aside
"The changes that have swept across the Arab world could usher in a new era of economic growth after years of inequality and joblessness, economists say, if leaders can resist pressure from the very protesters whose rage has reshaped the region."
G20 tackles global economy; China unswayed on yuan
"The challenge of getting the Group of 20 to agree on how to spot and fix dangers to global growth comes as policymakers are worried about more immediate threats -- high oil prices, huge debts in some rich nations and unrest in the Middle East."
G20 eyes anti-crisis plan, mulls recovery risks
«"Despite the risks in oil, the financial challenges still facing parts of Europe, despite what's happened in Japan ... what you see is gradual healing, gradual strengthening in confidence that the world economy is going to be growing at a reasonable rate," he insisted.»
The Real Housewives of Wall Street
"In early April, in an attempt to learn exactly how much Mack and Karches made on the TALF deals, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa wrote a letter to Waterfall asking 21 detailed questions about the transactions. In addition, Sen. Sanders has personally asked Fed chief Bernanke to provide more complete information on the TALF loans given not only to Christy Mack but to gazillionaires like former Miami Dolphins owner H. Wayne Huizenga and hedge-fund shark John Paulson. But Bernanke bluntly refused to provide the information — and the Fed has similarly stonewalled other oversight agencies, including the General Accounting Office and TARP's special inspector general."
Jobless claims fall, retail sales stronger
"New claims for jobless benefits fell last week and retailers racked up much stronger-than-expected sales in March, signs that high fuel prices have not knocked the economy off its growth path."
Remarks by the President After Meeting with House Republican and Senate Democratic Leadership
"We’re not going to cut those things that we think are absolutely vital to the growth of the American economy and putting people back to work."
World trade to carry crisis scars into 2012: WTO
"World trade will carry the scars of the financial crisis into 2012, the World Trade Organization said on Thursday, predicting 6.5 percent growth for this year, a rate much more modest than last."
Pressure Limits Efforts to Police Drilling for Gas
«“It was like the science didn’t matter,” Carla Greathouse, the author of the study, said in a recent interview. “The industry was going to get what it wanted, and we were not supposed to stand in the way.”»
The billionaire Koch brothers' war against Obama
«A 2004 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, described the Kochs’ foundations as being self-serving, concluding, “These foundations give money to nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that impact the profit margin of Koch Industries.”»
Joblessness, rising prices could spark war within
The end of this article has a rapid-fire exposition about growth that could be useful.
High Food Prices Threaten Growth of Energy Crops in Britain
"WSP calculated that planting energy crops on a fifth of Britain’s arable land would meet just 10 percent of the British heating demand."
It's official: The economy is set to starve
Looking for a single good quote in this article is hard, because almost the entire article is quote worthy. You need to read this article!
Smartphones: Blood stains at our fingertips
"About 80 per cent of the world’s coltan is in Africa, and the vast majority of that store resides in war-torn Eastern Congo. With an estimated $25-trillion in potential value, Congo is, in terms of untapped mineral wealth, perhaps the richest country on Earth. However the country’s mineral trade is a complex and violent web. Rebel groups from within the Congo and neighbouring countries have set up shop around the coltan mines, sometimes with the implicit support of the local military – which experts note are sometimes little more than criminal warlords in uniform."
Declining Energy Quality Could Be a Root Cause of Current Recession
«"If we aren't fundamentally changing the way we produce or consume energy now, don't expect the economy to grow as much as the past two decades," he says.» Ha! Good luck with that.
I'm From The Government, And I'm Here To Scare You.
«It's also a marker of what Radley Balko refers to as the media's "statist" bias, which doesn't take place along a clear left-right spectrum but rather represents "bia[s] toward power and authority, automatically turning to politicians for solutions to every perceived problem."»
Private prison industry helped draft Arizona immigration law
"[N]o one should be surprised that the private prison industry is in part responsible for the Arizona immigration law that requires state law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law (read: lock up anyone suspected of being Hispanic until and unless they can prove their citizenship)."
Hungary's toxic sludge of aluminum doom
"Bauxite, the ore from which aluminum is derived, is one of Hungary's main natural resources, and the state has been smelting the metal on an industrial scale since World War II. And no matter who runs the show, commissar or CEO, there's no getting around the fact that processing bauxite ore into aluminum is a nasty, nasty business, and has been so since the 1880s, when the Austrian chemist Karl Bayer figured out an efficient way to do so."
In School Outreach, BP and NOAA Dispel Myths' About Dispersants, Subsurface Oil
"[R]epresentatives of BP and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have reached out to local schools to “dispel myths” about dispersants and subsurface oil ... During one demonstration, reported the Tri-Parish Times, a BP representative asked the students questions about the oil spill. Students who answered correctly received a BP hat or pen as a prize."
Exclusive: Blackwater Wins Piece of $10 Billion Mercenary Deal
"Never mind the dead civilians. Forget about the stolen guns. Get over the murder arrests, the fraud allegations, and the accusations of guards pumping themselves up with steroids and cocaine. Through a “joint venture,” the notorious private-security firm Blackwater has won a piece of a five-year State Department contract worth up to $10 billion, Danger Room has learned. Apparently, there is no misdeed so big that it can keep guns-for-hire from working for the government. And this is despite a 2008 campaign pledge from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to ban the company from federal contracts."
