The banksters of the country will endeavor to prolong its REIGN by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

Lincoln assassination image courtesy of: http://www.abrahamlincolnpictures.net/Abraham-Lincoln-Assasination.html

Say NO to ACTA

Learn more and take action about ACTA at http://lqdn.fr/ACTA
(subtitles included : fr, en, es, de, it, nl, se, pt, ro, ca, hu, gr, …)

Here are few ways to act against ACTA, right now: http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/How_to_act_against_ACTA

Ongoing translation and subtitling efforts:
https://pad.lqdn.fr/p/trad-video-acta

Last week, 3 million of us beat back America’s attack on our Internet! — but there is an even bigger threat out there, and our global movement for freedom online is perfectly poised to kill it for good.

ACTA — a global treaty — could allow corporations to censor the Internet. Negotiated in secret by a small number of rich countries and corporate powers, it would set up a shadowy new anti-counterfeiting body to allow private interests to police everything that we do online and impose massive penalties — even prison sentences — against people they say have harmed their business.

Europe is deciding right now whether to sign ACTA — and without them, this global attack on Internet freedom will collapse. We know they have opposed ACTA before, but some members of Parliament are wavering — let’s give them the push they need to reject the treaty. Sign the petition — we’ll do a spectacular delivery in Brussels when we reach 500,000 signatures:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/eu_save_the_internet/?vl

It’s outrageous — governments of four-fifths of the world’s people were excluded from the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations and unelected bureaucrats have worked closely with corporate lobbyists to craft new rules and a dangerously powerful enforcement regime. ACTA would initially cover the US, EU and 9 other countries, then be rolled out across the world. But if we can get the EU to say no now, the treaty will lose momentum and could stall for good.

The oppressively strict regulations could mean people everywhere are punished for simple acts such as sharing a newspaper article or uploading a video of a party where copyrighted music is played. Sold as a trade agreement to protect copyrights, ACTA could also ban lifesaving generic drugs and threaten local farmers’ access to the seeds they need. And, amazingly, the ACTA committee will have carte blanche to change its own rules and sanctions with no democratic scrutiny.

Big corporate interests are pushing hard for this, but the EU Parliament stands in the way. Let’s send a loud call to Parliamentarians to face down the lobbies and stand firm for Internet freedom. Sign now and send to everyone you know:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/eu_save_the_internet/?vl

Last week, we saw the strength of our collective power when millions of us joined forces to stop the US from passing an Internet censorship law that would have struck at the heart of the Internet. We also showed the world how powerful our voices can be. Let’s raise them again to tackle this new threat.

With hope and determination,

Dalia, Alice, Pascal, Emma, Ricken, Maria Paz and the rest of the Avaaz team

More information:

If You Thought SOPA Was Bad, Just Wait Until You Meet ACTA
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/01/23/if-you-thought-sopa-was-bad-just-wait-until-you-meet-acta/

ACTA vs. SOPA: Five Reasons ACTA is Scarier Threat to Internet Freedom
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/286925/20120124/acta-sopa-reasons-scarier-threat-internet-freedom.htm?cid=2

What’s Wrong With ACTA
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number10.1/whats-wrong-with-ACTA

The secret treaty: Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and Its Impact on Access to Medicines
http://www.msfaccess.org/content/secret-treaty-anti-counterfeiting-trade-agreement-acta-and-its-impact-access-medicines

34 Shocking Facts About U.S. Debt That Should Set America On Fire With Anger

We have all been lied to. For decades, the leaders of both major political parties have promised us that they can fix our current system and that they can get our national debt under control. As the 2012 election approaches, they are making all kinds of wild promises once again. Well you know what? It is all a giant sham. The United States has gotten into so much debt that there will be no coming back from this. The current system is irretrievably broken. 30 years ago the U.S. debt was a horrific crisis that was completely and totally out of control. If we would have dealt with it back then maybe we could have done something about it. But now it is 15 times larger, and we are adding more than a trillion dollars to the debt every single year. The facts that you are about to read below should set America on fire with anger. Please share them with as many people as you can. What we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is absolutely nightmarish. Words like “abuse”, “financial rape”, “theft” and “crime” do not even begin to describe what we are doing to future generations. We were the wealthiest nation on earth, but it wasn’t good enough just to squander all of our own money. We had to squander the money of our children and our grandchildren as well. America has been so selfish and so self-centered that it is hard to argue that we don’t deserve what is about to happen to this country. We have stolen the future of America, and yet we strut around as if we are the smartest generation that ever walked the face of the earth.

