How You Will Change the World with Social Networking

Berrett-Koehler Publishers / By Deanna Zandt

An excerpt from Deanna Zandt's new book, 'Share This!' explains how we share information and find community will change our lives.

The following is an excerpt from Deanna Zandt's 'Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking' (Berrett Koehler, 2010).

Social networking is all the rage, and it's coming at us, a million miles an hour. We're surrounded by a flurry of new technology, and just when we begin to make sense of one tool, a new one arrives on the scene.

Click to read more ...

Are Nations Going Extinct?

Foreign Policy in Focus / By John Goekler

Our conception of what constitutes a "country" is deteriorating. Say hello to post-national entities -- "other guys" that stand outside of the dominant system.

When I was a young philosophy student, my Marxist fellows discussed the 'withering away of the state' with an almost rapture-like awe. We would all, they assured me, be hunters in the morning, fishers in the afternoon, and poets in the evening.

Click to read more ...

Playing With Teen Sex Statistics: A Lesson in Lies

Written by Amanda Marcotte for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

There are many goofy aspects to this Life Site News story arguing that because a slim majority of teenagers don’t have sex, we don’t need to teach them about contraceptive methods. Perhaps the most puzzling is why they came out with the story on July 14^th, since the report came out a month and a half ago. (In classic Life Site fashion, they don’t actually link the report, for fear that a stray reader may actually read it an clue into the fact that their spin is dishonest.) Did it take the American Life League this long to craft a response? If so, you’d expect them to come up with something less transparently silly than this:

Click to read more ...

WikiLeaks Creates Fresh Doubt About Afghan War, Secrets

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) - The monumental leak of classified Afghan war documents threatened Monday to create deeper doubts about the war at home, cause new friction with Pakistan over allegations about its spy agency and raise questions around the world about Washington's own ability to protect military secrets.

The White House called the disclosures "alarming."

The torrent of more than 91,000 secret documents, one of the largest unauthorized disclosures in military history, sent the Obama administration scrambling to assess and repair any damage to the war effort, either abroad or in the U.S. The material could reinforce the view put forth by the war's opponents in Congress that one of the nation's longest conflicts is hopelessly stalemated.

Click to read more ...

Maddow: Fox Uses ‘Flagrantly Bogus Stories’ to Provoke White Racism

Raw Story / By David Edwards and Muriel Kane

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow called out Fox News for its role in promoting reports about Shirley Sherrod and ACORN that proved to be distorted.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow called out Fox News on Thursday for its role in promoting reports about Shirley Sherrod and ACORN that proved to be distorted. She charged that the network "continually campaigns on flagrantly bogus stories designed to make white Americans fear black Americans."

Click to read more ...

Lady Gaga: Pop Star for a Country and an Empire in Decline

AlterNet / By Sarah Jaffe

"If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars, and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well. The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment."

So wrote Tom Engelhardt, in an essay titled "America Detached from War," and he couldn't have picked a more perfect metaphor. Gaga is sexy, ubiquitous, and oh so of-the-moment. She exists on a line between monstrous and beautiful, making us ask questions about progress, about agency, about control, about men and women, about Americans and the world. She is both a perfect embodiment of American cultural dominance and subverting what that means at every turn.

Click to read more ...

Fear of 2012: How Does It Affect Children?

By Rev. Carole Hallundbaek

PRN Host, GODSPEED, Sundays 2:00pm Eastern

My children are young, still in elementary school. The other day, the subject of 2012 came up and my fourth grader said plaintively, “Mommy, I don’t want to die when I’m 11.”  

“Goodness -- of course you won’t,” I reassured her. But her comment took me aback.  

I realized she is growing up with an additional layer of uncertainty in her childhood – on top of all the others in life – and I wondered about the emotional and psychological effect the ‘2012’ concept, fact or fiction, is having on kids.

Click to read more ...

Glenn Beck: I Might Be Going Blind

Glenn Beck said he has learned he could go blind within a year.

Speaking before a crowd of 6,000 on his "American Revival" tour in Salt Lake City on Saturday, the Fox News host tearfully told his audience that he had recently seen a doctor and received the grim news:

"A couple of weeks ago I went to the doctor because of my eyes, I can't focus my eyes...he did all kinds of tests and he said, 'you have macular dystrophy ...you could go blind in the next year. Or, you might not.' I said, did you just charge me a thousand dollars for knowing what I knew my whole life?"

Click to read more ...

Coast Guard Blocks Out Media in Gulf; Activists Demand Answers

TruthOut.org / By Mike Ludwig

Coast Guard officials have pointed out that the 20-meter security zone is minimal and does not hamper documentation of the cleanup. Environmentalists disagree.

Journalists and independent observers of the oil cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico could be fined up to $40,000 and be charged with a felony if they get too close to booms and oil cleanup areas, and activist group Seize BP wants to know how authorities can justify such a muzzle on independent information gatherers.

Click to read more ...

How Amazon Kills Books and Makes Us Stupid

The Nation / By Colin Robinson

Amazon offers infinite choice and rock-bottom prices: those aren't necessarily good things.

Jeff Bezos loves numbers. In a speech in May to graduates at his alma mater, Princeton University, he recounted a childhood memory: when driving with his grandmother, a heavy smoker, he calculated how many years her addiction would reduce her life expectancy. Announcing the result from the back seat of the car, he expected praise for his deft maths. But his grandmother just burst into tears.

Click to read more ...