Charles Maxwell Forecasts Peak Oil in Seven Years
From the referenced article: "We're obviously in an unsustainable situation. We are now using up a greater number of barrels that we have found in the recent past and that we have reserved in the ground. We are now beginning to use it up relatively quickly--with scary consequences for the future."
German Military Study Warns of Potential Energy Crisis
"This week a study on peak oil by a German military think tank was leaked on the Internet. The document shows that the German government is closely studying the issue of peak oil, and is aware of the potential for serious consequences as oil production declines."
"With global wheat prices expected to spike following an export ban in Russia due to fires destroying millions of hectares of crops, a new study measuring global food security has identified the food supplies of Afghanistan and nine Africa states as the countries which are most at risk and vulnerable to rising costs."
What if there’s much less coal than we think?
"Now, for those of you without a calendar: 2011 is soon! Think about it: 40 years from now, despite growth in population and energy demand, there will be about half as much coal available as there is now. That's a big relief for the atmosphere but serious trouble for, y'know, people."
Did top Obama donor carry Israeli message to W.H.?
"[A] top Israeli general traveled to Chicago to ask a top Obama contributor and supporter of Israel, billionaire Lester Crown, to pressure the White House to take a tougher line on Iran."
"Since 1950, the study found, the oceans have lost 40 percent of their phytoplankton. As these organisms account for the production of half the earth’s organic matter, this is not good. It’s like finding out that there’s half as much money in all the earth’s banks as we thought there was. But of course it’s worse than that. No one knows for sure what happens when the oceans are diminished like this—that’s the point. We’re in a new and dangerous place, without a clue."
Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered
"A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year."
Conservatives Try To Bash USDA Anti-Racism Suit, Shirley Sherrod
"It's not clear whether Brietbart's release of the video was specifically intended to hurt the chances of other African-America farmers to receive recompense from decades of discrimination that caused them to lose their farms, but conservatives immediately used the video to attack the settlement."
"Well, the people with money, the elite, decided, hey, we need to do something here to divide them. "So that's when they made black people servants for life. That's when they put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That's when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And they -- it started working so well, they said, gosh, looks like we've come up on something here that can last generations -- and here we are. Over 400 years later, and it's still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us." See <http://www.colorofchange.org/shirley/message.html> if you want to take action.
Farm to grow crops, economic development in Cleveland's Ohio City
"Six vacant acres of Cleveland's West Side neighborhood, just blocks from cutting-edge restaurants and the venerated West Side Market, are turning to a fresh food project and a plow."
Prospects Abound Among the Kurds
"Critics say these former officials are cashing in on a costly and contentious war they played a role in. The way they see it, though, they have every right to fulfill the American dream after having left their government posts."
Judge Blocks Obama's Moratorium on Deep-Water Drilling
'Citing potential economic harm to businesses and workers, Judge Feldman wrote that the Obama administration had failed to justify the need for such “a blanket, generic, indeed punitive, moratorium” on deep-water oil and gas drilling.'
In the Shadow of the Serengeti
"In recent years, there have been a number of government-orchestrated forcible dispossessions related to high-end safari ventures in northern Tanzania"
The Spill, The Scandal and the President | Rolling Stone Politics
Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force
"A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress."
Murkowski Blocks Bill to Raise Oil Companies' Liability for Spills
Here is another shard of evidence demonstrating how corporations (in this case the oil industry) influence government.
Experts rally to defense of climate science
"There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend."
"In 2003, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service considered mandating the devices, but decided against it under pressure from oil companies that complained that the $500,000 devices were too burdensome." 'It shouldn't take a spill of this magnitude to remind us that we are still far from "beyond petroleum." No amount of rebranding can change that.'
The Legacy of Billy Tauzin: The White House-PhRMA Deal
"How they did it ... is a testament to how ingrained the grip of special interests remains in Washington."
Medical Interests Spent $876 Million on Reform
"Medical interests alone shelled out more than $876 million in lobbying expenses during the 15 months beginning in January 2009 and ending in March, when Congress passed the sweeping overhaul."
"Why the secrecy? And what was the national security requirement that dictated avoiding competition? Did Mina's source for fuel have anything to do with it?"
Lobbyists and Lawmakers Bond During Springsteen Concerts
"Lawmakers continue to enjoy free and easy access to events that aren’t available to most Americans. And lobbyists and wealthy business leaders are still partying with lawmakers who can directly affect their bottom line."
How Senator Vitter Battled the EPA Over Formaldehyde’s Link to Cancer
'As long as the studies continue, the EPA will still list formaldehyde as a "probable" rather than a "known" carcinogen, even though three major scientific reviews now link it to leukemia and have strengthened its ties to other forms of cancer. The chemical industry is fighting to avoid that designation, because it could lead to tighter regulations and require costly pollution controls.'
US military warns oil output may dip causing massive shortages by 2015
"The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact."
"Even with his mistake, the Republicans are filibustering twice as often as Democrats have in any previous Congress - so they clearly are abusing the system."
Senate sitting on 290 bills already passed by House; tension mounts
"Exasperated House Democratic leaders have compiled a list showing that they have passed 290 bills that have stalled in the Senate."
Planet Open Government Open Source Hacking
"This site aggregates blogs from the open government technology community and public sector bloggers on related topics in the United States."
"There's a lot of anger at the Senate"
"House Democrats think they've figured out the problem with healthcare reform: The Senate"
Talking Points Memo | Breaking News and Analysis
"The site specializes in original reporting on government and politics and offers breaking news coverage, investigative reporting, high profile guest bloggers and a book club."
