October 30, 2011

Final Mandelbrot Set

BenoĆ®t Mandelbrot, inventor of fractal geometry – the branch of mathematics that describes the hidden order in nature and in seemingly chaotic systems – died this last Thursday.

More here.

October 22, 2011

Study: 147 Transnational Corps. Control 40% of the World's Wealth

. . . held by 37 million companies and investors worldwide. "When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group."

More, including the names of the top 50 corps., at NewScientist.

October 21, 2011

Naomi Wolf on the "Stealth" Theft of Our 1st Amendment Rights

Excellent exposition of what's happening now and how we got here. (As of 2016-08-28 or earlier, the video originally embedded below [previously available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCuax-3DeBc] was "no longer available because the [user] account associated with [it] has been terminated"; so I'm adding a similar interview of Wolf from just a few days later)

From Occupy Boston

. . . on facebook.

October 19, 2011

October 17, 2011

A Message from Anonymous

(As of 2016-08-28 or earlier, the video originally embedded below [previously available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxBLfAC0sME] was gone because "[t]his video is unavailable.")

October 16, 2011

Occupying Madrid (& a lot of other places)

The video below shows ongoing, OWS-style protests in Madrid. The best part follows the final movement of Beethoven's 9th, about 3 min. in; per ismashedmydick, "They're holding their empty palms in the air, chanting 'These are our weapons!' It's to show their peaceful resistance movement."

Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Madrid on Saturday against government cutbacks to health and education spending, unemployment and corporate greed as part of a global day of protest.

The demonstration came exactly five months after Spain's so-called 'indignant' protest movement was born with a rally on May 15 that turned into a sprawling protest camp that occupied Madrid's central Puerta del Sol for weeks. The 'indignant' movement then spread to Europe, finding strong backing in crisis-hit countries like Greece, and then worldwide - last month reaching the centre of global capitalism in Wall Street.

Five columns of marchers converged on Madrid's central Cibeles Square after walking for hours from different points across the city before proceeding to Puerta del Sol for assemblies scheduled to last throughout the night.
[ismashedmydick's comment from YouTube; quoted text above from straitstimes.]



More pics from around the world on DU.

October 12, 2011

Since 1980: Your Share of What You Produced

From Alternet:

According to Paul Buchheit, a professor with City Colleges of Chicago and founder of fightingpoverty.org, “if middle- and upper-middle-class families had maintained the same share of American productivity that they held in 1980, they would be making an average of $12,500 more per year.The size of our economy, he wrote, “has quintupled since 1980, and we all contributed to that success. But our contributions have earned us nothing. While total income has also quintupled, percentage-wise almost all the gains went to the richest 1 percent.” This upward redistribution of wealth “translates into a trillion extra dollars of income every year for the richest 1 percent.”
We don't have a tax problem. We have an employment / wages problem.

If you live in Dallas, TX, see Occupy Dallas.

October 11, 2011

Our Spending Priorities

Nice visual summary from True Majority. Click on the image for a larger version, or find an even larger one here.