US Government About to Control Internet

Great article about what our patriarchal society is trying to get passed now. See the rest of the article here



(Excerpt)

President of Less Government and editor-in-chief of StopNetRegualtion.org, Seton Motley explained it this way,

“The godfather of the media reform movement, a man by the name of Robert McChesney, said [net] neutrality does not commandeer control of the Internet,” [Motley cites.] “‘We’re not at the point yet,’ he actually uses that sentence, ‘but the ultimate objective is to eradicate the media capitalists from the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.’”

“At which point, they will be rationing bandwidth, just like ObamaCare will result in rationing of healthcare. And when that happens, if they’re choosing websites that get bandwidth, and they’re choosing between Daily Kos [and] MoveOn.org vs. National Review and American Spectator, who’s the government going to choose?”

First of all, you should realize just how deceptive this new FCC regulation is. They refer to it as net neutrality when in fact it is anti-neutrality. It’s like getting people to drink poison by calling it Kool-Aid. The name sounds safe but the contents will kill you.

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What really lies behind all of this? Is our government really trying to control the internet? Don't they control everything else? Pretty soon it will be like Farenheit 451 when Big Brother is watching everything you do at all times and you are killed or punished for initiating anything that would allow you to know more than the government feels you should.

Do black tech entrepreneurs face institutional bias?

San Francisco (CNN) -- Wayne Sutton has been asking venture-capital investors and Silicon Valley executives a question that's not often broached here in the epicenter of the technology industry:
"Why aren't there more black people in tech?"


Black Entrepreneur bias?
Soledad O'Brien is chronicling the NewMe Accelerator journey in "Black in America: The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley," airing Sunday at 8 p.m. ET on CNN.

The vast majority of top executives at the leading Silicon Valley tech firms are white men. Women and Asians have made some inroads, but African-American and Latino tech leaders remain a rarity. About 1% of entrepreneurs who received venture capital in the first half of last year are black, according to a study by research firm CB Insights.

This lack of diversity in Silicon Valley made headlines last month when influential tech blogger Michael Arrington, in an interview for CNN's upcoming documentary "Black in America: The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley," said, "I don't know a single black entrepreneur." Arrington later recanted the statement, saying he was caught off guard by the question, but the sensitive issue sparked a public dispute between the newly minted venture capitalist and CNN's Soledad O'Brien.

NewMe co-founder Wayne Sutton, center, works on his laptop at a coffee shop with fellow entrepreneurs.

It's an issue that Sutton, who co-founded the NewMe Accelerator for under-represented minorities in the tech industry and is also building a software company, has been grappling with for months.

NewMe is an incubator program formed to help minorities launch Internet ventures. For two months last summer, Sutton and seven other black entrepreneurs worked together in a rented house in Mountain View, California, where they got advice from successful executives and pitched their startup ideas to investors.

The venture capitalists, including business-software designer Mitch Kapor, told them the struggles of blacks in the tech industry might be attributed to a concept called "pattern matching," which is prevalent in venture-capital circles and yet alien to the rest of the business world.

"Silicon Valley really likes to think of itself as a meritocracy," Kapor said. In fact, "the general state of Silicon Valley is completely backwards," he said.
A true meritocracy?

Pattern matching comes from a computer-science exercise in which a system looks for common attributes within reams of data. Its companion is pattern recognition, a term that some investors use interchangeably but which describes a less precise method.
In the business of investing, pattern matching defines a technique for figuring out which human traits, corporate makeup and financial projections are the foundations for the next Facebook or other big Internet success. The criteria can include a founder's track record, personality type and alma mater, which market the company is targeting and how its peers are performing, and how quickly the business is expected to grow and begin collecting revenue. Commonly, these successful founders are white computer-science graduates of Stanford University or a similar elite school.

Many of the top venture-capital firms use some form of pattern matching, but no two use precisely the same data sets. The firms typically don't disclose what exactly goes into their formulas because they see their patterns as trade secrets.
But Sutton's NewMe co-founder, Angela Benton, wonders whether pattern matching, which critics say favors the status quo over change, is a veiled form of racism.
"I was offended by it," said Benton, who is also starting a company, in an interview with CNN. "I'm black. I'm a woman. I have kids. I might as well go home."
People familiar with the pattern-matching process say race is not explicitly a factor, nor is gender.