"Thomson Reuters is the world's largest international multimedia news agency, providing investing news, world news, business news, technology news, headline news, small business news, news alerts, personal finance, stock market, and mutual funds information available on Reuters.com, video, mobile, and interactive television platforms. Thomson Reuters journalists are subject to an Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests."
Center for Investigative Reporting
"Founded in 1977, the Center for Investigative Reporting is the nation's oldest nonprofit investigative news organization, producing multimedia reporting that has impact and is relevant to people's lives."
ProPublica - Journalism in the Public Interest
'ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.'
"GovTrack Insider takes you inside the legislative process on Capitol Hill."
Tracking news, views, and conversations in 11,860 towns and neighborhoods
Center for Media and Democracy
"[The CMD] include[s] PR Watch, a quarterly investigative journal; six books by CMD staff; Spin of the Day; the Weekly Spin listserv; and, Congresspedia and SourceWatch"
"A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on techniques and benefits of designing with web standards."
"the web's best television resource"
"Security Response provides ... world-class analysis and protection from viruses, blended threats, security risks and vulnerabilities."
"The Central Voice for Linux and Open Source Security News"
"Information Technology News, Computer Networking & Security"
"SecurityFocus is a vendor-neutral site that provides objective, timely and comprehensive security information to all members of the security community ..."
"KernelTrap is a web community devoted to sharing the latest in kernel development news."
"LWN.net aims to be the premier news and information source for the free software community."
"The Original Monthly Magazine of the Linux Community"
NotebookReview.com is a site to find links to the latest Notebook Reviews, Laptop Information and Prices and Laptop Discussion.
A collection of feeds from a variety of commentators on RDF-related issues.
A collection of feeds from a variety of commentators on XML-related issues.
Michael J. Totten's Middle East Journal
An independent reporter provides a from-the-ground perspective on events and life in the Middle East.
nostalgia
AbiWord is a Freed Software word-processing application.
ontologies
Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer
A lightweight, subject concept reference structure for the Web
Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records - Final Report
organization
paper-airplanes
parsing
Trails of EasyExtend - Projects and projections
"... a blog representation of Kay Schlühr."
personal
Personal web site of John E. Ikerd
Author of "A Revolution of the Middle... and The Pursuit of Happiness", "Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense", "Small Farms are Real Farms: Sustaining People Through Agriculture", "Return to Common Sense", and "Crisis and Opportunity: Sustainability in American Agriculture".
Trails of EasyExtend - Projects and projections
"... a blog representation of Kay Schlühr."
Lateral Opinion - Roberto Alsina's Web Log
"I write free software. I have an opinion on almost everything. I write quickly. A weblog was inevitable."
Life Among The Mammals: Len Bullard's Web Log
... someday, I would like to be able to understand Len.
Eric Meyer's personal web page.
Jamie Zawinski's personal web site.
Dan Connolly discusses the Semantic Web and other Web Architectural issues.
Aristotle Pagaltzis' home page.
Communication Forum for Andrew Sullivan
This site provides access to Andrew Sullivan's take on current events through his web log, his articles, and other media such as letters. Mr. Sullivan is professional writer who seems interested in history and its effect on the present.
philosophy
Ian Bicking: a blog :: Toward a new self-definition for open source
Ian Bicking reflects on Free Software, how it should define itself, and what its ideas could mean for the rest of humanity.
Edgar Allan Poe's The Philosophy of Composition as applied to software engineering
photography
"Digital Photography Review is an independent resource dedicated to the provision of news, reviews and information about Digital Photography and Digital Imaging ..."
poetry
politicians
Dan La Botz – Socialist for Senate 2010
"We need a country where the majority—not an economic oligarchy—control our country’s resources. Working people—steelworkers and nurse, bus drivers, waiters and teachers–make the country run, and working people—not the banks and corporations—should run the country."
politics
Can gas prices doom the president?
"As we can see from that second graph, that tremendous and ongoing slide is not because we conscientiously decided to stop parasitically bleeding the Earth of the most versatile finite source of energy available so that we can hop in the car to catch a movie or buy sandals or basically enjoy whatever we want. No, now we make up the difference between our current production and our current consumption, a difference of about 12 million barrels per day, by ensuring that we get a smooth flow from the rest of the world. And we can see how that's going."
Proof Obama is not caving on regulation: The EPA
"Thus, depending on economic growth for societal stability while trying to put an upper limit on the amount of greenhouse gases that we emit are two fundamentally contradictory goals, and trying to base decisions on contradictory goals such as these will continue to lead to both economic and ecological disasters. We must resolve these contradictions before we can implement reasonable public policy."
"Look at the list of things they agree on: Opposing corporate control of government, bloated military budgets, undeclared wars, corporate bailouts, invasion of civil liberties and civil rights, opposition to the USA PATRIOT Act, trade deals like NAFTA and WTO, stronger whistleblower protections, support for WikiLeaks, opposition to runaway deficits, and bringing transparency to the actions of the Federal Reserve and putting it under democratic control."
A congressman writes to his constituents: "Thank God for gerrymandering"
Ian Bicking: a blog :: Toward a new self-definition for open source
Ian Bicking reflects on Free Software, how it should define itself, and what its ideas could mean for the rest of humanity.
Bending the Curve: Effective Steps to Address Long-Term Health Care ...