Calling All Future-Eaters

By Chris Hedges

The human species during its brief time on Earth has exhibited a remarkable capacity to kill itself off. The Cro-Magnons dispatched the gentler Neanderthals. The conquistadors, with the help of smallpox, decimated the native populations in the Americas. Modern industrial warfare in the 20th century took at least 100 million lives, most of them civilians. And now we sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the “future-eaters.”

Click to read more ...

For Fox, Beck, Limbaugh -- Race Baiting Has Become Standard Fare, with More to Come This Summer

Media Matters for America / By Eric Boehlert

If you thought last summer’s Obama Beer Summit was troubling in terms of how far-right media partisans wallowed in the topic of race, early indications are this simmering season is going to be much worse as Fox News and its brigade of haters fan the flame of division and distrust. 

There’s no question that race peddlers went nuts last summer over the controversy involving Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge, MA police Sgt. James Crowley, as well as Obama’s later involvement in the story. But this time around, ‘wingers have removed all mechanical governors and are talking about race in America the way that perhaps they’ve always wanted to talk about it during the Obama era; in unapologetically ugly, resentful and divisive tones.

Click to read more ...

Joe Bageant: Our Plunder of Nature Will End Up Killing Capitalism and Our Obscene Lifestyles

JoeBageant.com / By Joe Bageant

To anyone who is paying attention, things look doomed. Fortunately for American capitalism, nobody is paying attention. They never have.

 

As an Anglo European white guy from a very long line of white guys, I want to thank all the brown, black, yellow and red people for a marvelous three-century joy ride. During the past 300 years of the industrial age, as Europeans, and later as Americans, we have managed to consume infinitely more than we ever produced, thanks to colonialism, crooked deals with despotic potentates and good old gunboats and grapeshot. Yes, we have lived, and still live, extravagant lifestyles far above the rest of you.

Click to read more ...

End of the Cheap "Made in China" Era Sends Companies Scrambling for Options

ELAINE KURTENBACH | 07/ 8/10 11:09 PM | 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/08/end-of-the-cheap-madeinch_n_639718.html

SHANGHAI — Factory workers demanding better wages and working conditions are hastening the eventual end of an era of cheap costs that helped make southern coastal China the world's factory floor.

A series of strikes over the past two months have been a rude wakeup call for the many foreign companies that depend on China's low costs to compete overseas, from makers of Christmas trees to manufacturers of gadgets like the iPad.

Click to read more ...

Growing Up Globally

by David Michael Green

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/10-0

God (if only there was one) only knows where the story of human development is leading next.  We live in time unlike any other in history, in the sense that lightening-fast technological acceleration guarantees just one thing for sure, that the future will be very different from the present.  Not very long ago, you lived and died just like your grandparents had.  Tomorrow, question marks hang over everything from the continued existence of life on the planet to the very engineering of the forms it might take. 

Click to read more ...

Revolution and Repression in America

By Andrew Gavin Marshall

Global Research, June 29, 2010

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19951

 
Introduction

As outlined in Part 1 of this series, “The Technological Revolution and the Future of Freedom,” there are two major geopolitical realities in the world today, both largely brought about as a result of the “Technological Revolution” in which technology and electronics have come to define and shape our society.

Click to read more ...

Myth: America is Conservative

New Report Documents Progressive American Majority

Independent Public Polls Debunk Conventional Wisdom
That Americans Agree With Conservative Agenda

http://mediamatters.org/press/releases/200706130002

Washington, D.C. - Today, Media Matters for America and Campaign for America's Future released a special report, "The Progressive Majority: Why a Conservative America is a Myth," documenting how the conventional wisdom that Americans are overwhelmingly conservative is fundamentally false. Through decades of public opinion data from nonpartisan sources, the report shows the majority of Americans hold progressive positions on a broad range of issues.

Click to read more ...

Lara Logan, You Suck

by Matt Taibbi

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/matt-taibbi/blogs/TaibbiData_May2010/122137/83512

Lara Logan, come on down! You're the next guest on Hysterical Backstabbing Jealous Hackfest 2010!

I thought I'd seen everything when I read David Brooks saying out loud in a New York Times column that reporters should sit on damaging comments to save their sources from their own idiocy. But now we get CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan slamming our own Michael Hastings on CNN's "Reliable Sources" program [1], agreeing that the Rolling Stone reporter violated an "unspoken agreement" that journalists are not supposed to "embarrass [the troops] by reporting insults and banter."

Click to read more ...

Live from Planet Norte:

America's totalitarian democracy and the politics of plunder, or, life is a titty tuck and a Dodge truck

By Joe Bageant

Created Jun 28 2010 - 10:01am

Winchester, Virginia | Starting with the Homeland Security probe at Washington's Reagan Airport, arrival back in the United States resembles an alien abduction to a planet of bright lights, strange beings and incomprehensible behavior. The featureless mysophobic landscape of DC's Virginia suburbs seems to indicate that homogeneity and sterility are the native religions. Especially after spending eight months in Mexico's pungent atmosphere of funky, sensual open air markets, rotting vegetation, smoking street food grills, sweat, agave nectar and ghost orchids.

Click to read more ...

Too Small To Matter

By Jim Quinn

As I watched the documentary GASLAND last night on HBO my blood began to boil. I'm sure my blood pressure went up dramatically during the 1 hour and 40 minute film. After watching our corrupt government decide that the biggest baddest banks on the planet were too big to fail over the last two years and giving my children's and their children's money to these behemoth criminal enterprises, I was not surprised to see poor working class Americans treated like dirt by these same corrupt politicians. Big corporations can buy off politicians to ensure profits. The "small people", as the Chairman of BP likes to call them, are expendable and can be ignored. They are too small to matter.

Click to read more ...