Seven years ago Tom Atlee, our mentor on collective intelligence and community self-organization for resilience and sustainability, began focusing on “ways of communicating.” Responding to a recent query from us about alternatives to partisan politics or dictatorships, he offered up the below links, each of which has many other links, as food for reflection.
Dear Colleagues for Human Rights and Environmental Justice,
The Wixárika (Huichol) people of Mexico are calling for international support to protect their sacred lands from a Canadian mining company. Please join Cultural Survival in sending urgent emails, faxes, or letters to Mexican government officials.
Seventy percent of First Majestic Silver Corporation's concessions at Real de Catorce (San Luis Potosí state) lie within the Wirikuta Cultural and Ecological Reserve. Recognized as a potential UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Wirikuta Reserve was created to protect the Wixárika people's most sacred sites and the rare, fragile ecosystem of the Real de Catorce desert, where the diversity of cactus species is the highest in the world. Mining would consume enormous amounts of water in this arid region, pollute the groundwater with heavy metals including cyanide, impact the tourism-based economy of the picturesque Real de Catorce town, affect endangered bird species and wildlife habitats, and pose a high risk to human health.
For more information, please see our action alert here and www.wixarika.org. The Wixárika traditional authorities' proclamation against mining in the Wirikuta Cultural and Ecological Reserves is posted here in English and here in Spanish.
Special report: In the last of his series from Afghanistan, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad asks Taliban leaders past and present what kind of regime they would run – and whether there is a chance of negotiated peace
The administrator
In the south-eastern city of Khost, the everyday business of the Taliban administration carries on across the street from the fortified, government-run city court and police station.
For the US, the political instability means that the government will remain unwilling to order the Army to undertake operations in the tribal areas anytime soon. The Army opposes such operations which it considers not part of its mission, as waging war against Pakistani citizens and a police chore, not a defense task.
The Gilani government is likely to collapse in 2011. It has become accident prone which means its best efforts to shore up the coalition are unlikely to reduce the instability and might worsen it.
Phi Beta Iota: This is fascinating and has enormous potential from local to global. It is what Amazon SHOULD have been, a means of harnessing the distributed intelligence of authors, reviewers, and readers. Phi Beta Iota was created to meet this need for one collection, cataloging Robert Steele's reading across 98 categories. We are contacting this group to suggest they create Global to Local Citizen Intelligence, Policy, and Budget Councils.
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Commission) was created to examine how the terrorist attacks of September 2001 could have occurred and what could be done to prevent future attacks. Among other things the Commission recommended that there should be a National Intelligence Director who would have “two main areas of responsibility” namely:
1) to oversee intelligence centers on specific subjects affecting national security; and
2) to oversee the national intelligence program and the agencies that contribute to it.
In effect the Commission wished to have a single authority that could that could task and co-ordinate the processes and operations of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). The U.S. Congress was more or less forced to act on this specific recommendation because of public pressure. Thus the position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was created by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.
In April 2005, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, former Ambassador to Iraq, was sworn in as the first DNI. Negroponte was chosen because no qualified candidate from the so-called IC was willing to take the job. In truth, the DNI was forced on the Federal Government by outside forces and began with no support either in the Congress, the Executive Branch, or the so-called IC. Indeed President Bush made it clear that he considered the DNI unnecessary. The position of DNI had responsibility for, but no authority over the IC, had no ready made constituency within the government, and was considered an unnecessary intrusion on intelligence operations by the principal members of the IC.
This English translation of this classic work by Sun Tzu is certainly an excellent one in that in addition to providing the original 13 “Chapters” of the original work it also provides the reader with considerable background that places this work in its proper context. It also provides commentary on specific portions of each chapter by Chinese scholars of Sun Tzu. All in all, the late Samuel B. Griffith has produced one of the more complete and carefully organized versions of, “The Art of War.” Any serious student of this classic work will find Griffith's work an excellent resource.
The written Chinese language is ideographic not phonetic and consists of thousands of pictographic characters whose meanings often depend on how they are arranged and combined into compounds. Further, Chinese doe not employ Western style punctuation so it takes a good deal of skill and knowledge for a Western to know where to break Chinese texts into sentences and paragraphs. Griffith appears to have done an excellent job in translating the Sun Tzu texts into something understandable by an English reader.