Sustainable Energy - without the hot air, by David MacKay
"to those who will not have the benefit of two billion years' accumulated energy reserves"
"An Inconvenient Truth" is a Movie, a Book, a Political Platform, and an extremely important Message about the frightening reality of Global Warming that calls us all to action.
portal
This is "an index of information and documentation of interest to those who now use or are considering using Linux on a notebook or laptop computer."
poverty
«No one looking for sensible rather than sentimental or ideological reasons to believe in the possibility of human progress need look any further than the fact that, for the first time in human history, it is possible to imagine the end of famine. … To be sure, there are also many other things to say, other questions to ask--most notably why, if we are now so competent at dealing with famine, we are so incompetent at dealing with chronic malnutrition, which is getting no better, and in some cases is actually getting worse, even in democratic countries such as India that seem to have banished famine. The other three horsemen of the apocalypse will likely always be with us. But the possibility that we have seen the fourth horseman off for good is a reason for the most profound thankfulness.»
Gap Between Rich And Poor Named 8th Wonder Of The World
"According to anthropologists, untold millions of slaves and serfs toiled their whole lives to complete the gap. Records indicate the work likely began around 10,000 years ago, when the world's first landed elites convinced their subjects that construction of such a monument was the will of a divine authority, a belief still widely held today."
"Camden is the poster child of postindustrial decay. It stands as a warning of what huge pockets of the United States could turn into as we cement into place a permanent underclass of the unemployed, slash state and federal services in a desperate bid to cut massive deficits, watch cities and states go bankrupt and struggle to adjust to a stark neofeudalism in which the working and middle classes are decimated." I also found this dramatic and extremely telling: "The city is busily cannibalizing itself in a desperate bid to generate revenue. ... There are about twenty scrap merchants in the city, and they have created a market for the metal guts of apartments and houses. ... Its huge shredding machines in the port can chop up automobiles and stoves into chunks the size of a baseball. Ships from Turkey, China and India pull into the port and take the scrap back to smelters in their countries." As our cities fall, others will literally mine them for their literally embodied resources.
Don't forget Shirley Sherrod's original message
"Low-income Americans have it incredibly tough, and the suffering engendered by not having enough money may be the most serious issue we face right now. But given the opportunity to talk about wealth, we talked, yet again, about race."
prayer
This site organizes and presents the daily Liturgy of the Hours.
presentation
"Web-based presentation software."
prison-industry
Enlisting Prison Labor to Close Budget Gaps
"Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, introduced a bill last month to require all low-security prisoners to work 50 hours a week. Creating a national prison labor force has been a goal since he went to Congress in 1995, but it makes even more sense in this economy, he said."
Private prison industry helped draft Arizona immigration law
"[N]o one should be surprised that the private prison industry is in part responsible for the Arizona immigration law that requires state law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law (read: lock up anyone suspected of being Hispanic until and unless they can prove their citizenship)."
prisoners
"Daniel McGowan is an environmental and social justice activist from New York City. He was charged in federal court on counts of arson, property destruction and conspiracy, all relating to two actions in Oregon in 2001." Also see <http://www.thenation.com/article/159161/gitmo-heartland> and the documentary "If A Tree Falls".
productivity
Methods of Work: It Didn't Happen If You Didn't Write It Down
"If you think of a good idea and don’t record it somewhere, you’ll forget it. Inevitably. If you need something done by a certain time and don’t record it somewhere, you’ll miss it. If you learn something while roaming through code, or exploring a new tool, write your experiences down. You’ll thank yourself later."
products
programming
"Python Challenge is a game in which each level can be solved by a bit of (Python) programming."
"Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve."
"Python® is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development."
"PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML."
Art of Assembly Language Programming and HLA by Randall Hyde
propaganda
'Most disturbing to me, as a journalist who'd long worked for many of the same magazines and newspapers pushing the scandal but who lived in Arkansas, was realizing that the "mainstream media" had acquired property rights in the bogus narrative. Correcting the record was seen as vandalism.'
prophecy
When Will the Food Bubble Burst?
"The average temperature in Moscow for July was a scarcely believable 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm. Watching the heat wave play out over the seven-week period on the TV evening news, with the thousands of fires and smoke everywhere, was like watching a horror film. Over 56,000 people died in the extreme heat. Russia's 140 million people were in shock, traumatized by what was happening to them and their country."
queue
"Imagining the future of libraries"
‘Net Energy’ Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society
Bending the Curve: Effective Steps to Address Long-Term Health Care ...
A Legal Issues Primer forOpen Source and Free Software Projects
"Share your RDF documents with the World!"
RDFHomepage generates a web site from a set of RDF sources, including FOAF.
TaskJuggler: Project Manager's Delight
TaskJuggler is Free Software for managing time and effort allocations for project workflow.
racism
Conservatives Try To Bash USDA Anti-Racism Suit, Shirley Sherrod
"It's not clear whether Brietbart's release of the video was specifically intended to hurt the chances of other African-America farmers to receive recompense from decades of discrimination that caused them to lose their farms, but conservatives immediately used the video to attack the settlement."
Don't forget Shirley Sherrod's original message
"Low-income Americans have it incredibly tough, and the suffering engendered by not having enough money may be the most serious issue we face right now. But given the opportunity to talk about wealth, we talked, yet again, about race."
