Fighting for Election Transparency – With Science – WhoWhatWhy

Our automated vote recording and tabulation system cannot be trusted. At least that’s what one statistician thinks, and she is not staying silent about it. Here is the story of how one person took on the bureaucracy in order to protect the integrity of our democracy.

 

Clarkson came across a statistics paper on the internet (http://electiondefensealliance.org/files/PrimaryElectionResultsAmazingStatisticalAnomalies_V2.1.pdf) titled “Republican Primary Election 2012 Results: Amazing Statistical Anomalies.”

 

The authors of the paper found that in elections all over the country where electronic voting machines were used, a strange pattern kept appearing: the larger the number of registered voters in the voting precinct, the larger the Republican vote. Since precinct size should have no effect on the vote distribution, the authors concluded  that the data “indicates overwhelming evidence of election manipulation.”

Sourced through Scoop.it from: whowhatwhy.org

Proper democracy requires many things, including trust in a fair election system, something that is lacking throughout the world. Americans should be especially embarrassed by the election fraud in our midst, and doing everything we can to ensure everyone’s votes counts.

See on Scoop.it – Global Consensus

Morgan Freeman Narrates the Greatest Story of Our Generation – Subtitulado en Español – YouTube

Morgan Freeman narrates the greatest story of our generation – the story of the human journey at this critical moment in time. Of all the
stories to belong to, this is the story to be a part of. Don’t watch it
from the sidelines. Don’t wait for the experts to figure it out. Ask
yourself: how can I become one of the weavers of the story? It’s a
tapestry with 7 billion threads. What contribution do I want to make?
If you’re not yet contributing to this story in some way, ask yourself
why not? This is a story for everyone.

Source: www.youtube.com

See on Scoop.it – Global Consensus

Pia Mancini: How to upgrade democracy for the Internet era – YouTube

Pia Mancini and her colleagues want to upgrade democracy in Argentina and beyond. Through their open-source mobile platform they want to bring citizens inside the legislative process, and run candidates who will listen to what they say.

Source: www.youtube.com

See on Scoop.it – Global Consensus

Naomi Klein: ‘Ferocious Love’ and the Climate Fight To Come

Timing matters. The calendar is counting. The clock is ticking. The planet is warming. But… people are rising.

 

What Klein and others have come to call “Blockadia”—the resistance movement that has been blocking pipelines, opposing new extraction projects, and quite willingly putting bodies on the line—is the moral antidote to world leaders who have repeatedly crumbled before the pressures exerted by the fossil fuel industry, the promise of unfettered trade, and the mantra of free marketeers.

“After two centuries of pretending that we could quarantine the collateral damage of this filthy habit, fobbing off the risks on others, the game is up, and we are all in the sacrifice zone now,” she writes.

Source: www.commondreams.org

See on Scoop.it – Global Consensus

How to Plan a Revolution (an Excerpt from Abundance)

How did a simple Facebook group mobilize 12 million people in 40 countries in just one month?

That’s exactly what Oscar Morales accomplished when, in 2008, he created a Facebook group called A Million Voices Against FARC.

What had Morales done to bring millions of people into the streets in a country where, for decades, anyone who said anything against the FARC wound up kidnapped or dead or worse? He’d created a Facebook group. He called it A Million Voices Against FARC. Across the page, he typed, in all capital letters, four simple pleas: “NO MORE KIDNAPPING, NO MORE LIES, NO MORE DEATH, NO MORE FARC.”

“At the time, I didn’t care if only five people joined me,” said Morales. “What I really wanted to do was stand up and create a precedent: we young people are no longer tolerant of terrorism and kidnapping.”

Source: singularityhub.com

See on Scoop.it – Global Consensus

BRICS: Toward a Rio Consensus – The Globalist

The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) set out to overcome Western domination and the legacy of the “Washington Consensus.”

 

This action could strike a true trifecta — recharge global economic governance and the prospects for development as well as pressure the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — to get back on the right track.

Now the BRICS are taking matters into their own hands. Their governments have been diligently putting together two new institutions that hold great promise — a new development bank and a new reserve pooling arrangement.

Source: www.theglobalist.com

See on Scoop.it – Global Consensus

A Global Call for a Greater Voice

A greater voice for the people in making government work for the common good is an idea that is powerful and popular, not only in the United States, but as we’re finding out, around the world as well.

Here in the U.S., overwhelming majorities among Republicans, Democrats and independents, from all across the political spectrum, support creating a Citizen Cabinet, and feel it will help improve the situation in Washington.

 

Voice Of the People (VOP) is a new non-partisan organization that seeks to re-anchor our democracy in its founding principles by giving ‘We the People’ a greater role in government.

Source: vop.org

The direction of evolution: The rise of cooperative organization

Two great trends are evident in the evolution of life on Earth: towards increasing diversification and towards increasing integration. Diversification has spread living processes across the planet, progressively increasing the range of environments and free energy sources exploited by life. Integration has proceeded through a stepwise process in which living entities at one level are integrated into cooperative groups that become larger-scale entities at the next level, and so on, producing cooperative organizations of increasing scale (for example, cooperative groups of simple cells gave rise to the more complex eukaryote cells, groups of these gave rise to multi-cellular organisms, and cooperative groups of these organisms produced animal societies). The trend towards increasing integration has continued during human evolution with the progressive increase in the scale of human groups and societies. The trends towards increasing diversification and integration are both driven by selection. An understanding of the trajectory and causal drivers of the trends suggests that they are likely to culminate in the emergence of a global entity. This entity would emerge from the integration of the living processes, matter, energy and technology of the planet into a global cooperative organization. Such an integration of the results of previous diversifications would enable the global entity to exploit the widest possible range of resources across the varied circumstances of the planet. This paper demonstrates that it’s case for directionality meets the tests and criticisms that have proven fatal to previous claims for directionality in evolution.

 

The direction of evolution: The rise of cooperative organization
John E. Stewart

Biosystems
Available online 1 June 2014

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2014.05.006

Source: www.sciencedirect.com

Can Systems Of The People, By The People, For the Titans, Long Endure? | Errors We Live By | Big Think

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Lincoln proclaimed good government is “of the people, by the people, for the people,” (from Wycliffe’s 14th-century Bible). That last clause provides a tyranny test. Tyranny being any power used “not for the good of those…under it,” but for the tyrants benefit.

Orwell reviewing Hayek’s Road To Serfdom said free markets were “a tyranny probably worse…than that of the state.” He knew tyrants are easier to stop than a “tyrantless tyranny” of bad ideas. A constitution-like balance of powers within economies must ensure they serve “the people.”

Daniel LaLiberte‘s insight:

Don’t forget the danger of the tyranny of the majority.  I believe there can be such a thing as too much cooperation, which can result in the imposition of the will of the majority over that of minorities.  True consensus decision making needs to fairly consider the views of all.

See on bigthink.com

Rising Up! The Growing People-Powered Movement Is Showing Power

See on Scoop.it – Global Consensus

A report shows that we are seeing the largest protests in world history, with a steady increase in the overall number of demonstrations annually.

See on www.alternet.org