4.0 out of 5 stars Bleak – a Righteous Personal Effort,March 3, 2012
I am a huge fan of photographic books, and I find this one to be very worthwhile, but not quite a five star offering because it does not have quite the diversity — or reading clarity — that I would have liked.
Never-the-less, it is a vital contribution to the literature on Afghanistan, and what does come out from the book, a mix of photographs by one man and short novella stories by a number of invited authors, is the bleakness of what has been wrought in Afghanistan, and most especially, the human toll in “collateral damage” of children and men (mostly) who have lost one leg and all too often both legs to land mines.
I now realize that neither governments nor corporations are “fixed” obstacles. In a world of constantly changing information, it is impossible for any structured organization to dominate a larger network—a hybrid network. Such broad, flexible governance without governments being “in charge” is where we need to go.[1] The objective: to implement transparency, truth, and trust across all boundaries.
David Weinberger, cited earlier,[2] is a genius on this point: not only can no one person or even one organization or one country “know” what they need to know to make an informed decision, but if they fail to understand, respect, and “jack in” to the knowledge network with full transparency as the method and truth as the objective, they will make very bad decisions. Of course this does not address the issue of corruption, and the raw fact that most governments and corporations could care less about objective truths, seeking instead to optimize profits for the few at the expense of the many, but their ignorance is our advantage. That is why We the People must recommit ourselves to Open-Source Everything, its underpinnings (transparency and truth), and its outcome: trust you can bank on without a bank.
I will say that again in a different way: the persistent unethical and ignorant emphasis on secrecy and on making decisions for partisan advantage or to pay off campaign contributors and select insiders is not sustainable. We the People have an opportunity to embrace this manifesto of Open-Source Everything and bury “rule by secrecy.” This is this is why I am optimistic about the future.
New, open-source, populist-based, information-era strategies will also serve our increasingly complex lives better in future situations of crisis such as natural disaster, war, and social disintegration. Collapse is cultural, systemic, a failure of process, not of any discrete event, institution, or location. The industrial-era model of command and control cannot adequately process information for a complex system, but an information-era model of distributed localized resilience can.
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Collaboration and consensus is the Epoch B way, but from the philanthropic foundations to the non-governmental organizations to all others, there is still a dearth of information-sharing that is both expensive and incapacitating. While the United Nations has committed itself to coherence, with the meme of “Deliver As One,” they do not have the intelligence—or the integrity—to actually do that. Similarly, governments talk of “whole of government” operations, and corporations of “matrixed management,” but these also fail the intelligence and integrity tests.
Much has been written about how mass collaboration—alternatively called Collective Intelligence, Smart Mobs, Wisdom of the Crowds, Army of Davids[3]—has not been possible in complex situations in the past because the industrial era introduced (imposed) a cumulative series of information pathologies that deprived the group of access to all relevant information, while favoring an elite few with privileged access that allowed them to concentrate both power and wealth. In the public domain, many artificial—that is to say, contrived—obstacles to informing the public emerged in the past century, such as the following, each a book title:
Fog Facts.[4] These are facts that are “known” to some and publicly accessible but only if you know where to look. The mainstream media “blacks out” this knowledge. Modern examples include U.S. government support for dictators and U.S. government tolerance of massive fraud, waste, and abuse in return for fractional campaign contributions to presidential and legislative candidates who strive to remain in office “at any cost.”
Forbidden Knowledge.[5] This includes both knowledge forbidden for public consumption by governments (e.g. restrictions on pornography) as well as corporations (e.g. concealment of known pathologies such as the effect of tobacco on cancer, or toxins associated with household goods) and religions (the triumph of dogma over consciousness).
Lost History.[6] The most prominent modern example is the deliberate classification as secret of clandestine and covert operations by the U.S. government such that a modern history of foreign relations cannot be written—this is the documented complaint of the historians responsible for this task on behalf of the Department of State.[7] The role of the Central Intelligence Agency in the introduction of massive amounts of cocaine into the USA under the pretext of supporting “strategic” operations “at any cost” is especially frightening to anyone upholding the Constitution.[8]
Manufacturing Consent.[9] Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman first discussed this aspect of a modern democracy, and now, decades later, their work has been updated by Sheldon Wolin in his book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.[10] Corporations now “own” not just the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government, but the judiciary as well, with the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United being the more reprehensible evidence of the corruption of the highest court in the nation.
