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What's a slogan for (banal on purpose)

At MWC, Claes Magnusson saw the following slogans on 25 different high tech booths (companies like IBM, HP, etc.)

Built Around People, Shaping Tomorrow With You, Leading A Smarter Planet, Your Messages Shape Our Future, Now What?, The Power Of Now, Today Changes, Power To You, Powering The Smartphones Of Tomorrow, Just Add Friends, Connecting the world enabling value, Creating experiences TOGETHER, Delivering Tomorrow's Experiences Today, No Longer Just An Idea, Bringing You Closer, Smart Devices, Simple World , Innovation Delivered, Simply Your Solution, The Future Changes Everyday, Take Charge Of Profits, Simply Different, Deploy Everywhere, There Is Here, Discover What's Possible, and No Hidden Surprises

What are they for? Do they mean anything at all?

I think the big company corporate slogan is like heavy paper on the annual report, white space on the billboard and a suit on the sales rep. It's a signal, a sign that the company is big, that it's able to waste time dreaming this stuff up and waste money yelling about it. No one actually reads the slogan (at Yoyodyne, the internet company I founded in 1992, our stolen slogan was, “Where the future begins tomorrow.” It was written on our business cards and everything. I don't think 1 person in a 100 commented on it).

Not everything you do actually gets a response. In fact, most of it doesn't. But each effort is a tiny brick in the wall of perception, even when it appears to be dumb and even senseless.

Phi Beta Iota: The working slogan for Earth Intelligence Network (E Veritate Potens–From Truth We the People Are Empowered) is now joined by a new slogan (needs scholarly checking) that focuses on Phase I of Revolution 2.0:

Conexa Sunt Unum (Connected We Are One)

Although the question has been asked often, we did not understand it ourselves until we saw the US Government ignore the Somali pirates despite a coherent, unclassified, and very explicit report done for CENTCOM J-2 Plans in 2005.  In 2007 both Special Forces and US Navy Irregular Warfare were asked why they had ignored the “clear and present” danger, and the answer was stunning identical from both:  “Not an expensive enough problem.”

In our view, the open source concept got squelched, first by MITRE and CIA, then across the board as others rushed to spend money on false, fraudulent “butts in seats” OSINT, because it directly threatened the very expensive and very dysfunctional US secret intelligence community and US defense industrial complex.  These people are not stupid–they are just unwitting or unethical or both.  Their focus is profit (or promotion) at any expense to the public, not on the public interest.  They give up their souls for a meal ticket and go through the motions because no one is holding them accountable.

Had there been proper attention to OSINT since the Aspin-Brown Commission recommended it be a “top priority” for DCI attention and funding in 1996; since  Boyd Sutton's Global Coverage report was blown off by George Tenet (“not an expensive enough solution”) in 1997, since the 9-11 Commission recommended an Open Source Agency in its 2004 Report, by now we would be well on our way to eradicating the ten high-level threats to humanity, eliminating the 50% of the US federal budget that is fraud, waste, and abuse; eliminating all 44 dictators, and empowering/educating the five billion poor “one cell call at a time” while also unscrewing the secret world by providing a comparative benchmark for creating faster, better, cheaper decision support for Whole of Government and multinational hybrid coalitions, and empowering the US public with the power that knowledge gives…

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