All of this prosperity that we see all around us is just an illusion. It is a false prosperity that has been purchased by the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world.

Did you know that if you added up all forms of debt in the United States and divided it up equally that every single family in the country would owe more than $683,000?

We are a nation that is absolutely addicted to debt, and the U.S. debt crisis threatens to destroy everything that our forefathers built.

Yes, everything may seem fine for the moment, but what do you think would happen if the federal government suddenly adopted a balanced budget?

1.3 trillion dollars a year would be sucked right out of the economy and we would be looking at an “economic readjustment” that would be mind blowing.

Enjoy this false prosperity while you can, because it is not going to last.

Debt is a very cruel master, and our day of reckoning is almost here.

The following are 34 shocking facts about U.S. debt that should set America on fire with anger….

#1 During fiscal year 2011, the U.S. government spent 3.7 trillion dollars but it only brought in 2.4 trillion dollars.

#2 When Ronald Reagan took office, the U.S. national debt was less than 1 trillion dollars. Today, the U.S. national debt is over 15.2 trillion dollars.

#3 During 2011, U.S. debt surpassed 100 percent of GDP for the first time ever.

#4 According to Wikipedia, the monetary base “consists of coins, paper money (both as bank vault cash and as currency circulating in the public), and commercial banks’ reserves with the central bank.” Currently the U.S. monetary base is sitting somewhere around 2.7 trillion dollars. So if you went out and gathered all of that money up it would only make a small dent in our national debt. But afterwards there would be no currency for anyone to use.

#5 The U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt during fiscal 2011.

#6 The U.S. government has total assets of 2.7 trillion dollars and has total liabilities of 17.5 trillion dollars. The liabilities do not even count 4.7 trillion dollars of intragovernmental debt that is currently outstanding.

#7 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.

#8 It is being projected that the U.S. national debt will surpass 23 trillion dollars in 2015.

#9 According to the GAO, the U.S. government is facing 34 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities for social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare. These are obligations that we have already committed ourselves to but that we do not have any money for.

#10 Others estimate that the unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government now total over 117 trillion dollars.

#11 According to the GAO, the ratio of debt held by the public to GDP is projected to reach 287 percent of GDP by 2086.

#12 Others are much less optimistic. A recently revised IMF policy paper entitled “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” projects that U.S. government debt will rise to about 400 percent of GDP by the year 2050.

#13 The United States government is responsible for more than a third of all the government debt in the entire world.

#14 If you divide up the national debt equally among all U.S. taxpayers, each taxpayer would owe approximately $134,685.

#15 Mandatory federal spending surpassed total federal revenue for the first time ever in fiscal 2011. That was not supposed to happen until 50 years from now.

#16 Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. GDP grew by only 4.26%, but the U.S. national debt soared by 61% during that same time period.

#17 During Barack Obama’s first two years in office, the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt than the first 100 U.S. Congresses combined.

#18 When you add up all spending by the federal government, state governments and local governments, it comes to 46.6% of GDP.

#19 Our nation is more addicted to government checks than ever before. In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income. Today, government transfer payments account for 18.4% of all income.

#20 U.S. households are now actually receiving more money directly from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes.

#21 A staggering 48.5% of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits. Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.

#22 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.

#23 In 1950, each retiree’s Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 U.S. workers. According to new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are now only 1.75 full-time private sector workers for each person that is receiving Social Security benefits in the United States.

#24 The U.S. government now says that the Medicare trust fund will run out five years faster than they were projecting just last year.

#25 Right now, spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percent of GDP. Back in 2001, it accounted for just 18 percent.

#26 If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 trillion to $5 trillion each and every year.

#27 If you were alive when Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now. But this year alone the U.S. government is going to add more than a trillion dollars to the national debt.

