Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha Indians become the first official Climate Refugees

The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw just received $48 million to move off of their disappearing south Louisiana island. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced in January that it had awarded the tribe $48 million to pay for a move, most likely farther north and inland, making them the first community of official climate refugees in the continental (lower 48) United States. The tribe wants to move as …

DISINFORMATION PART 2: DETAILED TIPS FOR TROLLS

This is Part 2 of a three-part series on the insidious techniques of trolls, spooks, feds, saboteurs, provocateurs, disinformants — whatever you wish to call them. These techniques were posted anonymously on the Internet some time ago. They appear to have been written by a professional troll for the “benefit” of less experienced trolls on how to prevent the sharing …

BEC CREW – Li-Fi has just been tested in the real world, and it’s 100 times faster than Wi-Fi

Expect to hear a whole lot more about Li-Fi – a wireless technology that transmits high-speed data using visible light communication (VLC) – in the coming months. With scientists achieving speeds of 224 gigabits per second in the lab using Li-Fi earlier this year, the potential for this technology to change everything about the way we use the Internet is …

The Death of the Internet: A Pre-Mortem – John Michael Greer

The mythic role assigned to progress in today’s popular culture has any number of odd effects, but one of the strangest is the blindness to the downside that clamps down on the collective imagination of our time once people become convinced that something or other is the wave of the future. It doesn’t matter in the least how many or …

Why So Many Americans Feel So Powerless – ROBERT REICH

A security guard recently told me he didn’t know how much he’d be earning from week to week because his firm kept changing his schedule and his pay. “They just don’t care,” he said. A traveler I met in the Dallas Fort-Worth Airport last week said she’d been there eight hours but the airline responsible for her trip wouldn’t help …

Trade Deals Will Supplant Democracy with Corporate Tribunals, Warn Critics

Provisions of international trade deals currently under negotiation threaten domestic sovereignty while giving corporations special legal rights, charges a letter signed by more than 100 law professors and sent on Wednesday to congressional leaders and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman. The letter (pdf), organized and released by the Washington, D.C.-headquartered Alliance for Justice (AFJ), specifically opposes the inclusion of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) language in the …

Inside the Major Political Fight for Broadband Internet That’s Brewing Across America

February 28th the Federal Communications Commission issued two decisions.  One concerned net neutrality, the other municipal broadband.  The first garnered by far the most attention, as it should.  Net neutrality affects everyone and establishes a fundamental new principle for Internet access. But as another presidential campaign looms the FCC decision on municipally owned broadband may offer more fertile ground for …