"Most VCs I know pride themselves on the idea that to be a good investor, you have to learn those skills," said Cindy Padnos, who founded a venture capital firm called Illuminate Ventures. Her company says in its creed, "We don't rely on 'pattern recognition.'"

NewMe founders Angela Benton, left, and Wayne Sutton discuss their project.
"I have no doubt that most of what we see happening in the high-tech community is completely unintentional bias, and yet, we all have to recognize (that) unintentional or not, we are all born with it," Padnos said. "Undoubtedly, the unintentional bias comes into play when they look at the 15 (startups) they did (invest in) and the five that succeeded big-time, when the ones that succeeded were led by white males. That somehow seeps into the equation."
Race still a factor?

These methods don't necessarily explain why so few blacks, Latinos and women lead tech companies when compared to the number of white-male execs.
Padnos and her venture firm have researched and advocated for hiring and funding more tech companies led by women. She says she has strived to diversify her 40-person advisory committee and her relatively small investment portfolio, but neither has an African-American.

High-placed female execs like Google's Marissa Mayer and Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg have advocated on their own for women, and women continue to break into the top executive ranks. Their recent successes, and the rise of Chinese and Indian tech leaders, could provide a model for other minorities in the United States who are hitting roadblocks in their quests to start Internet companies, industry experts say.
But their hard-earned victories have not come easily.

"We live in a society where race is still a factor," said Rey Ramsey, an African-American man who runs a political lobbying firm for the tech industry called TechNet. Referencing Facebook's famous young founder,he added, "We're waiting for the black Zuckerberg."

A few standout black leaders have emerged in tech over the years, said Charles Moore, an African-American who founded Rocket Lawyer, a startup that offers online legal documents and advice. He cited Frank Greene, a pioneering semiconductor engineer turned venture capitalist who died in 2009, and Charles Phillips Jr., the former Oracle co-president, as inspirations.

"Race has not really been a factor in a material way in my career," said Moore, whose company is backed by Google Ventures, the search giant's venture capital arm. "I think that Silicon Valley is a place where you can work hard and be smart and have some luck, which everybody needs. And if you have those things, you can succeed, regardless of your race or gender or other demographic profile."
Data-driven investing Google Ventures has extolled the virtues of its data-driven approach to investing, in which it draws patterns from past home runs. For example, the firm has learned, as it told the New York Times in July, that successful entrepreneurs are more likely to create the spark again and that startups located far from the offices of their investors are more likely to succeed.

"Traditionally, the venture business is highly driven by qualitative assessments," said Bill Maris, Google Ventures' managing partner, recently at a conference. "We're trying to also look quantitatively, and apply some data tools and metrics around some questions that make natural sense to us to try and look at."
A longtime venture capitalist, who declined to speak on the record, said pattern matching, when applied correctly, is designed to spot the rare talent that may hit it big, not promote sameness. It has nothing to do with race, he said.
Many of the top venture firms have said publicly that they use pattern matching to identify potentially successful startups. But when contacted by CNN, they were reluctant to talk about it. Spokespeople for several high-profile venture firms, including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, did not return requests for comment on this story.

Ben Horowitz, who founded his venture firm with Marc Andreessen, wrote on his blog last year that he understands the value of pattern matching, which allows investors to "recognize patterns of strategy and behavior that generally work, and patterns that generally fail," although he thinks it has limits.
Sequoia Capital's Michael Moritz has said that age is a factor his firm considers when deciding who to invest in.

New Venture Partners, a New Jersey-based firm with an office in Silicon Valley, uses pattern matching, said partner Daniel Deeney in an interview. But race is not a factor, he said, and several companies New Venture has invested in have black leaders. He said New Venture's investments tend to go into the telecom industry, where AT&T, Lucent and others have fostered corporate diversity programs that have fostered minority-led startups.

