If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Monday, June 28, 2010

For Liberty: How the Ron Paul Revolution Watered the Withered Tree of Liberty

Finally a long-awaited documentary about Ron Paul's life-long freedom campaign available online for free viewing. A must watch! Live free or die!



As the 2007-08 presidential campaign cycle offered up the usual slate of Washington insiders, Ron Paul, an obscure Congressman from Texas brought an alternative voice that challenged the political establishment.

Advocating a philosophy of sound money, a non-interventionist foreign policy, strict Constitutionalism, and individual liberty, Dr. Paul inspired a unique grassroots movement unmatched in American history - the repercussions of which continue to reverberate today and into the future of the American psyche.

For Liberty: How the Ron Paul Revolution Watered the Withered Tree of Liberty follows this historic campaign from the perspective of grassroots activists, and showcases the unique, often bizarre, yet groundbreaking projects they undertook as they brushed aside traditional campaign methodology.

For Liberty: How the Ron Paul Revolution Watered the Withered Tree of Liberty

Sunday, June 27, 2010

G20 Gazillion Protests in Toronto!

Yet another mass protests against the G20 capitalist predators. Viva la Revolution!

G20 Toronto Protest - 06/25/10


Toronto G20 protest organized by OCAP - Part 2 - March, Standoff, and Pursuit


Toronto G20 protest organized by OCAP - Part 3 - Back to Carlton


Toronto G20 protest organized by OCAP - Part 4 - Return to Allan Gardens


G20 PROTEST TORONTO


G20 Protest, Toronto, 25/6/2010


G20 Protests Heat Up: Video of police car fire in Toronto


Broken windows, burnt cars left by G20 riots in Toronto


G20 Protest The Battle of Toronto

Friday, June 25, 2010

Ben Bernanke needs fresh monetary blitz as US recovery falters

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is waging an epochal battle behind the scenes for control of US monetary policy, struggling to overcome resistance from regional Fed hawks for further possible stimulus to prevent a deflationary spiral.


Fed watchers say Mr Bernanke and his close allies at the Board in Washington are worried by signs that the US recovery is running out of steam. The ECRI leading indicator published by the Economic Cycle Research Institute has collapsed to a 45-week low of -5.7 in the most precipitous slide for half a century. Such a reading typically portends contraction within three months or so.

Key members of the five-man Board are quietly mulling a fresh burst of asset purchases, if necessary by pushing the Fed's balance sheet from $2.4 trillion (£1.6 trillion) to uncharted levels of $5 trillion. But they are certain to face intense scepticism from regional hardliners. The dispute has echoes of the early 1930s when the Chicago Fed stymied rescue efforts.

"We're heading towards a double-dip recession," said Chris Whalen, a former Fed official and now head of Institutional Risk Analystics. "The party is over from fiscal support. These hard-money men are fighting the last war: they don't recognise that money velocity has slowed and we are going into deflation. The only default option left is to crank up the printing presses again."

Gabriel Stein, from Lombard Street Research, said the US is still stuck in a quagmire because Mr Bernanke has mismanaged the quantitative easing policy, purchasing the bonds from banks rather than from the non-bank private sector.

"This does nothing to expand the broad money supply. The trouble is that the Fed does not understand broad money and ascribes no importance to it," he said. The result is a collapse of M3, which has contracted at an annual rate of 7.6pc over the last three months.

Mr Bernanke focuses instead on loan growth but this has failed to gain full traction in a cultural climate of debt repayment. The Fed is pushing on the proverbial string. The jury is out on whether or not his untested doctrine of "creditism" will work.

"We are now walking on deflationary quicksand," said Albert Edwards from Societe Generale.

Continue reading - Ben Bernanke needs fresh monetary blitz as US recovery falters

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

G-speak - The Future of UI

Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler demos g-speak -- the real-life version of the film's eye-popping, tai chi-meets-cyberspace computer interface. Is this how tomorrow's computers will be controlled?

John Underkoffler points to the future of UI

Measuring What Makes Life Worthwhile

When the dotcom bubble burst, hotelier Chip Conley went in search of a business model based on happiness. In an old friendship with an employee and in the wisdom of a Buddhist king, he learned that success comes from what you count.

Chip Conley: Measuring what makes life worthwhile

Thursday, June 17, 2010

The American People Strongly Support HR 1207. Audit the Fed!

Responding to: Fed Dodges Bullet as House Drops Audit Idea

Congressman Ron Paul testifies before the conference committee on the inclusion of the Fed audit in the financial reform bill.

Conference Committee June 16, 2010

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Ron Paul: A 2012 Revolution

Ron Paul is America's leading voice for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, and a return to sound monetary policies.

Ron Paul: A 2012 Revolution

Monday, June 14, 2010

Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday


ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen.