"Well, the people with money, the elite, decided, hey, we need to do something here to divide them. "So that's when they made black people servants for life. That's when they put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That's when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And they -- it started working so well, they said, gosh, looks like we've come up on something here that can last generations -- and here we are. Over 400 years later, and it's still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us." See <http://www.colorofchange.org/shirley/message.html> if you want to take action.
rdf-source
"The mission of UniProt is to provide the scientific community with a comprehensive, high-quality and freely accessible resource of protein sequence and functional information." This is their new beta site, which includes excellent access to taxonomic RDF
"The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web."
GovTrack.us: Tracking the United States Congress
GovTrack publishes and summarizes formalized information about ongoing activities in Congress.
recommended-reading
James Howard Kunstler: The old American dream is a nightmare
The whole interview is excellent.
It's official: The economy is set to starve
Looking for a single good quote in this article is hard, because almost the entire article is quote worthy. You need to read this article!
"THAT A DISTINCTION can usefully be drawn between wants and needs seems obvious. Mainstream economics, however, refuses to countenance such a distinction."
"Who can deny that our American world is in trouble? Or that our troubles, like our wars, have a momentum of their own against which we generally no longer raise our voices in protest; that we have, in a sense, been disarmed as citizens? ... If the policies of these two disparate figures often have a tweedledum-and-tweedledee-ish look to them, then what we face is not specific party politics or individual style, but a system with its own steamroller force, and its own set of narrow, repetitive “solutions” to our problems. We also face an increasingly militarized, privatized government, its wheels greased by the funds of giant corporations, that now regularly seems to go about the business of creating new Katrinas."
A Middle East peace that could happen (but won't)
"These Israeli naval attacks began shortly after the discovery by the BG (British Gas) Group of what appear to be quite sizeable natural gas fields in Gaza's territorial waters."
The business of America is kleptocracy
"A spirit of shared sacrifice, dismissed as hopelessly naïve, has been replaced by a form of tribalized privatization in which insiders find ways to profit no matter what."
A congressman writes to his constituents: "Thank God for gerrymandering"
Ian Bicking: a blog :: Toward a new self-definition for open source
Ian Bicking reflects on Free Software, how it should define itself, and what its ideas could mean for the rest of humanity.
Sustainable Energy - without the hot air, by David MacKay
"to those who will not have the benefit of two billion years' accumulated energy reserves"
The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq
"[N]ow when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years."
reference
The Spill, The Scandal and the President | Rolling Stone Politics
Ken Salazar, corporatism and the BP oil spill
"Yet who did Obama choose to head the Interior Department? Ken Salazar, notorious for being beholden to the very industries he would be regulating."
"Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources."
"In 2003, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service considered mandating the devices, but decided against it under pressure from oil companies that complained that the $500,000 devices were too burdensome." 'It shouldn't take a spill of this magnitude to remind us that we are still far from "beyond petroleum." No amount of rebranding can change that.'
The alleged Wall Street e-mail that went viral
"A whole class of people put their faith in a market fundamentalist ideology that declared the pursuit of profit and the indulgence of greed to be the a right and proper way to organize a society. And now, well, it kinda seems like they were wrong."
The Legacy of Billy Tauzin: The White House-PhRMA Deal
"How they did it ... is a testament to how ingrained the grip of special interests remains in Washington."
Medical Interests Spent $876 Million on Reform
"Medical interests alone shelled out more than $876 million in lobbying expenses during the 15 months beginning in January 2009 and ending in March, when Congress passed the sweeping overhaul."
A Middle East peace that could happen (but won't)
"These Israeli naval attacks began shortly after the discovery by the BG (British Gas) Group of what appear to be quite sizeable natural gas fields in Gaza's territorial waters."
Can a Supreme Court seat be bought?
"For now, it seems possible that a group could pour an unlimited amount of money into a judicial nomination fight without any oversight whatsoever -- meaning that, were one to ask for recusal at a later date, it would be very difficult to prove what had been spent in the first place."
Time for a Wall Street-Washington divorce
"Even as Congress debates legislation to tame it, Wall Street is conducting a bidding war between the parties for its continued beneficence."
"Why the secrecy? And what was the national security requirement that dictated avoiding competition? Did Mina's source for fuel have anything to do with it?"
Goldman Sachs' best friends in politics
'It may be that McMahon, in taking a position that was so favorable to the banking industry, really believed his Op-Ed's headline: "Misunderstanding derivatives endangers Main Street." Or maybe he just knew where his bread was buttered.'
The business of America is kleptocracy
"A spirit of shared sacrifice, dismissed as hopelessly naïve, has been replaced by a form of tribalized privatization in which insiders find ways to profit no matter what."
A jailed banker explains why banks still run the world
"[P]erhaps he is there to remind the senators and representatives he left behind on Capitol Hill how rewarding retirement can be for politicians who take care of the banks. ... Amazingly, many politicians who claim to represent the public interest take this money. Ken Silverstein, who has diligently followed the economic and political depredations of UBS for years, asked the most pertinent question long ago: Why would any decent elected official in this country still accept a dime from this outfit?"
Republican senator hints "bailout" charge is false
"But Corker did not appear terribly embarrassed by his own contortions. He told Gannett News that he feels "energized" and "liberated." He can help to write a bill and then sign a letter threatening to filibuster that same bill, while acknowledging that the stated reasons for the filibuster are untrue. Nobody in the national press corps will call him to account for that glaring contradiction. And nobody in the press corps will ask McConnell to explain why the Republican senator with the most expertise on this bill has said, as diplomatically as possible, that McConnell is lying."