#28 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

#29 A trillion $10 bills, if they were taped end to end, would wrap around the globe more than 380 times. That amount of money would still not be enough to pay off the U.S. national debt.

#30 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 470,000 years to pay off the national debt.

#31 If Bill Gates gave every penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.

#32 According to Professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, the U.S. is facing a “fiscal gap” of over 200 trillion dollars in the future. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article that he did for CNN….

The government’s total indebtedness — its fiscal gap — now stands at $211 trillion, by my arithmetic. The fiscal gap is the difference, measured in present value, between all projected future spending obligations — including our huge defense expenditures and massive entitlement programs, as well as making interest and principal payments on the official debt — and all projected future taxes.

#33 If you add up all forms of debt in the United States (government, business and consumer), it comes to more than 56 trillion dollars. That is more than $683,000 per family. Unfortunately, the average amount of savings per family in the U.S. is only about $4,735.

#34 The U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913.

But do our leaders care about statistics such as these?

No.

In fact, Barack Obama says that we need to raise the debt limit by another 1.2 trillion dollars.

The absurdity of raising the debt limit when we are already in so much debt is beautifully illustrated by the video posted below….

I just thought that video was so well done.

The “huge cuts” that Congress has agreed to are absolutely meaningless when compared to how rapidly our debt is exploding.

Calling those cuts “pocket change” would be an insult to pocket change.

But it is not just U.S. debt that is the problem. The European debt crisis threatens to completely unravel in 2012 and Japan actually has the highest debt to GDP ratio in the entire industrialized world.

In 2012, a total of 7,600,000,000,000 dollars of debt must be rolled over by the G-7 nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China.

That doesn’t even count new borrowing. That number just represents old debts that are coming due that must be refinanced.

Anyone out there that insists that this debt bubble can be fixed under our current system is lying.

A massive amount of financial pain is coming.

It is time for Americans to wake up from their television-induced comas.

It is time for Americans to get very angry.

Your future has been destroyed and the future of your children and grandchildren has been destroyed.

You better take action while you still can.

Learn more: http://www.yolohub.com/economy/34-shocking-facts-about-u-s-debt-that-should-set-america-on-fire-with-anger

15 Fascinating Academic Studies Done on Twitter

Three hundred million users, one billion tweets each week, and three thousand tweets per second. This thing called Twitter is blowing up. It’s been five years since Jack Dorsey released the blue bird of social connectedness onto the scene, but it’s only been fairly recently that tweeting has caught fire. The soaring popularity of the microblogging service has attracted the attention of researchers who have come up with some pretty rad data through fascinating studies like these.

TWITTER GOT HELP FROM THE REAL WORLD

Researchers at MIT looked at Twitter data from over 400 U.S. cities with the highest rates of new tweeters from 2006 to 2009. They found that online hype is no replacement for real-world word-of-mouth and coverage by old-school media outlets. As the video shows, there was a “contagion process” that fueled Twitter’s growth in areas of the country that are geographically close to each other.

#UNHAPPINESS IS SO HOT RIGHT NOW

If Twitter users are representative of the world at large, we’ve been one sad human race lately. University of Vermont scientists did a study to try to measure society’s happiness by rating 10,000 common English words as they appear in the Twitter universe and tallying the scores. After scoring 46 billion words, they found happiness has been declining since 2009, falling quicker in the first half of 2011. Bummer.

WAKE UP HAPPY, GO TO BED HAPPY

Cornell grad student Scott Golder analyzed 400 messages from every new Twitter account opened between February 2008 and April 2009. The study found that across the globe, people wake up in a good mood that gradually deteriorates as the day goes on, then improves again in the evening. Before you call him Captain Obvious, Golder found the pattern holds true on the weekends. Turns out it’s your circadian rhythm, not work, that’s making you grouchy.

WE ARE THE .05%

You know that friend of yours who tweets links all the time? He and just 19,999 other tweeters generate a whopping 50% of all the URLs clicked through Twitter, according to Yahoo! Research. The study also showed that birds of a feather flock together: musicians click links tweeted by musicians, athletes click links tweeted by athletes, and so on.