A racial divide with no clear explanation
Little research has been done on the topic of race in the tech industry. Some observers, including Ramsey, wonder whether the lack of racial diversity can be blamed on hiring practices at tech juggernauts such as Apple, Facebook and Google, none of which cooperated with a request by CNNMoney for employee diversity statistics.

"The tech industry is pretty clubby," said Hank Williams, an African-American entrepreneur in the NewMe program who had success in the Internet boom of the 1990s. "There are really no people of color in Silicon Valley."
Others say the issue could be rooted deep within the black community. The NewMe co-founders said African-American families don't typically encourage business leaders or programmers to pursue interests in tech.

"The African-American community is like, 'Oh, nobody is going to give you money to make a website,'" Sutton said. "It's almost like stupid, or not cool."
Still others, like the founder of Kapor Capital, say risk-aversion within venture capital stifles changes in the demographics of entrepreneurs chosen to be financed.
"African-American candidates are much more likely not to match the pattern," said Kapor, who hosted NewMe's demo day at his office. "To recognize the truth is to accept that the winners at the top did so through a rigged game."

His wife, Freada Kapor Klein, a longtime adviser to tech firms on racial diversity in employment, believes people of different racial or ethnic backgrounds can solve problems with technology that others can't because of perspectives learned during their upbringings. Firms that recognize this, she said, should have an edge on less open-minded rivals.

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The special mentioned in the article is coming on CNN tonight which I plan on watching. I watch all the CNN Specials on Black in America as well as Latin in America with Soledad O'Brien. This isn't an old issue. There are many occupations that are white dominated as well have higher salaries. There are more people of color with degrees from higher education institutions now than in recent decades. There seems to be a bias in more than just the technical field in regards to the disparity between races. I'll report back more after I watch the special. I just thought this was a very interesting article. I think this encompasses beliefs about race, class and even gender. The technical field is also highly male dominated as well.

Scribbled Thoughts of Class

As I stated in class this week, it seems unfair and critical to judge the worth of an individual's life, family, dreams and goal merely because of their perceived "class." There is so much we don't know and cannot fathom about someone's life just because of societal stereotypes or adopted norms attributed to certain classes of people.

The most interesting thing I noticed about each piece we read, is that they all came from the perspective of working class women and their experiences in the world. I wonder if a working class man would see the world from a much different perspective, maybe even a perspective that held more power, promise and inside information to the way the world works --- maybe even in favor of working class men. Working class men are in the same class as women yet have different opportunities afforded to them.

For each author, the most important factor in their ability to "survive rather than live" and "smile" came from the strength they received from their familial ties. Growing up they drew from the unwavering pride and creative capabilities of their families who in the outside world were seen as intellectual inferiors, but were the very threads that held their family and personal lives together with determination. It may be difficult for an outsider to look in and see their struggles as anything but something to reflect upon sadly, but through each voice, each word, I felt a sense of appreciation and admiration the women had for their working class upbringing. Granted, they were unsure in the world at times growing up and out of their working class families to go to college and travel the world, but they never forgot where they came from and had instilled upon them the belief of hard work, pride, dedication and respect for life.

The hardest to believe, but most repetitive ideal I noticed, was either their hope to be invisible (at a young age) to others who had "class freedom" or their desire to be seen despite feeling invisible to professors, peers who had come from middle or upper class backgrounds and others they encountered who held some sort of esteem. For one author, she couldn't decide if she should shout on the train that her clothes underneath her expensive coat(bought on credit) were really from the Salvation Army. The distinction that those without make about class was well put by author Terri Griffith: Class is about more than money; it's about safety and security, knowing that what you have today, you will have tomorrow.

Growing up without or on the edge of going without (constantly) creates a mental stress that even if you get older and have more than enough, you fear you might have nothing the next day. Middle and upper class constituents assume what they have, they always will. Perhaps, that is why it's that much harder for them to bounce back if by some chance of fate they lose it all. They aren't built to accept or expect failure. On one hand, that can sound negative, but it actually helps build a stronger character that not only can withstand troubles, but is able to think on his/her own feet when needed and survive.