How Senator Vitter Battled the EPA Over Formaldehyde’s Link to Cancer
'As long as the studies continue, the EPA will still list formaldehyde as a "probable" rather than a "known" carcinogen, even though three major scientific reviews now link it to leukemia and have strengthened its ties to other forms of cancer. The chemical industry is fighting to avoid that designation, because it could lead to tighter regulations and require costly pollution controls.'
Banks, Bankers, and the New Political Economy
"Thinkers across the political spectrum ... can recognize the critical role of political connectedness in driving bankers’ compensation."
Getting Serious About Ending Bailouts
"If there are no changes to the rules that brought us the too big to fail problem, there is no reason to think that another bailout wouldn’t happen again."
What Happens When Congress Fails to Do Its Job?
"Obstructionism is a good minority strategy as long as it actually works to stymie the majority's agenda and return you to power. But if it just means you sit out the work of governance while the majority legislates around you, your constituents and interest groups will eventually begin demanding that you include them in the process. And that's as it should be: we hire legislators to legislate. We need a system that encourages them to do so."
Tipping Point: Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production - Part 1 - Summary
"We have passed or are close to passing the peak of global oil production. Our civilisation is structurally unstable to an energy withdrawal. There is a high probability that our integrated and globalised civilisation is on the cusp of a fast and near-term collapse."
"The new-school filibuster would preserve minority rights in the Senate, while imposing significant costs on obstructionist members, changing the calculus that causes today’s logjam."
Welcome to the Permanent Recession – Food and Transportation Prices Rising
"Victory Gardens provided much food to Britons and Americans during World War II, and Dmitri Orlov has said that home gardens saved a lot of Russians following the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should all be developing some self-sufficiency skills."
"Even with his mistake, the Republicans are filibustering twice as often as Democrats have in any previous Congress - so they clearly are abusing the system."
Can Obama Bypass Republicans on Health?
"it seems clear that the filibuster is a convenient excuse Democrats use to justify their inaction"
The Democratic Party's deceitful game
"This is what the Democratic Party does; it's who they are. They're willing to feign support for anything their voters want just as long as there's no chance that they can pass it."
Senate sitting on 290 bills already passed by House; tension mounts
"Exasperated House Democratic leaders have compiled a list showing that they have passed 290 bills that have stalled in the Senate."
So You Wanna Reform The Filibuster? Here's How
"Here's the good news: reforming the filibuster -- technically speaking -- isn't that hard."
Why Washington Loves The Filibuster
"The belief that the filibuster is okay, but minority parties should just use it less often and start acting nicer is the equivalent of the belief that the financial system was totally fine, there just needs to be less greed and more caution."
What stands in the way of "forcing" a filibuster?
'[W]hile a "real" filibuster can result, all of the costs fall on the majority.'
"There's a lot of anger at the Senate"
"House Democrats think they've figured out the problem with healthcare reform: The Senate"
Filibuster 2.0: How 41 Senators Control The Country Without Actually Filibustering
'Majority Leader Harry Reid's office has studied the issue and concluded that a filibustering senator "can be forced to sit on the [Senate] floor to keep us from voting on that legislation for a finite period of time according to existing rules but he/she can't be forced to keep talking for an indefinite period of time."'
Why the filibuster is OK for Democrats but not for Republicans
"What's most striking, though, are the many cases in which the filibustering Senate minority has actually represented a majority of Americans."
Don't give in to media-inspired fatalism
'Not only has total paralysis been theoretically achieved, but our allegedly liberal "mainstream" news media treats it as entirely normal.'
A national anthem for healthcare reform
"[T]he biggest health insurers are lobbying like mad against reform because they like things just the way they are. They can squeeze the public and the public has no alternative but to pay up."
Wall Street owners angry with their purchase
"Wall Street executives are angry that, after duly purchasing the Democrats (they have receipts and everything), the Obama White House is now rousing the dirty rabble with their anti-banker rhetoric"
There is job hysteria for a reason
"it's not as if the government hasn't directly created jobs before"
"From the perspective of what the People want, or even the perspective of what the political parties say they want, the Fundraising Congress is misfiring in every dimension."
Our incredible shrinking democracy
"It seems as if more and more decisions that should be made democratically are being shunted off somewhere to a few people who make them in back rooms."
Steven G. Brant: The United Corporate States Of America
'While those "evil" corporations planning to take over our country are making their plans, "we the people" will use the power of consumer dollars to transform those "evil" corporations into "good" corporations. We will do that by changing the value system underlying the choices all corporations make.'
The sanctity of military spending
"It's time for "everyone" to sacrifice and suffer some more -- as long as "everyone" excludes our vast military industry, the permanent power factions inside the Pentagon and intelligence community, our Surveillance and National Security State, and the imperial policies of perpetual war which feed them while further draining the lifeblood out of the country."
The underlying divisions in the healthcare debate
"Our laws are written not by elected representatives but, literally, by the largest and richest corporations. At the level of the most concentrated power, large corporate interests and government actions are basically inseparable."
Healthcare industry stocks explode as bill progresses
"[T]he White House's strategy from the start was to negotiate in secret with those very special interests in order to craft a bill that they liked and that benefits them."
White House as helpless victim on healthcare
"The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives."
"The community-built resource that focuses on alternative, clean, practical, renewable energy solutions."
