The Kickstarter project deadline for meeting the goal is just three days away. If you can, please consider donating to it. You can read about the project and donate here.
With the open society under threat, the time has come to fulfill the promise of the Internet by launching an entirely new way for citizens to work together: securely, intuitively, and effectively. The time has come to build Pursuance.
The traditional news media, faced with filling in every single moment with content that will draw in viewers that can be sold to advertisers, has descended into the pattern that we see, of talking heads who are selected because it is already known what they will say and can be counted on to argue with each other without adding much useful knowledge. In this drive fro phony drama and confrontations, resources for real investigative reporting that requires a lot of digging and analysis, get squeezed out as being too expensive. As Seymour Hersh says in his book Reporter, the worst words a reporter can say are “I think”. But that is the most common phrase in these shows as people speculate about things they don’t know or try to predict the future.
[Read more…]
I have mentioned before that I am involved with the Pursuance Project and serving on its Board of Directors. It is the brainchild of activist journalist Barrett Brown to try and get better information out in this age when we are swamped with bad news, fake news, and mostly trivial news, by better enabling committed people who seek common goals to find and work with each other and avoiding wasted or duplicated effort. The project is advanced enough along that a Kickstarter project has just been launched and the following press release explains what the project seeks to do.
The project is not easy to understand at first but this article in the Observer does a pretty good job.
[Read more…]
Watch this ad made for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who is challenging long time New York Democratic incumbent congressman Joe Crowley in the June 26th primary.
The ABC television network has canceled the show Roseanne because its star Roseanne Barr had sent out insulting and racist tweets about Valerie Jarrett, a close advisor to Barack Obama when he was president, one of which said “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”.
[Read more…]
Michelle Wolf’s scathing attack on the entire class of people in the political and media world at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner that showcases the incestuous relationships among them continues to produce ripple effects, with some speculating as to whether her performance spells the merciful end of this event. If it does, Wolf deserves our sincere gratitude.
[Read more…]
Larry Schwartz has compiled a list of 10 golden oldies, hoaxes that took place some time ago. Some of them such as Piltdown Man and crop circles were known to me. Others such as Clever Hans I do not really consider hoaxes as much as misinterpretation, since I consider a hoax to be a deliberately created fraud. The famous War of the Worlds is listed, though other analysts have said that the stories of mass panic were highly overblown and that there was no mass rush of people into streets following the broadcast.
[Read more…]
Yesterday I closed my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. I got both accounts a long time ago but never actively used either of them in the sense that I never posted any content on them. They were just passive accounts that others used to tell me what they were doing, which most of the time was of no interest to me. I had been pondering cutting ties for a long time but never got around to it. So while my closing of my Facebook account was not out of anger at the recent disclosures about its practices, I don’t mind if the company thinks that is the reason for closing it.
[Read more…]