Missing Information.[11] Bill McKibben did something never done before—he recorded all the television channels being broadcast in his area in one twenty-four-hour period, and watched them all over the course of time. He then spent twenty-four hours alone in the wilderness. Comparing the two experiences, he produced a truly brilliant exposition of how much “missing information” there is in our lives.
Propaganda.[12]Propaganda, put most simply, is the development of manipulated (i.e., not truthful) information and the delivery of that information to an audience in such a way as to impress upon them views and beliefs that are not rooted in fact or deliberative dialog. Propaganda, which includes advertising that itself fosters an appreciation for planned obsolescence, waste, and toxic foods and goods, is the antithesis of transparency, truth, and trust.
Rule by Secrecy.[13] As we have all now realized, and as Occupy is now confronting on Wall Street and around the world, secret banking networks, not governments, have been making decisions about war and peace, poverty and prosperity. It is banks that profit most from wars, followed by the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex, and We the People that suffer most. Government secrecy enables massive lies—such as the 935 documented lies[14] delivered by Dick Cheney that took us into a multi-trillion dollar losing war in Iraq[15]—and this is one reason why I have committed the balance of my life to Open-Source Everything: transparency, truth, and trust are the true currency for human transactions, and everything else is a cancer.
Weapons of Mass Deception.[16]Whereas Rule by Secrecy is about secret cabals making decisions on the truth as they know it, Weapons of Mass Deception are about blatant lies—many of them allowed to go unchallenged by the media, think tanks, university specialists, and all others who should be thinking in the public interest but instead choose to “go along” out of a selfish and unethical dependency on funding from the government doing the lying. A form of mass hysteria is achieved, one best illuminated by the manner in which the three singers of the band Dixie Chicks , were treated when they publicly protested and questioned the veracity of the White House.[17] Now, years later, as with Jane Fonda on Viet-Nam, we know that the White House was committing treason, and the Dixie Chicks were both ethical and correct in their protestations. Mass hysteria – and mainstream media corruption – prevented the broader public from recognizing the truth at the time.
Weapons of Mass Instruction.[18]Underlying the ability of a treasonous White House and a complicit Congress (which must abdicate its Article 1 responsibilities when going along with known lies to permit an undeclared war at great cost) is a national educational system that is at best mediocre and at worst a crime against humanity. We are imposing on children of the Internet era—digital natives—an industrial-era system that is mindless: rote learning of old knowledge, sitting silent for hours on end, listening to lectures best left silent and so easily replaced by more vibrant multimedia communications. Teachers and the educational stakeholders who are complicit in the criminally negligent continuation of a retarded educational system are a foundation for an uninformed, unengaged public.[19]
[1] Two useful books on this concept—but devoid of understanding of collective intelligence and advances being made in information sharing and analysis technologies, are Wolfgang Reinicke and Michael Armacost, Global Public Policy: Government Without Government (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), and Wolfgang Reinicke et al, Critical Choices: The United Nations, Networks, and the Future of Global Governance (Ottawa, ON: IDRC Books, 2000). I did not realize, until searching for the above two books, that James Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, Government without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), was an earlier book on this topic. At a practical level, the best book I have found to date on actually “doing” global governance “around” government, is Ken Conca, Governing Water: Contentious Transnational Politics and Global Institution Building (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005).
[17] During a London concert ten days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, lead vocalist Maines said “we don't want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States (George W. Bush) is from Texas”. The statement offended many Americans, who thought it rude and unpatriotic, and the ensuing controversy cost the band half of their concert audience attendance in the United States. The incident negatively affected their career and led to accusations of the three women being “un-American”, as well as hate mail, death threats, and the public destruction of their albums in protest. Source: Wikipedia/Dixie Chicks citing film “Shut up and Sing,” and “Dixie Chicks Shut Up and Sing in Toronto,” MSNBC, seen 10 Aug 2006.
[19]Cf. Karen De Coster, “How the Public Schools Keep Your Child a Prisoner of the State,” LouRockwell.com, 31 January 2012; and also “19 Crazy Things That School Children Are Being Arrested For In America,” endoftheamericandream.com, undated.
Real-time information channels like Twitter, Facebook and Google have created cascades of information that are becoming increasingly challenging to navigate. “Smart-filters” alone are not the solution since they won’t necessarily help us determine the quality and trustworthiness of the information we receive. I’ve been studying this challenge ever since the idea behind SwiftRiver first emerged several years ago now.
