Posts Tagged ‘empower’

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Technology is Bringing Peace Through Education

Monday, March 14th, 2011

Institutions of innovative ideas interacted this week, as Salman Khan, founder of the free online Khan Academy, met up with TED Talks to share his riveting insights into the future of the world’s education systems.

Following highlights from the Academy’s enormous supply of teaching videos used by millions, Khan spoke of his vision to harness the real power of technology to educate the world:

  • Video lectures offer many advantages over their real-life counterparts, like being able to pause, repeat and learn at one’s own pace.
  • Intuitive, interactive exercises that advance according to the student’s comprehension helps break the mold of traditional one-size-fits-all classrooms.
  • Real-time progress tracking gives students game-style achievement trophies, enticing them to excel.
  • Teachers get a unique profile for each student, making the learning process as productive as possible.

Perhaps most intriguing is Khan’s notion of ‘flipping the script’, where the students are assigned their lectures for outside the class, and they do the assigned homework in class when the instructor is there to help. What a great idea!

The Khan Academy, by providing free, world-class educations to anyone with access to the Internet, truly highlights the power of technology to educate our planet.

With electronic devices growing increasingly cheap and powerful, a fully-connected global population could be feasible within a decade or two. Free, universally accessible, world-class educations would do a lot to level humankind’s playing field.

More importantly, access to the net’s infinitely expanding knowledge base can help the world’s needy find ways to help themselves. The earth’s poorest, when given access to information, can learn new irrigation techniques, find out how to use the sun to make drinking water, or even locate instructions to generate one’s own electricity.

Technology is opening new doors for us all the time and empowering us as a species. Pretty soon, we’ll have a world where no one is starving, and no child dies from easily preventable diseases. This will be fantastic, since each step towards ending extreme poverty brings us that much closer to realizing world peace.

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Corporations Are Stealing From Us

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Question: What do corporations do when we leave them unchecked?

Answer: They subtly manipulate the system in ways barely comprehensible to us, with the end result being our money lining their pockets.

Corporations have countless lawyers and lobbyists tirelessly working in their favor, rigging the economy and laws in ways that ultimately cheat the general public out of more and more money and power.

In George Monbiot’s latest article, he breaks down the intricate details of what could be “the biggest and crudest corporate tax cut in living memory”. Here’s some highlights from his piece:

If you’ve heard nothing of it, you’re in good company. The obscure adjustments the government is planning to the tax acts of 1988 and 2009 have been missed by almost everyone. They are, anyway, almost impossible to understand without expert help. But as soon as you grasp the implications, you realise that a kind of corporate coup d’etat is taking place.

[The UK Prime Minister David Cameron] has quietly been plotting with banks and businesses to engineer the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle to the ultra-rich that this country has seen in a century.

So how did this happen? You don’t have to look far to find out. Almost all the members of the seven committees the government set up “to provide strategic oversight of the development of corporate tax policy” are corporate executives [from major corporations and banks].

Our political system protects and enriches a fantastically-wealthy elite, much of whose money is, as a result of their interesting tax and transfer arrangements, effectively stolen from poorer countries and poorer citizens of their own countries.

Governments ensure that we are thrown enough scraps to keep us quiet, while the ultra-rich get on with the serious business of looting the global economy and crushing attempts to hold them to account.

Sure, the methodology used by corporations can be subtle and complex, but the solution to corporate power grabs is quite simple: we need to make our collective voice louder than those of the corporations.

The power and influence of these billion dollar corporate empires will prove to be no match for the cooperative efforts from large groups of energized and motivated people.

We will take the power back!

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Comedian Louis C.K. Kills People With His Car

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

Just one of the brilliant things said by Louis C.K.:

“I drive an Infiniti. That’s really evil. There are people who just starve to death – that’s all they ever did. There’s people who are like, born and they go ‘Uh, I’m hungry’ then they just die, and that’s all they ever got to do. Meanwhile I’m driving in my car [kicking back music blaring] having a great time, and I sleep like a baby.

It’s totally my fault, ’cause I could trade my Infiniti for a [less luxurious] car… and I’d get back like $20,000. And I could save hundreds of people from dying of starvation with that money. And everyday I don’t do it. Everyday I make them die with my car.”

