Crowd-Funding is the financial concept. It refers to raising money from individuals, whether one or many, whether small or large amounts. It is the social networking alternative to borrowing money from legalized crime families.
Crowd-Sourcing is the intellectual concept. Too many commentators are confusing this with Crowd-Funding. This refers to the full and open presentation of relevant information to many, and the elicitation from any of the many of good ideas for innovation.
Crowd-Seedingis an emerging concept, centered on the empowerment of individuals with free cell phones and free air time in order to activate them as sources of truthful timely information within their grasp “on the ground.” Combined with near-real-time translation and international crisis mapping, this increases the capacity to create public intelligence from public information by an order of magnitude. See also: Patrick Meier: Crowd-Seeding – This is HUGE Advance
Robert David Steele, opening speaker at HOPE 01 in 1994 and invited back every time since then, will speak about his six week formal campaign as a Reform Party candidate for the presidency in 2012. He communicated with every presidential candidate less Romney and Obama, and will outline what he learned about “the system,” the personalities running for President, and several specific recommendations he has made to Occupy and others about how to reboot the Republic. His campaign website remains live at http://bigbatusa.org.
Saturday Late Night Two-Hour Q&A: SPY IMPROVE: Reality Unfiltered
Day/Time: Saturday, July 14, 2012 – 2359-0200
Location: Dennis (18th floor)
Several HOPES ago Robert Steele started doing separate Q&A sessions, using his knowledge as a former spy, pioneer of Open Source Intelligence, advocate of multinational sense-making, and #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction.At HOPE 8, with help from those who stayed with him, he set what may be the world record for Q&A, eight hours and one minute, from midnight Saturday to 0801 Sunday. This year will be strictly limited to two hours in open session, but the possibility of a round-table thereafter will remain open. All questions welcome. Note to DOHA: no secrets will be revealed — really. Send ears.
The circumstances underlying this manifesto are stark and compelling: We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making. Power was centralized in the hands of increasingly specialized “elites” and “experts” who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted.
In the beginning, there was the commons. Over vast stretches of prehistoric time, tribal cultures evolved in tandem with the natural environment. They did this without creating private property or hierarchical relationships of control and dominance that led to consumption of nature as a resource. Open-source culture provided for community sharing and community development. With the rise of patriarchy, empire, and systems of egoic control and empowerment, this open-source approach to community was destroyed. Over the course of the last centuries, the commons was fenced, and everything from agriculture to water was commoditized without regard to the true cost in non-renewable resources. Human beings, who had spent centuries evolving away from slavery, were re-commoditized by the Industrial Era.
The corruption of the commons led to the loss of integrity between and among individuals, organizations, and community. Artificial paradises made up of objects and possessions were substituted for true community based on authentic heart-to-heart relationships. Secular corruption is made possible by information asymmetries between those in power and the public. In the absence of transparency, truth, and trust, wealth is concentrated and waste is rampant.
We, Homo sapiens, are defined by what we know in the context of the Cosmos and the Earth — larger Whole Systems.
For six weeks in early 2012 I ran for the office of President of the United States of America. I was accepted by the Reform Party (one of six accredited national parties completely shut out of the political process in the US), was listed at Politics1, participated in a WikiNews interview and got my views posted at On the Issues. I created We the People Reform Coalition, and I wrote letters to every single candidate for President including Rocky Anderson and Buddy Roemer, throwing in Dennis Kucinich for grins. This is my report — there are no winners.
Preamble
I was shocked into paying attention by Al Gore's playing dead in 2000 (despite Greg Palast outing the Bush family scheme to disenfranchise 50,000 people of color, doing so three months in advance of election day). I was radicalized by 9/11 — a clear false-flag operation in which elements of our own government were complicit — and infuriated with the ease by which this nation was taken to war on the strength of 935 now-documented lies — lies that no serving officer — including Colin Powell — was willing to confront. Then I lost everything in the 2008 economic crash described so well by Matt Taibbi in GRIFTOPIA — it took two years for my company to go out of business — and along came Occupy. Occupy failed. This is their story and mine. If this story moves you, I believe we have 90 days from today to take seven steps that can bury the two-party tyranny and install an honest coalition government.
The National Security Agency (NSA) mega-data center, combined with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) special relationship with Google, and the federalization of local police using Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funds to pay for monitoring both the locations and the conversations of anyone they wish — without a warrant –suggest that the government of the United States of America (USA)-from local to national-is no longer in friendly hands.
As a professional intelligence officer and a retired Marine Corps officer, I am deeply offended, personally threatened, and patriotically alarmed. Evil has triumphed across the United States of America. Every single institution — from academies to civil society to commerce to the government and law enforcement at all levels, the media, the out of control military-industrial complex, and the bottom-feeding non-governmental and non-profit organizations that suck at the federal government tits gorged with printed money — has failed to respect the Constitution. There is neither intelligence nor integrity at the highest levels of all of our institutions.
2012 is a year of confrontation and convergence. On the confrontation side, we have a federal government that dismisses the Constitution across all three branches — a Court that believes corporations are citizens and strip-searches for parking tickets are “okay”; a Congress that abdicates its Article 1 responsibilities, instead serving as foot-soldiers to the corrupt two-party tyranny that excludes the majority from the ballot and the vote; and an Executive that borrows a trillion a year in our name, wastes two trillion a year, and has claimed the right to kill US citizens without due process, and to lie to the Courts when it deems it necessary for “national security.”
