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thinkahol *

t r u t h o u t | Jon Stewart | Elizabeth Warren's Greatest Hits (video) - 0 views

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    Elizabeth Warren on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, as compiled by MoveOn.org
thinkahol *

'Feds radiating Americans'? Mobile X-ray vans hit US streets - CSMonitor.com - 0 views

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    As an antiterror measure, the US government has deployed mobile X-ray technology to randomly scan cars and trucks. But the measure is riling privacy proponents.
thinkahol *

CISPA Action List. We need to hit up Congress today. CISPA goes to vote next Monday 4/2... - 0 views

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    Reddit Activist Network
thinkahol *

Sullivan's defense of presidential assassinations - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

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    The justifications for Obama's hit list reveal what is missing most from American political thought
thinkahol *

Bernie Sanders Puts Barack Obama to Shame | Rolling Stone Politics - 0 views

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    Not long ago I was sitting at home writing something for publication - I won't say what, except that it was a passage about a certain politician on the Hill. Out of habit I launched into a description that was full of nasty and personal language, and I was about to press on to the next part of the piece when suddenly I hit a mental speed bump. A voice in my head whispered - this really happened - "If you write that shit and Bernie Sanders sees it, he's going to be disappointed in you." So I went back and removed the gratuitous body blows from the article.
thinkahol *

US Uncut's Anti-Austerity Protests Hit Bank of America - 0 views

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    As a voice at the megaphone of the Portland protest said, "The United States does not have a deficit problem. The United States has a revenue problem." According to a 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office, 25 percent of the biggest corporations pay no federal income tax. B of A, the recipient of $45 billion in bailout funds, shuttles its would-be tax dollars into 115 offshore tax havens. Meanwhile, budget deficits are cited as justification for pay freezes for public workers and cuts to heating assistance programs, Social Security, and other social safety nets.
thinkahol *

Startling revelations from a Swiss banking insider | Dailycensored.com - 0 views

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    (interview with a Swiss banker  done in Mosсow 30.05.2011)  Q: Can you tell us something about your involvement in the Swiss banking business?A: I have worked for Swiss banks for many years. I was designated as one of the top directors of one of the biggest Swiss banks. During my work I was involved in the payment, in the direct payment in cash to a person who killed the president of a foreign country. I was in the meeting where it was decided to give this cash money to the killer. This gave me dramatic headaches and troubled my conscience. It was not the only case that was really bad but it was the worst. It was a payment instruction on order of a foreign secret service written by hand giving the order to pay a certain amount to a person who killed the top leader of a foreign country. And it was not the only case. We received several such hand written letters coming from foreign secret services giving the order to payout cash from secret accounts to fund revolutions or for the killing of people. I can confirm what John Perkins has written in his book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". There really exists just a system and Swiss banks are involved in such cases.
thinkahol *

Speech on media propaganda - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

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    The 30-minute speech I gave last month at the Symphony Space in New York is now available on video, and is posted below in three YouTube segments (the first segment also contains the 4-minute introduction of my speech). The speech pertains to the evolution of my views on media criticism, the nature of media propaganda and what drives it, and what can be done to combat it. A DVD of the entire event -- featuring the three other speeches: from Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore -- is available at FAIR's website. I want to note one example, from today, that vividly illustrates many of the themes I discussed in that speech.  It is found in the following passage from this Reuters article on Obama's escalation of the covert war in Yemen and his targeting of U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki for assassination: A U.S. official confirmed to Reuters that a U.S. strike last Friday killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, a midlevel al Qaeda operative, which followed last month's attempted strike against Anwar al-Awlaki, the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Whether Awlaki has any operational role in Al Qaeda at all is a matter of intense controversy.  The U.S. Government has repeatedly asserted that he does, but has presented no verifiable evidence to support that accusation.  But what is not in dispute is the notion that Awlaki is "the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."  He unquestionably is not, and never has been, as multiple Yemen experts have repeatedly noted.  The Reuters claim is factually and entirely false. Whatever one's views are on Obama's assassination program, targeting U.S. citizens without due process obviously raises extraordinary and vitally important questions.  As The New York Times' Scott Shane put it when confirming Awlaki's inclusion on Obama's hit list: "The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen. . . . It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an America
thinkahol *

Parsing the Data and Ideology of the We Are 99% Tumblr | Rortybomb - 0 views

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    One of the most fascinating things to come out of the current We Are 99%/Occupy Wall Street protests is the We Are 99% Tumblr.  At the site, people hold up signs that explain their current circumstances, and it tells the story of a whole range of Americans struggling in the Lesser Depression.  It is highly recommended. DATA The site features pictures of individuals holding their signs, and occasionally the tumblr reproduces the text of the signs themselves underneath the image as html text.  Sometimes the text under the image is blank, sometimes it is a different message, but often it is the sign itself. In order to get a slightly better empirical handle on this important tumblr, I created a script designed to read all of the pages and parse out the html text on the site.  It doesn't read the images (can anyone in the audience automate calls to an OCR?), just the html text.  After collecting all the text on all the pages, the code then goes through it to try to find interesting points. It's a fun exercise, pointing out things I wouldn't have seen otherwise.  For instance, I found this adorable little rascal, pictured below, mucking up the algorithm, as the first version of the code assumed all the ages would have two digits.  I found that he, and the sign his mom made for him as a confessional to her son, hit me a ton harder than any of the more direct signs of despair in this economy:
Johann Höchtl

10 Years of Freedom of Information in the UK: Tony, Tension and Turbulence | opendatastudy - 0 views

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    The truth is that the FOI Act isn't used, for the most part, by 'the people'. It's used by journalists. For political leaders, it's like saying to someone who is hitting you over the head with a st...
Johann Höchtl

The Government 2.0 Forecast For 2010: 7 Predictions | SocialComputingJournal.com - 0 views

  • Social computing will continue to grow in government, but won't hit critical mass in 2010.
  • Don't forget that there was some clamping down on social media in government during 2009 including the Marines restricting access to services such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter. Progress in 2010 will be better in state and to a lesser extent local government. The federal government will also struggle with a consistent policy and approach for internal and external social computing, which probably won't emerge next year.
  • Open data goes back to the drawing board. I've been bullish on open data and APIs for years and the government got religion in 2009 with data.gov. But the usage is down as government workers and businesses realize that the data is often far out-of-date and not in forms that can be used operationally.
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  • Cloud computing will go big. While many agencies will just use the technologies internally for now in order to have public options later, there is tremendous interest in the cloud
  • Government portals (rightly) continue to incorporate social media, but deep engagement will be elusive for now. I've seen many overhauls of government portals this year, including Utah.gov and the Department of Defense, prominently incorporate social media right on their home pages. To be clear, these are major advances for the government to make on the internal/external boundary and I encourage them.
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