Combining the ability to survive with the will to live and be able to live comfortably is essentially what would level out the playing field. In fact, it's the ideal that most working class people live by. The wealthy aspire to maintain and increase wealth, while those less fortunate would be happy with enough to live comfortably and be able to enjoy themselves if desired. The notion that working class and poor people don't have dreams, goals or aspirations is false. Rather, what they endure and are presented through political and social structures are brick walls to ensure they don't "dream too big" and remain where they are. For some, that provides the fuel to get out while for others it's simply confirmation that what they are is all they will ever be.

It was empowering to read the beauty and hardship simultaneously of all four women, regardless of race, having similar "class" experiences although, I related most with Meliza Banales, who wrote the Poet and The Pauper. I am also an aspiring poet and writer who has been told by many that my writings about race, class, gender and sexuality are not things that people want to read about. Yet, as she noted, those who wrote about trees and other obscure things are published regularly. When she spoke of the "smile" that people of color give to White people in authority, I felt as if she was letting out a secret membership tactic. All my life, my mother taught me to "smile" and not lash out at the rude, inconsiderate, racist and downright obnoxious things that White people in positions of power would say to her or me so as not to reduce my chances of mobility within the workplace. I've worked in mainly White dominated places of employment where if I was lucky there might be one other person of color and if there was one, they were always in competition with me to be the "better minority." In making us compete, we were never allowed to truly be friends or identify with one another because we were both trying to climb the rungs of the societal ladder that would give us the financial stability and security that our white counterparts had.

I read her piece thinking "How could you tell them about the smile? It's our greatest weapon." Yet I know that as the words left her thoughts and stained the paper in ink, there would be many who were guilty of igniting the smile, that would not understand, so I took comfort in that. As a woman of color and queer, your struggles through life, without class, are that much more complex and fraught with mixed messages that class is not only reserved for a certain racial composition, but also for your heterosexual comrades. No one thinks of queer people, let alone queer people of color, as very high on the totem pole. The quintessential crossover queer is Ellen DeGeneres. I believe that crossing over into acceptance came from her visibility in the media and acquiring social status before she outed herself. She had to solidify her place in society before slightly turning her world on its side. She came out at a time where it still wasn't tre-popular to say you were "gay." What does a person who is heterosexual know about trying to find your place in the world, not only through your family, your class, your race, but also your gender identity? It adds yet another layer onto the lasagna, making it take that much longer to bake and possibly altering the flavor we thought it should have.

The idea that who we are is in sharp contrast to the rest of world is something we learn at an early age through our experiences. We are either apart of the "in group" or outside of it looking in. Middle class and upper class society is much tougher to infiltrate than the "mean girls" in middle or high school. In reality, it's a group that affirms they are above you while every thing they live and breathe is made to support that belief. The stories we read played into that societal hierarchy. Through exploring life on their own, each author was able to see life outside the confines of their upbringing and challenge the notion that who they were simply consisted of the clothes, they wore, the food they ate and where they lived. It ran much deeper than the material and often had to do with an ideal of self-worth and self-preservation against all odds, which despite some cultural capital, they were able to receive from their close knit families.

(p.s. - the picture in the corner is one I took of the women's bathroom at RIC. I thought it went perfectly)

Jon Bon Jovi's "Pay What You Can" Restaurant

RED BANK, N.J. (AP) — In three decades as one of the world's biggest rock stars, Jon Bon Jovi has eaten in some of the world's best restaurants, savoring the best food the planet has to offer. [LINK to article HERE]

Yet there's no place he'd rather have dinner than The Soul Kitchen, a "pay-what-you-can" restaurant he and his wife Dorothea established in a former auto body shop near the Red Bank train station in central New Jersey.

The restaurant provides gourmet-quality meals to the hungry while enabling them to volunteer on community projects in return without the stigma of visiting a soup kitchen. Paying customers are encouraged to leave whatever they want in the envelopes on each table, where the menus never list a price.

The restaurant is the latest undertaking by the New Jersey rocker's Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, which has built 260 homes for low-income residents in recent years.
"With the economic downturn, one of the things I noticed was that disposable income was one of the first things that went," Bon Jovi told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday before the restaurant's grand opening ceremony. "Dining out, the family going out to a restaurant, mom not having to cook, dad not having to clean up — a lot of memories were made around restaurant tables.

