The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
De-Americanization?
Iran, Turkey must work together to fight IS: Rouhani
TEHRAN: Iran and Turkey must work with one another to root out the threat of extremism in the region, President Hassan Rouhani told his Turkish counterpart, the official IRNA news agency reported. … “A consolidation and expansion of ties between Tehran and Ankara is of paramount importance to us,” he said.
Possibilities, we see.
Dubai to become first ‘four-dimensional city’ in the world
A group of technology companies in the UAE have launched a project to make Dubai the world’s first four dimension city, according to Al Arabiya News channel. The project, called “D4D” or Dubai 4 Dimension, will create a digital replica of the city in the shape of three-dimensional imagery and will allow users anywhere in the world to roam through the city in real time using tablets such as iPads.
Continue reading “Yoda: Dubai – City of Gold in Four Dimensions?”
Climate Change, Values Change, Social Change (1): Art and Energy
In the coal energy culture – a culture of workers and production – you are your job. “I am what I make.” In an oil and gas energy culture – a culture of consumption – you are your possessions. “I am what I buy.” But in a renewable energy culture, you are what you conserve. “I am what I save and protect.” We aren’t used to thinking like this, because we can’t see where the money will come from. But in a culture of renewables, money will not be the only measure of wealth
Eliciting Memorable Spheres and Polyhedra from Hyperspace
Integrative connectivity of problems, strategies, themes, groups or people
The US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) and the Quest to Commandeer Culture
A flurry of policy pieces written over the last several weeks have called for a new improved version of HTS, reflecting a deep longing by military-linked strategists to reboot the program. American military and intelligence agencies have a long history of seeking the sort of cultural knowledge that HTS’s architects sought to weaponize in Afghanistan and Iraq. These agencies have largely failed to harness social science for military purposes, but they stubbornly persist. Given this background — and ongoing efforts to subjugate and control foreign populations to fulfil the requirements of automated, mechanized killing via drones, algorithms, and predictive modeling programs — we should understand HTS’s termination as an exercise in retiring one brand and replacing it with newly packaged operations that are well underway. The gaps in military knowledge that HTS claimed to fill still remain. The desire to weaponize culture is as old as dreams of counterinsurgency, and such dreams do not die easily.
“Political ground is gained not when you successfully inhabit the middle ground, but when you successfully impose your framing as the ‘common-sense' position.”
George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working on moral frames for 50 years. He gives this precis: “Framing is not primarily about politics or political messaging or communication. It is far more fundamental than that: frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. But frames do have an enormous bearing on politics … they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason … For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic.”