YES, I FOLLOW ASHTON KUTCHER. AND NO, I DON’T LISTEN TO ANYTHING HE SAYS

We finally have the data to prove what we had all suspected: no one cares what celebrities think. Watching tens of millions of tweets to see which ones caused trends, researchers at Northwestern University found average-Joe tweeters who are experts in their respective fields influence more people than celebrities with far more followers.

DON’T CALL US, WE’LL TWEET YOU

In a 2010 study, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University showed that Twitter provides polling results as reliable as those obtained by traditional polling organizations over the phone. The researchers used text analysis software to filter one billion tweets for tweets about politics and the economy. The results could mean the end of those pesky pollsters calling asking for just a few minutes of your time.

BRAND NEWS

Research group Chadwick Martin Bailey came up with some numbers that no doubt sent retailers scrambling to get on Twitter if they weren’t already there. CMB looked at about 1,500 adult tweeters and found that of Twitter users that follow certain brands, 60% are more likely to recommend the brand to friends and 50% more likely to buy that brand themselves. And once they follow, they stay — 75% said they’ve never unfollowed a brand.

STUDENTS BORED? LET ‘EM TWEET

Dr. Reynol Junco of Lock Haven University had 70 students in a pre-med program incorporate tweeting into their assignments and class discussions. Another 55 students were given the same workload but could not involve Twitter. Using a survey, he gauged all the students’ levels of class involvement at the beginning and end of the semester. He found that not only were the tweeters twice as engaged in class, they also earned half a point better GPA.

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO GET US MORE CUSTOMERS

George Washington University and the Pew Research Center brought this one to light. Over the course of a week in February, 2011, researchers sifted through 3,600 tweets by news outlets and found that 93% had links back to their own websites. Only one lonely percent linked to another news group’s site. In other words, bringing information to the public is a close second to bringing the public to them.

TWITTER MAKES YOU DUMBER

At least one researcher claims using Twitter weakens your working memory, the thing you need to recall information and use it. Dr. Tracy Alloway of the University of Stirling in Scotland created a program for slow-learning kids to strengthen their working memory. She found that Facebook greatly increased IQ, but YouTube and Twitter diminished attention span and memory skills.

TWITTER IS WORTHLESS

Yes, Twitter is wildly popular. But according to a 10-year study by USC’s journalism school, not a single living soul would pay to use it. That’s right: zero percent of those surveyed said they would pay a dime to post a tweet. Fifty-five percent said they would tolerate ads on Twitter, but half said they never click ads anyway.

TWITTER IS PROPHETIC

As more proof we don’t need to be harassed by polling calls anymore, the analysts at 140elect discovered that Twitter can accurately predict shifts in the popularity-poll numbers of GOP presidential candidates. Simply by tracking the changes in the number of a candidate’s Twitter following over a seven-month period, the guys were able to show that in each case, the Twitter change precipitated the change in polling figures.

SO, THEY’RE ALL LIBERTARIAN?

Apparently Twitter users aren’t Democrat or Republican fans. Analysis of two million tweets by the Project for Excellence in Journalism showed tweeters post twice as many negative comments about GOP presidential candidates as they do positive. President Obama does even worse, with a 3 to 1 negative-positive ratio. And even though the Repubs have been on center stage lately, Obama has been the subject of well over twice the number of tweets than all the other candidates combined.

ME, ME, ME

Thanks to this study, we now have a word to describe people who tweet nothing but updates about themselves: “meformers.” After reading 3,500 tweets from 350 tweeters, professors at Rutgers determined that 80% of users on Twitter are meformers. The sample tweets were sorted into nine different groups, like “sharing,” “me now,” and “statements and random thoughts.” Only one in five users qualified as informers, who had a median following twice that of meformers.

DID THEY REALLY NEED A STUDY TO FIND THAT?

Are you sitting down? Forty percent of tweets are pointless! Data company Pear Analytics sorted 2,000 tweets into six categories: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational, and pass-along value. Anything that started with “@” or could fit into more than one category was rated “conversational.” Even that was not enough to keep the “I’m eating a sandwich now” tweets from coming out on top.

source: http://www.onlinecollege.org/2012/01/04/15-fascinating-academic-studies-done-on-twitter/