Jeremy Scahill - The Colbert Report - 2013-15-07. Growth Is the Problem - Chris Hedges' Columns. Growth Is the Problem Posted on Sep 10, 2012 By Chris Hedges (Page 2) Survival will be determined by localities.
Communities will have to create collectives to grow their own food and provide for their security, education, financial systems and self-governance, efforts that Heinberg suspects will “be discouraged and perhaps criminalized by those in authority.” Joseph Tainter, an archeologist, in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” provides a useful blueprint for how such societies unravel. “More complex societies are costlier to maintain than simpler ones and require higher support levels per capita,” Tainter writes.
Heinberg says this is our fate. “The inevitable decline in resources to support societal complexity will generate a centrifugal force,” Heinberg said. To see long excerpts from Richard Heinberg’s “The End of Growth” and Joseph Tainter’s “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” click here and here. New and Improved Comments. RACHEL MADDOW OBAMA DESTROYING THE CONSTITUTION. John Cusack Interviews Law Professor Jonathan Turley About Obama Administration’s War On the Constitution. (Photo: Jonathan Thorne, Edited: Lance Page) I wrote this a while back after Romney got the nom.
In light of the blizzard of bullshit coming at us in the next few months I thought I would put it out now. Now that the Republican primary circus is over, I started to think about what it would mean to vote for Obama... Since mostly we hear from the daily hypocrisies of Mitt and friends, I thought we should examine "our guy" on a few issues with a bit more scrutiny than we hear from the "progressive left", which seems to be little or none at all. Instead of scrutiny, the usual arguments in favor of another Obama presidency are made: We must stop fanatics; it would be better than the fanatics—he's the last line of defense from the corporate barbarians—and of course the Supreme Court.
True enough. But yet... ... there are certain Rubicon lines, as constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley calls them, that Obama has crossed. All political questions are not equal no matter how much you pivot. Mr. David Sirota: Big Brother in Your Car. Big Brother in Your Car Posted on Sep 6, 2012 By David Sirota Your chipper TV friend Flo, otherwise known as Progressive Insurance’s ubiquitous shill, wants you to be excited—very excited.
As you’ve probably learned from her effervescent commercials, she and her Big Brothers in the insurance biz want you to see their new tracking devices for your car not as a privacy-destroying step to justify raising your government-mandated car insurance premiums. Instead, they want you to see the gizmos, which record your vehicle’s every move, as a great innovation to get you premium discounts for safe driving. Yet, despite the happy TV ads, questions are nonetheless swirling around this so-called “telematics-based insurance”—questions that Flo doesn’t want you to ask, because the tracking system is so frighteningly invasive and arbitrary.
To appreciate that disturbing reality, consider how the system operates. What’s wrong with such a system? What can be done about this? Government Surveillance: Cheaper and Deeper. Government Surveillance: Cheaper and Deeper Posted on Aug 24, 2012 Technical advancements and plunging costs for digital storage mean that government surveillance programs no longer have to be selective about the data they store.
And with the average person leaving a trail of Web browsing, emails, text messages and more, there’s plenty of information that can be filed away on individuals. —Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly. The Caucus at The New York Times: John Villasenor, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles, studied the plummeting cost of computer data storage and reached an astonishing conclusion: It will soon be technically feasible and affordable to record and store everything that can be recorded about what everyone in a country says or does. … Mr. More Below the Ad New and Improved Comments If you have trouble leaving a comment, review this help page.
Advances in Data Storage Have Implications for Civil Liberties. IBM, via Associated Press; Daniel Acker/Bloomberg NewsIn 1956, the original IBM 350 disk storage unit, left, could store about 4.4 megabytes.
Earlier this year, Victorinox released a 1 terabyte USB flash drive, right, that fits inside a Swiss Army Knife. A closer look at big issues facing the country in the 2012 Election. A wave of worry about a software program called TrapWire, designed to detect terrorists casing possible targets, appears to be unjustified, as I wrote in Tuesday’s Times. Based on stolen corporate e-mails posted by WikiLeaks, some reports hugely exaggerated the program’s sweep and capabilities; the New York Police Department, for instance, says that contrary to claims on the Web, it has never used TrapWire. But the bogus flap over one particular surveillance product should not eclipse the very real issues lurking behind it. Paul J. Not anymore. And there is plenty of data to store. Mr.