"When I learned that one in six people in this country goes to bed hungry, I thought this was the next phase of the Foundation's work," he said.

It started several years ago when Dorothea Bongiovi (she uses the legal spelling of her husband's name) and Jon started helping out at a food pantry at nearby St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Church. They later moved their focus to the Lunch Break program, which feeds 80 to 120 people a day, dubbing it "The Soul Kitchen."
They brought that name with them to a former auto body shop down the street from the Count Basie Theater, where Jon and his self-titled band have played many fundraising shows for local charities.

It took a year and $250,000, but the restaurant now rivals any of its competitors in trendy Red Bank, with entrees like cornmeal crusted catfish with red beans and rice, grilled chicken breast with homemade basil mayo and rice pilaf, and grilled salmon with soul seasonings, sweet potato mash and sauteed greens, many of which were grown in the herb and vegetable garden right outside the restaurant's doors.
Bon Jovi, who has a home in next-door Middletown, is adamant about one thing.
"This is not a soup kitchen," he emphasizes. "You can come here with the dignity of linens and silver, and you're served a healthy, nutritious meal. This is not burgers and fries.

"There's no prices on our menu, so if you want to come and you want to make a difference, leave a $20 in the envelope on the table. If you can't afford to eat, you can bus tables, you can wait tables, you can work in the kitchen as a dishwasher or sous chef," he said. "If you say to me, 'I'm not a people person,' I say, 'That's not a problem. We'll take you back to Lunch Break to volunteer with those people. If you don't want to volunteer with that, we'll take you to the FoodBank."

After volunteering at one of those places, a person will be given a certificate good for a meal at The Soul Kitchen.

"If you come in and say, 'I'm hungry,' we'll feed you," Bon Jovi said. "But we're going to need you to do something. It's very important to what we're trying to achieve."

That includes making people feel part of a larger community that cares about them, while still expecting them to contribute to society at large.
"This is not an entitlement thing," Bon Jovi said. "This is about empowering people because you have to earn that gift certificate."

He and others at the restaurant want those who can afford to dine out to patronize the restaurant as well and pay what they consider market prices, or even a bit more than that, to help sustain The Soul Kitchen as a true community resource.

Bon Jovi said he is currently writing songs for his band's next album, due out in 2013, along with another typically massive Bon Jovi tour. He said many of the songs are inspired by the current economic downturn and the struggles of everyday people to make ends meet without losing hope.

In the meantime, he and his wife plan to stay active in the restaurant, where he estimates he has worked at least once a week in recent months. The Soul Kitchen is open for dinner Thursday through Saturday, and offers Sunday brunch.

How important is rolling up his sleeves and working in the restaurant to him?
"Last Friday, I was at the White House, serving on the Council for Community Solutions, got on a train, changed in the bathroom and got here in time to wash dishes Friday night," he said. "I'm the dishwasher, for real. I can't cook a lick."
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Wayne Parry can be reached at http://twitter.com/WayneParryAC
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What I think is really amazing about this article is that someone who has the money to help others has taken the time to understand what those less fortunate are going through. He doesn't have to care or even try to see class from way "up there" but he does. He even works in his OWN restaurant. This quote stuck out at me: "Last Friday, I was at the White House, serving on the Council for Community Solutions, got on a train, changed in the bathroom and got here in time to wash dishes Friday night," he said. "I'm the dishwasher, for real. I can't cook a lick." I thought it was fabulous that he doesn't feel too good to do the dishes in his own restaurant. I wonder if any of his humility has to do with his age and the era in which he grew up. Not many of the younger generations who have money seem to give of it that freely to those in need.

Bon Jovi stated that "a lot of family memories were made around restaurant tables" also alluding to his age and how popular eating out at restaurants with family was and still should be as a means of coming together. There are a lot of people with negative comments to say in regards to this article, but I'd love to see another celebrity who has a restaurant with quality food where you don't get charged a single penny to eat in there --- you just have to contribute in some other way (ie, washing dishes, helping bus tables, volunteer at soup kitchens, etc). It's an incredible act of compassion and although I've always loved Bon Jovi, this has created a newfound respect for him.

