Group items tagged

The Land of the Free punishes or imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation. This collection of testimonials from criminal offenders, family members, and experts on America's criminal justice system puts a human face on the millions of Americans subjugated by the US Government's 40 year, one trillion dollar social catastrophe: The War on Drugs; a failed policy underscored by fear, politics, racial prejudice and intolerance in a public atmosphere of out of sight, out of mind. The United States has only 5% of the world's population, yet a full 25% of the world's prisoners. At 2.5 million, the US has more prisoners than even China does with five times the population of the United States. 8 million Americans (1 in every 31) languish under some form of state monitoring known as correctional supervision. On top of that, the security and livelihood of over 13 million more has been forever altered by a felony conviction. The American use of punishment is so pervasive, and so disproportionate, that even the conservative magazine The Economist declared in 2010, never in the civilized world have so many been locked up for so little. The project will unfold over a two year period, beginning with the release of this feature-length documentary and then continuing on with the release of short films and complete interviews from each of the 100 participants in the project, meant to represent the 1 in 100 Americans that are currently sitting behind bars.

It's not your traditional ROI model. Back to the culture, it supports the fact that you don't need a hard number at the end of the day. It's the right thing to do, we want to listen to our customers, so let's do it.

LONGVIEW (Sept. 8th) - Violence erupted today in a major labor dispute that has simmered for months at the Port of Longview, leading to work shutdowns at ports up and down the Washington coast. Why are members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) - and their supporters in Washington and Oregon - so upset about a grain terminal that employs just 50 workers? Here's why.

What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process.  Remember all that?  Yet now, here's Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President - even Barack Obama - vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process. Also, during the Bush years, civil libertarians who tried to convince conservatives to oppose that administration's radical excesses would often ask things like this: would you be comfortable having Hillary Clinton wield the power to spy on your calls or imprison you with no judicial reivew or oversight?  So for you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this:  how would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?

Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers - of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses. So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait - let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What's next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

Alter (2006) aber ausgezeichneter Artikel zum Thema Kollektive Intelligenz - Potentiale und Grenzen. Mit einigen sehr guten Beispielen.

Big Data Projekte der Verwaltung in den USA waren bisher noch nicht so erfolgreich. Eine kurze Analyse

How the White House Is Using Web 2.0 Technology So Far

Horx über das "Ende" der sozialen Netzwerke

This video became interesting to me simply because of the fact it was announced 1 day prior to the September 11th terrorist attacks in the U.S. Why has there been no mention of the massive amount of the taxpayers money gone missing? It is almost as though after the 9/11 tragedy it was forgotten. I don't know about the other citizens of the United States but I would like to know where 2.3 TRILLION dollars has gone. I believe when we as taxpayers give our hard earnings to the government is it not their responsibility to explain where the money is being spent? Was this case forgotten? If so, WHY? I would like to know where this money has gone. Wouldn't you?

April 22, 2008 Democracy Now! Pentagon's Pundits: A Look at the Defense Department's Propaganda Program The New York Times has revealed new details on how the Pentagon recruited more than seventy-five retired military officers to appear on TV outlets as so-called military analysts ahead of the Iraq war to portray Iraq as an urgent threat. The Times reported the Pentagon continues to use the analysts in a propaganda campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance. We speak with Col. Sam Gardiner (Ret.) and Peter Hart of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. (excerpt)

"A recent blizzard of liberal columns has framed the debate over American Islam as if it were no more than the most recent stage in the glorious history of our religious tolerance. This phrasing of the question has the (presumably intentional) effect of marginalizing doubts and of lumping any doubters with the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, the anti-Semites, and other bigots and shellbacks. So I pause to take part in a thought experiment, and to ask myself: Am I in favor of the untrammeled "free exercise of religion"?"

It seems that just about every hundred years or so, the body politic we call America swells with fever as it fights off a democracy-destroying disease. That disease is "Special Interest Government".

In towns across the country, the voices of those who don't want mosques built in their neighborhoods are growing louder. The open expressions of hostility have become so loud in recent months, that a coalition of Muslim groups is taking steps to remind people that American Muslims are Americans -- the same as anyone else.

Drivers for open data

Design Principles of Open Data

Netflix Prize sequel discontinued

Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.

Stop wasting time with SPAMMERS on twitter.We will validate your followers so you don't have to.

Die Zeit des statischen Internets ist abgelaufen. Auch im E-Government. Es wird verstärkt auf Web 2.0 Technologien gesetzt. Wie aber eine kommunale »Web 2.0 E-Government Plattform« rechtskonform gestaltet werden kann, ist derzeit noch weitgehend ungeklärt. Hier setzt die Darstellung an. Der Autor erläutert die Grundlagen sowohl des »E-Government« als auch des »Web 2.0«. Anhand einer Musterkonfiguration analysiert er alle wesentlichen Planungs-, Aufbau- und Betriebsphasen einer solchen Plattform in rechtlicher Hinsicht. Hierbei geht der Verfasser nicht nur intensiv auf vergaberechtliche Fragestellungen und Implikationen in der Beschaffungsphase, sondern auch auf gestalterische Notwendigkeiten (Stichwort: Barrierefreiheit) ein. Im Anschluss untersucht er anhand von Beispielen die Verantwortung der Plattformbetreiber in der Praxis und berücksichtigt die besonderen Probleme der Öffentlichen Hand. Der Leser erhält auf die Öffentliche Hand zugeschnittene Strategien zur Haftungsvermeidung. Schließlich widmet sich die Arbeit dem Konkurrenzverhältnis der Öffentlichen Hand als Betreiberin einer Web 2.0 Plattform zu privaten Plattformanbietern und dem Marktumfeld Web 2.0. Der Verfasser verfolgt konsequent zwei Ziele: Zum einen werden die im Zusammenhang mit der Umsetzung einer Web 2.0 E-Government Plattform auftretenden Rechtsfragen wissenschaftlich fundiert geklärt. Zum anderen sind die gefundenen Ergebnisse so aufbereitet, dass sie auch für die Praxis dienlich sind.