The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
New Institutions as the Bulwark Against the Corporate-Political State from Kevin Rollins on Vimeo.
Michael Ostrolenk and Kevin Rollins discuss the role of new media, both social media like facebook and twitter, as well as niche magazines. Ostrolenk says that such forums help new ideas because they “remove barriers to entry and support [new idea] generation.
This is Robert Steele's core phrase, apart from the two Latin mottos (at end).
“The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.”
Citation (2 options):
Robert Steele, “About” at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, 4 July 2010.
Robert Steele, “Cyber-Command or IO 21,” US Army Information Operations Conference, 6 April 2011.
It was inspired by Herman Daly and other champions of “true cost” and ecological economics. Also influencial were these two quotes as found on the About page of Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.
Fedor Dostoevsky: A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else.
Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York): When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.
Latin mottos
E Veritate Potens. From Truth We (the People) Are Made Powerful. Created for OSS.Net, Inc.
Connexum Sumus Unum. Connected, We Are One. Created for Earth Intelligence Network, 501c3.
Still need a Latin scholar to certify the new one (Connexum…)
The last time the price of oil topped $100 a barrel for an extended period, we ended up in a global financial meltdown. Is this time any different?
Not much.
All of the excessively financial leverage and fraudelent derivative wealth we had during the last melt down is still in place. Total debt to GDP levels in the US are about the same (370% of GDP or so). No reforms were made on Wall Street. Nobody at fault for the fraud that led to the last melt down went to jail, so behaviors haven't changed.
We're worse off than before. Read rest of article…
This is classic Tainter (the excellent anthropoligist/historian). He posited that complex societies only collapse when the costs of basic inputs increase at the same time the returns on investments in complex institutions/etc. turn negative. So, with oil going up again, we are seeing basic input costs rise. It's also clear that our twin overheads Government and Global Finance are well past the point they delivered positive returns for additional complexity. Worse, they are colluding, via cronyism, to prevent any meaningful changes.
Review: The Collapse of Complex Societies
The discussion of corruption–and the urgency of reasserting integrity–permeates this website.
Here are a general comment and a few links.
General comment: Corruption consists of a lack of integrity, which in turn is not just about dishonesty, but about a failure to achieve transparency, truth, trust, and accurate feedback loops. The cost of corruption, calculated in terms of waste, is at least 50% and could be as high as 75%. In the US, on Capitol Hill, the known kick-back for earmarks seen to allocation is 2-5%. In fairness to the lobbyists, they are not offering the money, they are being shaken down by Senators and Representatives. It is the lack of integrity in government that makes the lack of integrity in the private sector so pervasive. What we do know is in the first two links. The first documents health waste, the second the cost of peace versus war (one third).
2010 Reference: HEALTH–The Price of Excess (PWC)
Graphic: Medard Gabel’s Cost of Peace versus War
Continue reading “Search: cost of corruption + Corruption RECAP”
Below are two opinion pieces.
The first is “A revolution against neoliberalism” by Abu Atris, it appeared in Al Jazeera on 24 Feb. The second is “Of the 1%, by the 1%, and for the 1%” by Joseph Stiglitz. One is about the Arab Revolt in Egypt and the other is about income inequality in the United States … they raise stunningly similar — and very disturbing — themes when compared to each other. I urge readers to read each carefully and think about the likenesses and differences between them.
EXHIBIT A
A revolution against neoliberalism?
If rebellion results in a retrenchment of neoliberalism, millions will feel cheated.
‘Abu Atris,’ Aljazeera, 24 February 2011
EXHIBIT B
Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%
Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.
By Joseph E. Stiglitz, Vanity Fair, May 2011
Hexidecimally Lingual: Websites Must Speak 16 Languages to Go Global
New data from research firm Common Sense Advisory suggests that if your brand is to achieve truly global reach in our online world, your website must “speak” more than 16 languages.
Common Sense Advisory publishes reports that are designed to help its clients reach a more global audience, so you could be forgiven for thinking it's obvious the firm would stress a statistic that promotes its own services–but actually, if you read through the company's thinking it all makes good sense. As part of its most recent report dubbed “The Top Scoring Global Websites,” CSA looked at a long list of global brand's websites and rated them for a wide range of accessibility scores, including poly-lingual skills.
The fact that 16 languages is recommended to have the most influential global web presence will come as quite a shock for many global brands who just tackle the top few of the world's most spoken languages (in order of number of speakers it goes Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi-Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, and Russian) and rely on English being the lingua franca of the Web; the figure will keep growing, too, as Internet penetration reaches more countries around the world. CSA's math suggests that sites that use 11 languages can only reach 80% of the world, and monolingual sites typically capture just 25% of the world's Net users.
Using the 20 different metrics in its analysis (including user experience, meta-navigation, and more) CSA scored Google the highest, with a total score of 9.56 out of 10. Facebook came second with 9.53 and YouTube third with 9.51. Wikipedia scored 9.43, and Samsung and Blackberry weren't far behind, with scores of 9.11 and 9.10.