While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system.

The BrinBot was hardly something out of “Star Trek.” It had a rudimentary, no-frills design and was a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies. Yet it also smacked of a future that the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.

At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past.

Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. For those who haven’t noticed, the Valley’s most-celebrated company — Google — works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans.

Larry Page, Google’s other co-founder, helped set up Singularity University in 2008, and the company has supported it with more than $250,000 in donations. Some of Google’s earliest employees are, thanks to personal donations of $100,000 each, among the university’s “founding circle.” (Mr. Page did not respond to interview requests.)

The university represents the more concrete side of the Singularity, and focuses on introducing entrepreneurs to promising technologies. Hundreds of students worldwide apply to snare one of 80 available spots in a separate 10-week “graduate” course that costs $25,000. Chief executives, inventors, doctors and investors jockey for admission to the more intimate, nine-day courses called executive programs.

Both courses include face time with leading thinkers in the areas of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, energy, biotech, robotics and computing.

On a more millennialist and provocative note, the Singularity also offers a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans — or at least something derived from them — can have it all.

“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”

Continue reading - In The Singularity Movement, Humans Are So Yesterday

Fed Manipulations in the Crosshairs


Before the economic meltdown was in full swing, a Florida real-estate developer named William Pitts correctly read the signs pointing toward tough times ahead. In an effort to preserve some of his savings, he bought financial products that would increase in value as real-estate and banking collapsed. It seemed like the sensible thing to do. But though his analysis was correct, his investments went bust — because the U.S. Federal Reserve made them go bust.

Pitts told The New American that in early-to-mid 2008, he became aware that well-respected financial analysts who had evaluated the health of large banks and the real-estate market concluded they were in terrible shape. And it was true. Examining the publicly disclosed financial statements of the big financial institutions also revealed trouble on the horizon.

Based on that information, Pitts sold his stock in large financial firms like Citibank and Bank of America while taking a “short position,” essentially betting that their value would go down. Along with countless others acting on the same information, he also purchased various exchange traded funds (ETFs) that would do well as real-estate’s and the big banks’ fates declined. And it would have been a smart move, Pitts recounted, “but then, a strange thing started happening”: massive cash infusions and major purchases of equities and stocks in both financials and real-estate.

It turns out that under the guise of “stabilizing” the economy, the Federal Reserve banking cartel had set in motion a series of actions that would eventually transfer trillions to the bankers at taxpayers’ expense, all while decimating the investments of countless average Americans like Pitts. The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) estimated the potential total cost of the combined crisis bailouts at $23.7 trillion, or more than $75,000 per person in the United States.

Redistributing the Wealth
Pitts explained some of the Fed’s manipulations: “When we begin looking at this — and it’s pretty common knowledge now — the central banks were loaning these large financial institutions huge sums of money at virtually zero percent interest.... So they’re taking this huge amount of money that’s being borrowed from the Fed, and really making money doing two things: one is all of the banks buying each others’ stock and running up the value of it to increase their net worth on the books … and then they’re also borrowing huge amounts of money from the Federal Reserve and buying U.S. Treasuries … which means guaranteed returns from the U.S. taxpayer.” When the Fed gives new money to the banks and they buy Treasury Securities, they are basically earning free profits in the form of interest on those securities courtesy of American taxpayers, since the government will have to tax citizens to pay back the bonds plus the interest. Wealth redistribution, government style!

In addition to borrowing newly created money at almost no interest and purchasing treasuries to earn higher returns, the banks are also getting another massive but little-noticed central-bank subsidy: The Fed is actually paying banks interest to keep their money parked there, essentially giving the banks America’s money and paying them not to lend it out. And that’s just the beginning.

Continue reading - Fed Manipulations in the Crosshairs

Sunday, June 6, 2010

BREAKTHROUGH! Part-Human, Part-Machine Transistor Devised : Discovery News


An artist’s representation of a new transistor that's contained within a cell-like membrane. In the core of the device is a silicon nanowire (grey), covered with a lipid bilayer (blue).

Man and machine can now be linked more intimately than ever, according to a new article in the journal ACS Nano Letters. Scientists have embedded a nano-sized transistor inside a cell-like membrane and powered it using the cell’s own fuel.

The research could lead to new types of man-machine interactions where embedded devices could relay information about the inner workings of disease-related proteins inside the cell membrane, and eventually lead to new ways to read, and even influence, brain or nerve cells.

“This device is as close to the seamless marriage of biological and electronic structures as anything else that people did before,” said Aleksandr Noy, a scientist at the University of California, Merced who is a co-author on the recent ACS Nano Letters. “We can take proteins, real biological machines, and make them part of a working microelectronic circuit.”

Continue reading - Part-Human, Part-Machine Transistor Devised : Discovery News