Archive for the 'Elite' Category
The Rise of the New Groupthink
January 15th, 2012Via: New York Times: SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people […]
Value Afghan Opium Yield Rose 133 Percent from 2010
January 14th, 2012Via: AFP: Production of opium and the illicit crop’s value soared in Afghanistan last year, the United Nations said in a report released Thursday. According to the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime, farmer income derived from Afghanistan’s opium crop in 2011 was $1.4 billion (1.09 billion euros), representing nine percent of GDP. “Opium is […]
Haiti: Two Years After the Earthquake, Where Did the Money Go?
January 13th, 2012Via: Global Post: Where those billions went following the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that left a government-estimated figure of 220,000 people dead — and at least 1.6 million more homeless — remains a confounding mystery. … “In the end,” says Robert Fatton Jr., professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia and a son […]
George Lucas: Hollywood Wouldn’t Back Film About Tuskegee Airmen Due to All Black Cast
January 12th, 2012Via: Washington Post: In a series of interviews in recent days Lucas has said he himself had to bankroll “Red Tails,” a movie 23 years in the making about the Tuskegee Airmen opening Jan. 20. Lucas invested $93 million of his own money for the making and distribution of the film, according to “Speakeasy,” a […]
MF Global: Account Holders Sue Jon Corzine Over Missing Millions
January 11th, 2012Via: ABC: Montana farmers have filed a class action suit against former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, charging that the failed financial firm run by Corzine stole millions from their accounts to pay off its spiraling debts, and that Corzine’s “single-minded obsession” with making MF Global a big player on Wall Street led to the […]
North Carolina May Pay Eugenics Victims $50,000 Each
January 11th, 2012Via: AP: As many as 2,000 people forcibly sterilized decades ago in North Carolina should get $50,000 each, a task force said Tuesday, marking the first time a state has moved to compensate victims of eugenics programs that weeded out the “feeble-minded” and others deemed undesirable. The payout, which could amount to as much as […]
Lehman Still Doing Deals in a Second Life on Wall Street
January 11th, 2012Via: New York Times: Things that refuse to die include Dracula, fungus, Jason from the “Friday the 13th” movies, zombies — and Lehman Brothers. You would probably like to forget Lehman in the wake of its collapse in 2008, an event that set off a near Armageddon in the financial world. Lehman filed for bankruptcy […]
Mass Suicide Threats at Foxconn Xbox 360 Plant
January 11th, 2012Foxconn has a plan to deal with these pesky meatsacks, and I don’t mean suicide prevention nets. Foxconn Wants to Build “Intelligent Robotics Kingdom” to Replace Human Workers with Robots Foxconn: 1 Million Robots in 3 Years Via: Kotaku: On Jan. 2, over 300 employees at a Foxconn plant in Wuhan, China threatened to throw […]
Google Backing Original Shows for YouTube — Lots of Them
January 8th, 2012Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram. This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a […]
Paypal Founder Backs Blueseed, ‘Googleplex of the Sea’
January 7th, 2012Will there be… Plasmids? BioShock is set during 1960, in Rapture, a fictional underwater dystopian city; its history is revealed to the player through in-game audio recordings scattered throughout the game. Rapture was envisioned by the Objectivist business magnate, Andrew Ryan, as a laissez-faire utopia for society’s cultural and scientific elite to avoid the oppression […]
