The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
March 25, 2011
Dear friends,
So much is happening under the guise of “the budget crisis” that I thought it might be useful to deconstruct this issue a bit.
Phi Beta Iota: Tom has produced a relatively long and meticulously documented essay
But Nobody Pays That
G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether
The New York Times, March 24, 2011
General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year
in 2010.
The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1
billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.
Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2
billion.
Phi Beta Iota: This is an atrocity, a crime against humanity. Legalized crime in the US has reached heights not seen in modern history. There is no social contract between the government and those puportedlyostensibly governed. GRIFTOPIA meets Empire of Illusion. The systemic corruption of America–the Paradigms of Failure–is daunting to those who strive to serve the public interest. Integrity–one word–absent across the board. Why? Because they can get away with it.
Phi Beta Iota: This is interesting at multiple levels. It demonstrates that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) endeavor to achieve common solutions is not only not working, but does not properly integrate industry. It demonstrates that Cyber-Command is off on its own warpath, and not thinking deeply about the issues that this White Paper raises. Finally, it is a perfect display of the tail end of Industrial Era thinking, assuming that top down coordination of anything is going to be effective in a bottom-up world. The Autonomous Internet is NOT something these people are even aware of….
OpenBSC is worth a close look.
OpenBSC is the current name for a software program that started with the name bs11-abis.
What is OpenBSC
It is a BSC (Base Station Controller) side implementation of the A-bis protocol, as implemented in the GSM Technical Specification 08.5x and 12.21. It implements a minimal subset of the BSC, MSC and HLR. It does not implement ant of the interfaces (like the A and B interfaces) between the higher-order GSM network components.
The goal of the project is to
We are not primarily interested in
Phi Beta Iota: We have learned that the OpenBTS pioneers are working with and admire OpenBSC–the latter has different goals and the architecture is traditional.
OpenBTS at Burning Man: Best Full Story
Time does not permit the detailed study a topic of this importance merits (it would be an excellent PhD project for a bi-lingual Japanese-English speaking PhD candidate) but here is what we do know:
1. The risks were known.
2. A tsunami risk was specificially brought up and dismissed at a critical juncture.
3. There was no “what if” planning or critical supply chain planning for contaminated water and food.
We speculate that an intense look at the information terrain surrounded Japan's nuclear and global warming and related environmental degradation and energy-commercial competitiveness discussions will yield an almost perfect understanding of where the data asymmetries and information pathologies were that allowed Industrial Era decision systems (inherently secret and corrupt) to ignore open source information on risk.
This is also a good place to study how disasters turn into catastrophes instead of remaining disasters, for lack of the proper political-legal, socio-economic, and ideo-cultural mindsets.
Fifty years from today, the catastrophe in Japan may be regarded as the moment of awakening for the global mind.
2012 is a year of awakening, and a year of convergence. Inspired by two books by Capt Doug Johnston, USN (Ret), Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft (1995) and Faith-Based Diplomacy–Trumping Realpolitik (2003), our collective concept of public intelligence has treated faith as essential and integral to the advanced Information Operations (IO) Cube.
Ref A: Albert Einstein Four Essays on Religion and Science (1930-1948)
Phi Beta Iota: Integrity is the core concept. religions that demand absolute obedience to dogma are just as bad as sciences that fabricate results, or politicians that lie. Just as we have found that there is no conflict between the intelligence profession and the craft of politics provided they both keep their integrity, so also do we believe it possible for religions and the sciences to be brought together by the humanities (philosophy et al) in order to achieve integral consciousness as individuals, as communities, and as a species.
Selected Books on Religion & Science, Religion & Philosophy
Continue reading “Reference: Religion, Science, & Philosophy”
emergent by design
10 Projects Moving Us Towards a Superfluid Economy
March 22, 2011
What is the future of money? And not just money, but currencies in general – from virtual currencies to timebanks to social currencies based around trust, identity, reputation, expertise and relationships. And not just currencies, a.k.a. tools that are supposed to represent a unit of measurement in order to transact, but also value exchange in general and the social behaviors that precede them.
So we’re really talking about The Superfluid Economy, the set of tools and behaviors that are developing to make economic exchange, transactions, payments, commerce, distributed collaboration, resource allocation, and social enterprise formation as frictionless and fluid as possible.
To kick off the conversation, I pulled up 10 projects that are innovating in this space which are either developing new products and services, or raising awareness through art and media. We’re excited to know that some of the initiatives below will be represented at Contact!
Read Blog that includes graphics, text, and twitter handles….
1. The Metacurrency Project .. 2. Community Forge .. 3. Bitcoin .. 4. Symbionomics .. 5. Payswarm .. 6. Ripple .. 7. OurGoods .. 8. WingCash .. 9. Open Bank Project .. 10. time/bank
Phi Beta Iota: Each generation marks their own path. The above list does not include the real pioneers of Open Money and community credits. Learn more at Open Money, Openmoney, and P2P Open Money Category.