Atlanta Woman Arrested For First Name

Again, class & race are clear here. If she was Lindsay Lohan this definitely wouldn't have happened. I honestly don't understand how someone can be arrested and imprisoned off just a "first name" assumption. No research or even real "police work" was done here and a woman had to be locked up for 53 days as a result? Our government never ceases to disgust me. All this money poured into military and police forces and they aren't even trained well enough to arrest someone whose name matches the one in question.

"Atlanta woman wrongly imprisoned for 53 days because of name mix-up"
By Liz Goodwin | The Lookout – 11 hrs ago

An Atlanta woman says she was mistakenly imprisoned for 53 days because police confused her for someone else with the same first name.

Teresa Culpepper says she called police to report that her truck had been stolen in August. But when they showed up at her home, they arrested her for aggravated assault committed by another Teresa.

"All she has is the same first name. The only descriptions that match are 'Teresa' and 'black female,'" Culpepper's attorney, Ashleigh Merchant told The Lookout. Culpepper, who is 47, didn't have the same address, birth date, height, or weight as the Teresa who was supposed to be arrested.

Merchant says Culpepper, who was legitimately convicted of a misdemeanor in the 90s but otherwise has no criminal record, lives in a rough neighborhood where police are frequently on patrol. She and her family were unable to post the $12,000 bond to get her out of jail, so she wasn't released until her public defender found the victim of the assault and brought him to the court to say Culpepper was not the "Teresa" he had accused.

"I just don't think in another side of town this would have ever happened," Merchant says. She says the city must settle with Culpepper or face a lawsuit, and added that the police department is investigating the incident.

"I didn't know what to do," Culpepper told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "I didn't know how to get out this situation."

You can watch Culpepper tell her story in the video below.

The World Vs Wall Street

Dear friends,

Thousands of Americans have non-violently occupied Wall St -- an epicentre of global financial power and corruption. They are the latest ray of light in a new movement for social justice that is spreading like wildfire from Madrid to Jerusalem to 146 other cities and counting, but they need our help to succeed.

As working families pay the bill for a financial crisis caused by corrupt elites, the protesters are calling for real democracy, social justice and anti-corruption. But they are under severe pressure from authorities, and some media are dismissing them as fringe groups. If millions of us from across the world stand with them, we'll boost their resolve and show the media and leaders that the protests are part of a massive mainstream movement for change.

This year could be our century's 1968, but to succeed it must be a movement of all citizens, from every walk of life. Click to join the call for real democracy -- a giant live counter of every one of us who signs the petition will be erected in the centre of the occupation in New York, and live webcasted on the petition page:

These national threads are connected by a global narrative of determination to end the collusion of corrupt elites and politicians -- who have in many countries helped cause a damaging financial crisis and now want working families to pay the bill. The mass movement that is responding can not only ensure that the burden of recession doesn't fall on the most vulnerable, it can also help right the balance of power between democracy and corruption. Click to stand with the movement:

PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION HERE

In every uprising, from Cairo to New York, the call for an accountable government that serves the people is clear, and our global community has backed that people power across the world wherever it has broken out. The time of politicians in the pocket of the corrupt few is ending, and in its place we are building real democracies, of, by, and for people.

With hope,

Ya

Did YOU know Whole Foods takes food stamps?

Even the author of this article had something to say about people receiving state assistance being able to get groceries at Whole Foods

I confess I did flinch at the idea of these people spending their taxpayer-provided food dollars at Whole Paycheck. And that made me realize that I have this unrecognized prejudice that the poor — meaning those who qualify for food stamps — must be condemned to eat cheap, bad food as the price of receiving state charity.

Even if you search the entire website of Whole Foods it says nothing about being able to use food stamps at their stores. In fact, if you put "food stamps" into the search engine, it will pull up a whole foods blog that asks for donations to "stamp" out hunger. Really? So are they trying to protect a whole class of people by NOT advertising that they actually do something good for the poor? I thought that was something companies liked to advertise, but then again there is an audience to maintain, right?

I found this really disturbing and will probably post more later about it....after I simmer down