Sustainable Energy - without the hot air, by David MacKay
"to those who will not have the benefit of two billion years' accumulated energy reserves"
Ten easy ways to attract women to your free software project
"This page shows common errors that Bash programmers make."
"This site is aimed at promoting the health of the Web by providing web developers and the public with the knowledge and tools needed to help the Web move forward."
"a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world"
"An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting"
"This site has over 5,800 Christian hymns & Gospel songs from many denominations."
News on movies, DVD releases, and related events.
The Blue Letter Bible provides online Biblical research tools.
New Advent provides access to an assortment of historical Christian writing as well as regularly updated news in an accessible manner.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
This site includes Catholic news and access to the Bible and the Catechism.
"This document attempts to answer Frequently Asked Questions about Compact Disc Recordable technology and related fields."
"This is the official home page for DocBook: The Definitive Guide."
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Python
"This book is about the fundamentals of data structures and algorithms... The algorithms and data structures in the book are presented in the Python programming language."
The Constitution of the United States
This site presents the U.S. Constitution in a setting maintained by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
Applied Computer Security Associates (ACSA)
This is the ACSA website; it also covers their annual conference - the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC). This website provides several good security resources and references.
research
Tropical forests were the primary sources of new agricultural land in the 1980s and 1990s
"Global demand for agricultural products such as food, feed, and fuel is now a major driver of cropland and pasture expansion across much of the developing world. Whether these new agricultural lands replace forests, degraded forests, or grasslands greatly influences the environmental consequences of expansion. Although the general pattern is known, there still is no definitive quantification of these land-cover changes. ... Across the tropics, we find that between 1980 and 2000 more than 55% of new agricultural land came at the expense of intact forests, and another 28% came from disturbed forests. This study underscores the potential consequences of unabated agricultural expansion for forest conservation and carbon emissions."
"Why would commercial banks hold $1 trillion more than they legally had to in reserves at the Fed, earning only 0.25 percent interest per year, and why would the Fed buy more than $1 trillion of mortgage securities of undisclosed quality in the marketplace?"
Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems research group at MIT CSAIL
resistance
«For Assange in 2006, then, the public benefit of leaked information is not the first-order good of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world (free information is its own reward), nor is it the second-order good of the muckrakers (free information will lead the people to demand change). What Assange asks of leaked information is that it supply a third-order public good: he wants it to demonstrate that secrets cannot be securely held, and he wants it to do this so that the currency of all secrets will be debased. He wants governments-cum-conspiracies to be rendered paranoid by the leaks and therefore be left with little energy to pursue its externally focused aims. In his words, “We can marginalise a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to, its environment.”»
security
This is the home page of John the Ripper, Openwall GNU/*/Linux, and several other pieces of security-related software.
"a stealthy system for network authentication across closed ports"
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures from MITRE
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is a list of standardized names for vulnerabilities and other information security exposures..."
"Security Response provides ... world-class analysis and protection from viruses, blended threats, security risks and vulnerabilities."
"The OASIS PKI Member Section was established ... to foster support for standards-based, interoperable public-key infrastructure (PKI) as a foundation for secure transactions in e-business applications."
"The Central Voice for Linux and Open Source Security News"
Joint Task Force - Global Network Operations
"The JTF-GNO directs the operation and defense of the Global Information Grid across strategic, operational, and tactical boundaries in support of DoD’s full spectrum of war fighting, intelligence, and business operations."
"Wiretapped is an archive of software and information covering the areas of host, network and information security, network operations, cryptography and privacy, among others."
The Diceware Passphrase Home Page
"This page offers a better way to create a strong, yet easy to remember passphrase for use with encryption and security programs."
"SecurityFocus is a vendor-neutral site that provides objective, timely and comprehensive security information to all members of the security community ..."
"AirSnort is a wireless LAN (WLAN) tool which recovers encryption keys. AirSnort operates by passively monitoring transmissions, computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered."
"Wireshark is one of the world's foremost network protocol analyzers ..."
"GnuPG is the GNU project's complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC2440."
"The 'Nessus' Project aims to provide to the Internet community a free, powerful, up-to-date and easy to use remote security scanner."
"The keychain script makes handling RSA and DSA keys both convenient and secure. It acts as a front-end to ssh-agent, allowing you to easily have one long-running ssh-agent process per system, rather than per login session."
Applied Computer Security Associates (ACSA)
This is the ACSA website; it also covers their annual conference - the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC). This website provides several good security resources and references.
PullThePlug Wargames, including Vortex, Catalyst, Semtex, and Blackhole
The PullThePlug Wargames are a set of live reverse engineering and exploit development exercises.
service
"TextDrive is a hosting company run by and for people who love publishing on the web."
"Strongspace is a secure place to gather, store, back-up and share any type of file with your co-workers, friends and family. You can upload, download and manage your files over SFTP (Secure FTP) or with any modern web browser."
shell
"This page shows common errors that Bash programmers make."
"Terminator is a cross-platform GPL terminal emulator with advanced features not yet found elsewhere."
"An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting"
History of visited directories in BASH
This document describes a Bash shell script which enhances the `cd` command to allow for easy selection of a new directory based upon a history of previous working directories.
Power Shell Usage: Bash Tips & Tricks
Power Shell Usage is a presentation which describes how to get more out of day-to-day use of the bash shell.
social-networking
Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered
"A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year."
software-engineering
"The way that I would like to represent a program is something more like a hypertext story."
