Scientists discover that the endangered California Condor is capable of producing offspring without the presence of male condors, prompting troubling questions for the future. A new AI program crowdsourcing ethical quandaries provides surprising answers to humans. Facebook promises to close down its facial recognition system, deleting billions of faceprints. All this and more in this week's Strange News.
In the second part of our deep dive into the assassination of John F. Kennedy, we examine some of the more plausible theories of what really happened on that fateful day in 1963.
Anne asks for more information about the weird world of memetic warfare. Voodoo shares a strange story about a recurring dream that just might have predicted some events in the waking world. Bronze Ranked Boomer wonders about the efficacy of blue-blocking cosmetics. All this and more in this week's Listener Mail.
Baratunde learns more about experiments in digital democracy. He speaks with Pia Mancini, cofounder of Open Collective, a platform empowering collectives and mutual aid groups with new transparent, decentralized financial tools that make local grassroots efforts more feasible than ever. It is a powerful example of how the use of technology can change the power dynamics and help people citizen together where they live and across the globe.
Guest: Pia Mancini
Bio: Democracy activist, open source sustainer, co-founder & CEO at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation.
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We are grateful to Pia for joining us! Follow her @piamancini on Twitter, or find more of her work at Opencollective.org.
ACTIONS
PERSONALLY REFLECT
Cultivate Optimism
Take a moment to reflect on when you feel most positive, most optimistic in your week? What are you doing, who are you around, what media/info sources are you consuming? Work on adding more of these elements to your weekly routines. The world needs more clear-eyed optimists for us to reach our collective potential. It’s hard to citizen when you’re only cynical.
BECOME INFORMED
Who in your life needs Open Collective
Take a moment to wrap your mind around this NEW community infrastructure that is truly revolutionizing the way local initiatives and groups work together around the world. We bet you know of a local project or informal group that could benefit from it! Take the time to learn more https://opencollective.com/. Also check out Pia’s TED talk, How To Upgrade Democracy for the Internet Era, for more about her beliefs and journey.
PUBLICLY PARTICIPATE
Join in with other locals
Support open-source and move away from private mega-malls like Facebook by adopting the Signal app, an open source, end-to-end encrypted, not-for-profit messaging platform. And if you use open source to build the product that is making you money, give back to open source, because open source is not free. It was paid for by someone else's time. So make sure you give back to the developers.
Genocide expert Arnesa Kustura joins us to discuss how a relatively prosperous multi-ethnic socialist state was destroyed by ethno-nationalists and how their rampant propaganda allowed them to carry out a genocide while Europe cheered.
Almost 60 years have passed since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. A 1992 law mandated all records of the assassination be made public. In 2017, many documents were released — but not all of them. What doesn’t the government want us to know about JFK’s death?