Former OPCW inspector Ian Henderson testified to the UN Security Council this week that his team's report on the April 2018 alleged gas attack in Douma, Syria, had been falsified at the orders of senior management and perhaps under pressure from the US government. The US mainstream media is silent.
Pushback with Aaron Maté
As millions of Iranians mourn the US murder of Qassem Soleimani, ex-Bush administration official Col. Lawrence Wilkerson discuses the parallels between Bush's war on Iraq and Trump's campaign against Iran; the history of US shunning diplomacy with Tehran; and how an addiction to war drives US foreign policy.
Guest: Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell. Currently a distinguished professor at the College of William and Mary.
Synthetic Biology Assault On Humanity - Elana Freeland
Smart Dust, Nanno particles, Space Fence Defense, Lockheed, Micro Computers and more. A Presentation in Portland Oregon.
The collection and analysis of data is changing the way economies operate. Are these changes so fundamental that they can be said to have led to the emergence of a new form of capitalism – surveillance capitalism? If people’s behaviour is made increasingly transparent, do we become a society in which trust is no longer necessary? Are individuals a mere appendage to the digital machine, objects of new mechanisms which reward and punish according to the determinations of private capital? How is social cohesion affected when people become dispensable as a labour force, while their data continues to provide function as a source of value in lucrative new markets that trade in predictions of human behaviour? How should we understand the new quality of power that arises from these unprecedented conditions? What kind of society does it aim to create? And what ramifications will these developments have for the principles of liberal democracy? Will privacy law and anti-trust law be enough? How can we tame what we do not yet understand?
Shoshana Zuboff is a social scientist and author of three books, each of which has been recognised as the definitive signal of a new epoch in technological society. Her latest book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism reveals a world in which technology users are no longer customers but the raw material for an entirely new economic system. Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and was a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School from 2014 until 2016.
Making Sense of the Digital Society
The current rapid pace of technological change creates enormous uncertainties – and thus the need for explanations that help us better understand our situation and shape the future. The Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) are therefore continuing the Lecture Series Making Sense of the Digital Society that was launched in 2017. The aim of the format is to develop a European perspective on the current processes of transformation and its societal impact. The first speaker of this year’s series was sociologist Eva Illouz, followed by Dirk Baecker, José van Dijck and Louise Amoore. The event with Shoshana Zuboff on 6 November is part of the Berlin Science Week 2019 and the keynote of the DigiKomm conference 2019.
More information about the event and the lecture series: https://www.hiig.de/en/events/shoshan...
Photo credit: Falling Walls Foundation
NYPL Author Talks | Recorded live at the New York Public Library, Celeste Auditorium, on September 5, 2018.
An award-winning journalist travels to the inner sanctums of the new gilded age to chronicle the global elites who are setting out to remake the fight for equality and social justice in their own images. Around the planet some of the world’s richest and most powerful citizens lead passionate campaigns to solve the manifold social and political problems that divide the haves and the have nots. Anand Giridharadas, journalist and winner of the Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award, asks whether those who have profited from “our highly inequitable status quo” are the best candidates to narrow the divides that have benefited them the most. When are their solutions democratic and universal, and when do they reflect and support the biases that introduced the inequity in the first place?
Join The Intercept’s senior correspondent Naomi Klein and Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff, author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,” for an engaging discussion about the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism” and the quest by corporations to predict and control our behavior.
Eduardo Galeano: "El mundo se divide en indignos e indignados"
The Crime of Ecocide
http://www.pollyhiggins.com/
"... move away from property laws to trusteeship laws, so rather than I own, to I owe. I owe a duty of care to this planet."
12-year old Victoria Grant explains why Canada (her homeland) and most of the world, is in debt.
"How the Media Frames Political Issues" by Scott London
In The Emergence of American Political Issues (1977) McCombs and Shaw state that the most important effect of the mass media is "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us. In short, the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about."[13] The presidential observer Theodore White corroborates this conclusion in The Making of a President (1972):
The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about - an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.[14]
McCombs and Shaw also note that the media's tendency to structure voters' perceptions of political reality in effect constitutes a bias: "to a considerable degree the art of politics in a democracy is the art of determining which issue dimensions are of major interest to the public or can be made salient in order to win public support."[15] http://www.scottlondon.com/reports/frames.html
I am just an anonymous citizen who firmly believes that we are the ones we are always waiting for. No saviors, heroes, leaders, gurus, or superior or inferior, we are all equals, and we need to think and behave as if it matters.