Ten easy ways to attract women to your free software project
The Struggles of New Graduates
A summary of "the problems new college graduates face in their first software development job."
Edgar Allan Poe's The Philosophy of Composition as applied to software engineering
On Lisp and software engineering
This site gathers information and references about Literate Programming.
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Python
"This book is about the fundamentals of data structures and algorithms... The algorithms and data structures in the book are presented in the Python programming language."
This paper provides an overview of the mental models behind software engineering.
Alan Cox on writing better software
Alan Cox provides a high-level perspective on a number of items that could be useful for producing better software.
specifications
Network Sorcery provides an index to Internet specifications, including RFCs.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
The W3C is a standards body responsible for development of specifications for basic Web technologies.
[RFC 3986] Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax
This document describes the general URI syntax.
storage
Version Control with Subversion
"This is the online home of Version Control with Subversion, a free book about Subversion, a new version control system designed to supplant CVS."
This is the homepage for ReiserFS and a number of other resources surrounding the technical aspects of naming and resource management.
"With FUSE it is possible to implement a fully functional filesystem in a userspace program."
"PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system."
Subversion is version control software that is similar to CVS in many concepts, but is easier and cleaner to use.
sysadmin
runit - a UNIX init scheme with service supervision
"runit is a cross-platform Unix init scheme with service supervision, a replacement for sysvinit, and other init schemes."
t-shirts
technology
"Technology is essentially a form of service. We work to make the world better. Our inventions can ease burdens, reduce poverty and suffering, and sometimes even bring new forms of beauty into the world. We can give people more options to act morally, because people with medicine, housing and agriculture can more easily afford to be kind than those who are sick, cold and starving."
television
"the web's best television resource"
tracking
Farm to grow crops, economic development in Cleveland's Ohio City
"Six vacant acres of Cleveland's West Side neighborhood, just blocks from cutting-edge restaurants and the venerated West Side Market, are turning to a fresh food project and a plow."
transportation
Midwest High Speed Rail Association
"The Midwest High Speed Rail Association is a non-profit, member-supported organization advocating for fast, frequent and dependable trains connecting the entire Midwest."
typesetting
Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN)
"The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network is the authoritative place to find TeX-related material for download."
"You can use LaTeX to typeset letters, both personal and business. The letter document style is designed to make a number of letters at once, although you can make just one if you so desire."
TeX4ht: LaTeX and TeX for Hypertext
"TeX4ht is a highly configurable TeX-based authoring system for producing hypertext."
unicode
unix
version-control
video
"END:CIV examines our culture's addiction to systematic violence and environmental exploitation, and probes the resulting epidemic of poisoned landscapes and shell-shocked nations."
Saul Griffith: Climate Change Recalculated
"Engineer, environmentalist, and entrepreneur Saul Griffith examines the numerical reality of the fight against climate change."
300 YEARS OF FOSSIL-FUELED ADDICTION IN 5 MINUTES
"It's all hands on deck!"
The Daily Show with Jon Steward - 2010-10-07 - Foreclosure Crisis
"Apparently now we have a foreclosure-based economy. We are fucked. And, the sad part is, Rube Goldberg himself could not have designed a more convoluted method to, in fact, fuck us."
Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution
'What kind of life do you want, and what are you willing to do to get it? Keith Farnish, author of Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis, sees industrial civilization as the most destructive way of living yet devised by humans. And it’s over: environmental degradation and depletion tell us it can’t continue. The system has myriad ways to make us believe we can’t live without it. But Keith believes we can - there are countless ways to move forward into contented, happy, and full lives. We can “disengage” and reconnect with the natural world, ourselves, and others.' This guy gets it.
volunteering
voting
This site provides documentation of the election-methods mailing list, as well as related resources.
wallpapers
This is a web site for a graphic art and design studio. The studio also produces some top-quality desktop wallpapers.
This site has a collection of digital artwork designed to be used as desktop wallpapers.
Very nice collection of desktop wallpapers, in Japanese.
wealth
Exponential Growth Rate of US Stocks since 1871
Also see the same data graphed on a logarithmic scale at <http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2010/10/29/us-stocks-roaring-20s/>.
"You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes."
weather
web
Facebook Seattle Engineering Road Show: Mike Shroepfer on Engineering at Scale at Facebook
"This site is aimed at promoting the health of the Web by providing web developers and the public with the knowledge and tools needed to help the Web move forward."
"TextDrive is a hosting company run by and for people who love publishing on the web."
"A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on techniques and benefits of designing with web standards."
"The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web."
Eric Meyer's personal web page.
"Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events."
1060 NetKernel is a resource oriented microkernel and RESTful application server created from the convergence and unification of the powerful fundamental concepts found in the World Wide Web and Unix.
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
Dublic Core provides a set of RDF schemata for basic and broad concepts.
Network Sorcery provides an index to Internet specifications, including RFCs.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
The W3C is a standards body responsible for development of specifications for basic Web technologies.
webhosting
"We believe Free Speech is for everyone. ... We believe the Internet is our home. ... NearlyFreeSpeech.NET makes web hosting affordable and usable for everyone."
wireless
"AirSnort is a wireless LAN (WLAN) tool which recovers encryption keys. AirSnort operates by passively monitoring transmissions, computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered."
"Kismet is an 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system."
word-processing
"OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project."
AbiWord is a Freed Software word-processing application.