Connect the Dots

The US election is November 7th. Three weeks away. Read this, then read this. Then, spend 12 minutes and watch this testimony under oath from a computer programmer who was hired to write software to flip the vote in electronic voting machines. Scary? Well, even worse is that he was hired by Tom Feeney, the […]

Sonny Boy

The meeting was 15 people, by invitation. Hosted in a very comfortable high-tech room. The guest speaker was from a famous university a few hours south. Worker bees and VPs gathered to talk shop and think big. 45 minute presentation, then lunch is served. We introduce ourselves. Discussion ensues. Eventually I ask: “What kinds of […]

Just Ignore Any Conflicts

I’m scheduling interviews for a project and I received the following (lightly edited) email at 10 AM today, illustrating the problems of “groupware.” That works for Susan! If this works for others, please feel free to add it to Susan’s calendar (I’m leaving at 10:30am today). Just ignore any conflicts that show at that time. […]

Is that what you said?

Nice rant from Brian Dear on the manipulations and distortions and hypocrisy of the US government.

The Harder They Come

But I’ll keep on fighting for the things I want Though I know that when you’re dead you can’t But I’d rather be a free man in my grave Then living as a puppet or a slave Garcia has a great version from 1978 in commercial release.

In 2006 Congress Passed a Tyrannical Law

I’ve had a really busy week at work, and now I find that since I took a blogging break the government has gone berserk. Rafe Colburn: Prisoner of conscience While some Republicans made a halfhearted show of conscience and Democrats hid in the most craven fashion imaginable, the Bush Administration managed to pass a bill […]

NSA & NPS @ SoL

I had lengthy conversations today with two interesting people. One is very senior in the National Security Agency, the other is very senior at the Naval Postgraduate School. In both cases I had increased hope that there are people in government who are thinking deeply about long-term issues that I care about, and are trying […]

Steal an Election with a Diebold Voting Machine

Princeton University scientists produce a video and post it on YouTube, demonstrating how you can hack a Diebold voting machine in less than one minute. They also provide to detailed technical paper. There are exactly zero computer scientists who think a voting machine can be made unhackable. It’s time to vote absentee, in all elections, […]

Be All You Can Be

Billmon has an excellent quote comparison post today. Who knew that in 1776 Edward Gibbon would write a book that so clearly described the state of our military in 2006?

Crony Capitalism at it’s Finest

Industry Note: The Rot at the Core, Special Disney Crony Capitalism Edition Of course, neither move – coypright extensions or side payments to politicians in the form of propaganda – are in the least good for the economy, because they destroy more value than they create, through the stifling of potential innovation, competition, and new […]

Olbermann on Rumsfeld

Every once in a while, it’s worth noting that the majority of people continue to disagree with the Bush/Cheney administration and their approach to the so-called War on Terror, even if we don’t talk about it much. Thank you, Keith Olbermann, for this searing critique. Transcript and video via the link.

Democratic Strategy

The smartest thing the US Democrats could do for the next two years is split the Republican Party down the middle between the church-focused social conservatives and the less-government economic conservatives. Karl Rove (has his middle name always been “Christian?”) and Grover Norquist have been masterful at holding these two unrelated groups together in one […]

Weekend Fun, Friday Edition

George W. Bush reads Camus August 11: My anger at The New York Times subsides somewhat as I skim Foucault and Sartre. Surveillance serves its disciplinary function only if the populace is conscious of it. And if Americans aren’t wrenched from being-pour-soi to being-en-soi (at least in relation to an observer who is Other) by […]

Creating and Destroying Mutual Understanding

Daniel O’Connor has a brilliant post over at Catalaxis called The Political Economics of Stephen Colbert. In simplest terms, when we communicate we tend to at least implicitly, if not explicitly, raise a set of three distinct validity claims regarding what is true, what is right, and what is sincere. When either one of us […]

We Must Disenthrall Ourselves

There’s a good interview with Al Gore in the July 13 issue of Rolling Stone. Some quotes: I believe there is a hunger in the country to be part of a larger vision that changes the way we relate to the environment and the economy. Right now we are borrowing huge amounts of money from […]

Letting Go of Outcomes

Over the past ten years I’ve become much more “process-oriented.” Part of this learning comes from my work—as a consultant I’m often in situations where I don’t know very much about the specific content, but contribute to change based on looking at the larger system. I used to say that a focus on process leads […]

USA, Today

Long Sunday deconstructs the meaning of 9/11 in the US psyche. Billmon compares current US politics to those of Spain in 1936. Brianstorms reminds us of the Bill of Rights.

Finds Neither Support nor a Passive Population

Former Special-Ops guy John Robb writes Global Guerrillas, “an open notebook on the first epochal war of the 21st Century.” The latest post, An Attack On Iran = Catalyst Of Chaos summarizes his current thinking on Iran, and the implications for the US. The economic/societal wave: state failures. A gulf monarchy falls. Successful terrorist attacks […]

Truly Making a Difference

Dave Pollard often gives detailed and passionate voice for my intuitive and information-overloaded thoughts. Today is no different. So progressives need to acknowledge that, unless they devote most of their time and energy to activities other than electing and lobbying politicians, they will continue to accomplish nothing. Indeed, they will accomplish less than nothing, since […]

Squeezing the Middle Class

An as-usual well-researched article from the Economist: The rich, the poor and the growing gap between them. The one truly continuous trend over the past 25 years has been towards greater concentration of income at the very top. The scale of this shift is not visible from most popular measures of income or wages, as […]