NYU political science grad student Drew Conway has used open source tools to chart the incidents reported; the trend doesn't look good.
More charts and other details at Wired, including the one from which I made the animated gif at left.
UPDATE to add the following, excellent animation based on the same material:
You can sign a petition in support of net neutrality here. Note, I concur with Rep. Alan Grayson's take that neutrality should be protected by legislation, not just by FCC regulation, which can easily be revised under another administration.
UPDATE: Google and Verizon aren't waiting around for us to get our act together. Reportedly, they've now reached an agreement that would allow the partial destruction of net neutrality; see WaPo.
is a Pullitzer-winning journalist who resigned from The NYT when he was told he could not keep his job there while publicly opposing the Iraq war (more at Wikipedia).
The video below is long but well worth the time. Don't stop watching after Hedges stops speaking the first time; I found the other speakers worthwhile, plus Hedges delivers additional brilliant stuff during subsequent Q&A.
A couple of Hedges' many insights:
[W]e forgot that the question is NOT, how do we get good people into power. The question is, how do we limit the damage the powerful can do to us?
Most people attracted to power are at best mediocre, and . . . often [are] venal. The true correctives of American democracy never achieved formal political power [e.g., those who fought slavery, the suffragettes, the labor movement, the civil rights movement -- none of these ever attained formal political power]. By 1968 Martin Luther King was the most important President this country [n]ever had . . . .
Peter Barry Lawrence . . . . made his getaway in his wheelchair, with $2,000 in cash on his lap. He was headed back to his rented room at the nearby San Diego Downtown Lodge . . . police caught up with him five minutes later.I suppose some will respond that we need to stop coddling prisoners.
. . . . But that was all part of the plan.
The way Lawrence tells it, Monday’s robbery of a Chase Bank was just a desperate ploy to get back behind bars, where he believes he will receive better medical care than he has been able to obtain on his own.
This is particularly disturbing if you've kept up with this.The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
* * * * *
“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told [Wired,] as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”
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For more info about how your tax dollars are allocated, see the National Priorities Project.
Coalition military deaths in Iraq since March, 2003: 4,766 (as of April 22, 2011; click here to update). At least 467 contractors have also died, based on only partial information. Total U.S. military wounded as of as of January 14, 2010: 31,882.
Coalition military deaths in Afghanistan since October, 2001: 2,416 (as of April 22, 2011; click here to update.
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