I was thus thrilled to come across a short paper on “Trails of Trustworthiness in Real-Time Streams” which describes a start-up project that aims to provide users with a “system that can maintain trails of trustworthiness propagated through real-time information channels,” which will “enable its educated users to evaluate its provenance, its credibility and the independence of the multiple sources that may provide this information.” The authors, Panagiotis Metaxas and Eni Mustafaraj, kindly cite my paper on “Information Forensics” and also reference SwiftRiver in their conclusion.
LAST PARAGRAPH BROUGHT FORWARD: A copy of the paper is available here (PDF). I hope to meet the authors at the Berkman Center’s “Truth in Digital Media Symposium” and highly recommend the wiki they’ve put together with additional resources. I’ve added the majority of my research on verification of crowdsourced information to that wiki, such as my 20-page study on “Information Forensics: Five Case Studies on How to Verify Crowdsourced Information from Social Media.”
Phi Beta Iota: The concept of trust reputations was discussed at Hackers in Silicon Valley in 1994. Computers deliver information to the lowest common denominator. Humans — human brains and human trust — remain the essence of humanity.
Below is EarthAction's monthly current Action Alert on global environment, peace, and justice issues. This one is most important, and timely action is needed.
Despite the international ban on the trade of Elephant Ivory in 1989, it is estimated that every year 38,000 elephants are killed for ivory sales on the black market. Poachers sell raw ivory for around $20 per pound. Most of this ivory eventually makes its way to China, where it is resold at $700 per pound‹or more.
This means that a single tusk from a full-grown bull elephant can fetch upwards of $50,000 on the black market. The poaching of elephants for their ivory tusks requires the death of some of the most beautiful and endangered animals on our planet. Unless action is taken soon, many of the gains made in recent decades to protect the great elephants of Africa may be undone.
In 1989 elephants were initially listed as an Appendix 1 species by CITES (the Convention on International Trade In Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna), banning any and all trade of ivory. In 1997 they were downgraded to an Appendix 2 species, allowing the trade of ivory with regulation. Many nations do not have the capacity to strictly monitor the flow of ivory through their borders, nor are measures in place to effectively monitor the global ivory trade. Disguising illegal ivory as a legal product requires only an artificial aging process.
In feudal times, you could be put to death if you didn't kneel when the carriages of the nobility passed by. This is a step in that direction (although very few people care). ‘
I'm not that excited to write about this type of things. Seems like more of a chore than something I want to do. Why do I write about it? It's another milestone on the decline of the US that is worth highlighting for future historians.
I can see these future historians now: pouring over the output from software systems that cull trends out massive social media repositories. Some will be shaking their heads, asking themselves: what were those numbskulls in the early 21st Century thinking about when their governments began to hollow out? Why were they so passive as things began to fall apart?
Essentially, it makes it a federal offense to be anywhere near, from being in the area or in the same building, somebody protected by the secret service. That's from the President to candidates for political office (Romney or Santorum) to senior government officials to foreign dignitaries (G20). In other words, lots and lots of people.
While being sold as a way to close a loophole in the current law regarding White House security, it is actually much more than that. It changed one word that made a world of difference. What's the difference?
To be arrested and imprisoned, all you need to do is be the same building or area around a person that has secret service protection. You don't even need to know they are there to be arrested and imprisoned. If you are merely walking by the area, you can be legally jailed for one year. If you are carrying something that can be seen as a weapon (legally or not), that imprisonment can be extended to ten years.
In short, if you are within the same building or neighborhood as a political or foreign personage without their expressed permission, you can be imprisoned.
“Trust us” or “they are good people” isn't a valid answer to this critique. If a new power can be abused legally, it will eventually be abused. Very simple tautology.
Brought forward from 22 December 2011 because of mention of Vice Presidential option for Mitt Romney (or Jeb Bush if the brokered convention takes place as many have suggested is planned).
Phi Beta Iota: Three observations must be made here. The first is that that intelligence was not faulty — Charlie Allen got it right with line crossers and the debriefing of the defecting son-in-law. George Tenet prostituted his office and betrayed the public trust. The second is that the book does not do justice to Dick Cheney and his shadow government behind the President's back. Finally, the third observation, that no secretary of state in recent memory seems to have a strategic analytic model or the ability to actually address the ten high-level threats to humanity. They are, instead, in the immortal words of Madeline Albright (we do not make this stuff up), “a gerbil on a wheel.” We can do better. A good start would be a foreign policy of peace, commerce, and friendship, a rejection of secret agendas, and a pursuit of a prosperous world at peace — a world that works for all. Anything less is, in our collective view, a betrayal of the public trust.
