The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Phi Beta Iota: Our newest Contributing Editor, Defense Dog (DefDog), thought to add to Chuck Spinney's earlier sharing of the Pentagon spagetti charts by adding a touch of colorful salad–such good salad it has even been covered by WIRED Magazine.
NOTE: The version at WIRED is High Resolution suitable for expanding to achieve drill down to every precious word.
And then, also from WIRED Magazine and courtesy of the same author, Noah Shachtman:
Pentagon’s Craziest PowerPoint Slide Revealed
UpTake Institute October 11, 2010
There are some problems that neither pure capitalism nor charity can solve. Social capital is a new way of looking at solving those problems. This month, people from all over the world came to SOCAP10 in San Francisco to talk about social capital, and put their money where their mouths are.
Over the next several days we’ll be posting stories about companies that have what is called a “triple bottom line” — where they measure results not just in profit, but also in the business impact on people and the planet.
Our first video focuses on just what the social capital movement is about. We talk with people who run social capital companies such as Firefox maker Mozilla, people who are seeking funding for their businesses, and journalists who are covering the social capital movement.
Tip of the Hat to Leif Utne at LinkedIn.
Review (Guest): Cognitive Surplus–Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
Review: Nonzero–The Logic of Human Destiny
Review: The Hidden Wealth of Nations
Review: The Monk and the Riddle–The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living
There is a fascinating dynamic occurring within the Tea Party “movement, one that juxtaposes earnest individuals of all types with much more calculating opportunists who are responsive to money via “anonymous” channels made possible by the Supreme Court decisions to take all limits off corporate funding in politics.
Despite the story being told by numerous media outlets, we estimate that the lower two-thirds, perhaps even the lower four-fifths, of the Tea Party have no idea they are window dressing, hired hands in a political drama being orchestrated by the Republican mandarins who have been named in the media, and their long-standing financial backers, also named.
Among other impacts, this has dramatically lessened the Libertarian movement's prospects, and placed the Green and Reform parties so far over on the sidelines they cannot achieve any semblance of past modest successes.
The question to be asked: Who Benefits? This is not a question the Tea Party membership is considering with any degree of informed introspection. Nor is it a question that Wikipedia or other popular public sources of information have addressed with any sufficiency.
20101010 English Defence League forges links with America's Tea Party
As the far-right group marches in Leicester, details are emerging of growing contacts with extremist US groups in a ‘war on Islamification”
Author, The Wisdom to Know the Difference: When to Make a Change — and When to Let Go
Quakers Advocate Living in ‘Right Relationship' with Creation
In recent years, a number of Quaker writers and organizations have argued that these core values and the future of our planet are threatened by an economic system that encourages people to consume increasingly scarce natural resources, resulting in environmental devastation, economic inequality, and wars for oil. The alternative they propose is living in “right relationship,” which means radically changing both our individual behavior and social structures so that our way of life honors all of God's creation.
“We draw on a Quaker legacy of passion for doing the right thing and going inward to discover what the right thing is,” explains the website of the Earth Quaker Action Team, which grew out of a gathering in the summer of 2009 where many Quakers felt that God was calling them to engage more vigorously with these issues. “We are people who recycle and re-use, who drive hybrids and bicycles, who take buses and shorter showers, and at the same time know that the sum of individual actions cannot make up for the destructive decisions taken by large structures. We realize we must turn to the power of collective action.”
Phi Beta Iota: We are sensing both an emergence and a convergence coming together in 2012.
The 90th Anniversary of Hungary's Dismemberment: Hungary declares “National Day of Unity,” AHF issues statement: “Trianon is not only tragic history, it is a lingering tragedy which continues to affect the Hungarian minorities and historical communities living in the states neighboring Hungary even today.”
At the time President Wilson said: “The proposal to dismember Hungary is absurd” and later Sir Winston Churchill said: “Ancient poets and theologians could not imagine such suffering, which Trianon brought to the innocent.” We are sad to report that they were right.
Phi Beta Iota: The day will come when many of the artificial political boundaries imposed by selected Western powers, not only in Africa but in Europe and elsewhere, are rejected. Professor Philip Allott of Cambridge has written the best book to date on the insanity and the human cost of these ill-considered impositions, see Review: The Health of Nations–Society and Law beyond the State. This is not to say that previous boundaries should be restored, but rather that the world is moving toward panarchy and hybrid governance–water may have one larger region and multinational governance, sewage a more local arrangement….and so on.
The below report by the Open Society Foundations (a Soros project) is extremely important and should get the widest distribution. It documents the cumulative blowback caused by our narcissistic ideas about how to win the hearts and minds of the Afghans. It does this by systematically examining the views of a wide variety of Afghans in an effort to construct an Afghan narrative of how the intervention is affecting their lives. That this narrative is often at variance with our views (which makes it easy to dismiss by western military leaders), the report shows why this is really quite beside the point. Of particular interest (at least to me) is the Afghan narrative of the psychological effects of collateral damage cause by our all-seeing, all-knowing precision strike systems. It is a classic on how the ongoing self-referencing BS about the performance of these weapons is blowing back on itself to magnify the atmosphere of mistrust and alienation that is playing directly into the success of the insurgent's guerrilla strategy.
Of course, this report might be easily dismissed by those patriotic Amurikans, drunk on High Tea, as the subversive product of the lefty Hungarian-emigre George Soros, who is, after all, just another ‘other.'
Phi Beta Iota: A properly managed intelligence campaign would have anticipated and then closely monitored this kind of situational awareness. It is called “Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield.” Neither CIA nor DIA know how to do this.
See Also:
Reference: Fixing Intel–A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan
Review: Operation Dark Heart–Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan — and the Path to Victory
Review: Surrender to Kindness (One Man’s Epic Journey for Love and Peace)
2010 INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability
The Huffington Post is doing a very fine job of raising key issues, but in isolation and out of context. Here is one story they have brought forward. As Cleveland found out when they had to raze to the ground 11,000 abandoned units, foreclosures come with very heavy social and financial costs. It is not to late to stop all foreclosures and evictions as we recommended in October 2008, to no effect. America is going through a multi-dimensional crisis without any leadership whatsoever. One way to understand the crisis is to study the Revolution Matrix and the Negative Book List. The Positive Book List requires some semblance of leadership and legitimacy, at this time not to be found in America, outside of the Virtual Cabinet at The Huffington Post, which does not really exist–it could, but it does not.