While no one should really believe he’s killing people with his car, Louis’ joke does reveal an underlying truth. Even though we have the means to prevent it, millions of people starve to death every year.

Unlike Louis C.K.’s solution, helping the world’s poorest doesn’t mean we have to sell our possessions and live in poverty beside them (although it wouldn’t hurt for us to moderate our consumption levels). No, we can keep our high standard of living and still help out the world’s poorest.

The real poor in the world – not the moderately poor we see in the streets around us – but rather those who live in extreme poverty, they don’t need money so much as they need opportunities. A hand up, not a hand out, to become empowered and able to help themselves and their own communities climb out of poverty.

Sometimes, this hand up comes in the form of teaching new techniques or sharing new technology. Other times, it’s a matter of empowering the population as a whole so they can demand more from the establishment.

And no, eradicating extreme poverty is not too hard to do. Extreme poverty has been consistently declining for years, and this struggle will keep getting easier to fight. We’re expanding our knowledge base and developing new tools all the time. Plus, as our world keeps getting better, more people rise to a position were they can help out those in need.

Don’t let pessimism dominate your thoughts when it comes to humankind’s future. Great things await us all!

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If this was only thousands, just imagine millions

Friday, December 10th, 2010

The initial backlash over CableGate seems to be waning, for now. With Wikileaks having released just a tiny fraction – less than one percent –  from the pile of classified cables, who knows what other skeletons will be unearthed or how the public will react.

Transparency is such a scary thing to the establishment. Well, to our current establishment, anyway.

See, so many wrongs of our world are allowed to persist because they can hide in the dark. Corruption and injustice don’t last long once exposed. And, as Wikileaks has shown us, we are gaining the means to shine a beacon into every corner of the status quo.

Take, for example, the distribution of wealth in our world. The cumulative wealth and power from our entire species is allowed to concentrate in the hands of so few at the top while the bottom 20% of the population is left to starve. Something as scandalous as this can only persist in the shadows. No one would stand for such a warped system were it brought under the global spotlight for all to see.

And this is just one (albeit a big one) of the injustices we are likely to abolish as our world becomes increasingly self-aware. The collective consciousness of the world’s people – the hivemind – is growing more and more in tune every day. As this happens, so too do we become more empowered as a species. Recent actions of Anonymous et. al only offer a glimpse of the real forces we are unleashing.

The Wikileaks cyberactivists number in the thousands. Imagine what will happen when there are millions of protesters acting in unison. And not just in cyberspace, either. In the real world, working like huge flash mobs, fighting injustice wherever it rears its ugly head.

Historically, when humans have worked collectively, we’ve been able to move mountains. Soon, as we coordinate our efforts on the global scale, we will be able to restructure the entire world.

Vive La Revolution!



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Tax Breaks for the People Who’ve Been Gaining the Most – The Super Rich

Monday, December 6th, 2010

In the US and all around the world, the wealthy have been getting richer while the middle and lower classes have gotten poorer. This trend has been happening for decades now.

Today it was decided: Americans will face several more years of the same trend thanks to the Senate passing more tax cuts for the very rich.

This is just ridiculous! Absolutely absurd!

There are strong ties between an empowered population and distribution of wealth. As the will of the people is increasingly heard, wealth gets more evenly distributed amongst the entire population. The more the people are silenced, the more wealth can concentrate into the hands of the few.

These latest tax cuts should be a wake up call for Americans and the world.

We’ve been too quiet for too long.

We cannot wait for our political leaders to take action. In the US, for example, both sides – Democrats and Republicans – share too much of the same agenda to effect real change. The same is true for most governments around the world.

We cannot wait for the talking heads in the mainstream news media to alert us to the growing threat. Most often the news media are part of the problem! The revolution is not likely to be televised. The biggest media corporations have too much vested interest in perpetuating the status quo.

If you value your freedom, you need to take action. Blog, tweet, Facebook, make videos, write or call your politicians, take to the streets in protest. Let your voice be heard.

The fate of a free humanity could very well be decided over the course of the next few years.

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Seeing how it was the US Senate that passed the latest bill, here’s a clip of a former Senator Huey P. Long offering a sentiment we don’t hear enough of in the political spectrum.

How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what’s intended for 9/10th of the people to eat? The only way to be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub that he ain’t got no business with! – Huey P. Long

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