Collaboration Zones – Page 1111 – Public Intelligence Blog

The consensus process strips away all the extraneous issues and allows people to speak to each other. Most of the time, people learn that the other side is not as “wrong” as they initially thought.

– Karl Ohs, late Montana Lieutenant Governor and chair of the Montana Republican Party 2005-2006

Social process may be conceived either as the opposing and battle of desires with the victory of one over the other, or as the confronting and integrating of desires. The former means non-freedom for both sides, the defeated bound to the victor, the victor bound to the false situation thus created—both bound. The latter means a freeing for both sides and increased total power or increased capacity in the world.

– Mary Parker Follett, author of THE NEW STATE (1918)

When I first began exploring the power of dialogue and deliberation in a democracy, I was quite surprised to find that some people regard consensus and even deliberation as oppressive processes. They feel that any effort to reach agreement necessarily involves suppressing differences.

I had not realized that consensus had negative connotations for so many people. In my teen years in Quaker meetings and then in activist groups and intentional communities, I learned about “consensus process” (co-intelligence.org/P-consensus.html). This term loosely referred to the idea that a group would not act on any decision until everyone agreed on what the group should do.

Continue reading “Tom Atlee: Reflections on Consensus — from Ugly to Beautiful”

2012/05/172012/05/17

Mini-Me: Greek Banks Run, IOUs New Drachma–Five Different Economies Running Side by Side in Greece

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government

Huh?

Greeks Bank Run; Lines Form at ATMs; Nearly $1 Billion Withdrawn in Past Week

Without a government for the last eleven days, and amid mainstream discussion of a Euro Zone exit, the Greek people are realizing that the economic and political system as they know it is rapidly descending into chaos.

With massive jobless rates that have forced many into bartering to survive, and facing credit destruction across the entirety of the country that has led to shortages of critical supplies like life saving medicines, those with any money left at national banks are taking the desperate step of withdrawing as much of their savings as they can from a banking system on its last leg.

This is what it looks like when a populace plagued with uncertainty finally loses trust in the credibility of their country’s leadership and financial system.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Greek Banks Run, IOUs New Drachma–Five Different Economies Running Side by Side in Greece”

2012/05/15

DefDog: The Power of OPEN – Blogger Shines Light on U.S. Shadow War in East Africa

Civil Society, IO Deeds of Peace, Knowledge, Media, Military, Peace Intelligence

The power of OPEN *. You might think that the media would be doing this, but one would be wrong….they are content to be spoon fed lies, more lies, and damn lies…..it takes the public to pull back the curtain and expose what is really going on….that may be a reason the IC doesn't like Open Source, it would continually show their inefficiencies…..

Blogger Shines Light on U.S. Shadow War in East Africa

David Axe

WIRED, 15 May 2012

An innocuous-seeming U.S. Air Force press release. A serendipitous satellite image in Google Earth. Snapshots from a photographer on assignment at a Spanish air base. The crash of an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bomber in the United Arab Emirates. These are some of the fragments of information that Italian aviation blogger David Cenciotti has assembled to reveal the best picture yet of the Pentagon’s secretive war in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.

In a series of blog posts over the past two weeks, Cenciotti has described in unprecedented detail the powerful aerial force helping wage Washington’s hush-hush campaign of air strikes, naval bombardments and commando raids along the western edge of the Indian Ocean, including
terror hot spots Yemen and Somalia. Cenciotti outlined the deployment of eight F-15Es from their home base in Idaho to the international air and naval outpost at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, north of Somalia.

. . . . . . . . .

But arguably the most interesting vessels in the area are also the least flashy. Lewis and Clark-class supply ships, normally used to carry fuel and cargo, have also been used as Afloat Forward Staging Bases — in essence, seaborne military camps for housing Special Forces and launching helicopters and small boats. The ships can be configured with makeshift jails for holding captured pirates and, in theory, terror suspects.

Read full article with many links.

2012/05/15

Dolphin: Scientists: Viruses Could Power Electronics

05 Energy, Earth Intelligence

Scientists: Viruses Could Power Electronics

Tuesday, 15 May 2012, 7:12 PM EDT

(NewsCore) – Scientists have developed a technique to generate power with harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity.

The breakthrough could mean that one day, we might be able to charge our cell phones with paper-thin generators that harvest electricity from the vibrations of everyday tasks such as shutting a door or climbing stairs, the scientists said.

“More research is needed, but our work is a promising first step toward the development of personal power generators, actuators for use in nano-devices, and other devices based on viral electronics,” said Seung-Wuk Lee, a scientist at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

The device works by harnessing the piezoelectric properties of the M13 bacteriophage, a virus that only attacks bacteria and is benign to people.

Piezoelectricity is electricity resulting from accumulation of a charge in a solid in response to pressure and is the basis for items like electric cigarette lighters and push-start propane barbecues.

“We're now working on ways to improve on this proof-of-principle demonstration,” Lee added. “Because the tools of biotechnology enable large-scale production of genetically modified viruses, piezoelectric materials based on viruses could offer a simple route to novel microelectronics in the future.”

Owl: Anonymous Makes a Statement – Has Meat, Add Salt

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Hacking, Liberation Technology, Non-Governmental

This interview overall undoubtedly has misconceptions, self-inflated bravado, gross exaggerations and so forth, but if the last statement he utters is true about people coming to them, even to a significantly lesser degree than he indicates, the world-ruling elites might be quaking ever-so-slightly, but involuntarily, in their boots. And much more so if indeed insiders are giving Anonymous the “keys to the kingdom,” the passwords into it.

Insider tells why Anonymous ‘might well be the most powerful organization on Earth

EXTRACT:

Q. What’s next for Anonymous?

A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems. The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody. Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: 01 Any system built by humans can be hacked by humans. 02 A system's security is heavily dependent on the legitimacy of the system owner in the eyes of those using the system.

The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century

2012/05/15

Owl: VIDEO – Twelve Year Old Nails Canadian Government & Banks

03 Economy, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Movies, Officers Call

WATCH THIS. 12 year old Canadian girl on banksters and debt

This little girl is simply amazing. She must have some pretty awesome parents. In a concise and clear way she explains the problem of national debt in language that anyone can understand.

VIDEO (5:26) from GodLike Productions

Phi Beta Iota: Going viral, and rightly so.

See Also:

Matt Taibbi: GRIFTOPIA – RECAP

2012/05/152012/05/15

John Steiner: The Righteous Mind – A Book Review

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence

Why Won’t They Listen? ‘The Righteous Mind,’ by Jonathan Haidt

REVIEW By WILLIAM SALETANPublished:

NY Times Review of Books, March 23, 2012

You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong.

This isn’t an accusation from the right. It’s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature. Like other psychologists who have ventured into political coaching, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them.

Haidt seems to delight in mischief. Drawing on ethnography, evolutionary theory and experimental psychology, he sets out to trash the modern faith in reason. In Haidt’s retelling, all the fools, foils and villains of intellectual history are recast as heroes. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be “the slave of the passions,” was largely correct. E. O. Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions. Even Glaucon, the cynic in Plato’s “Republic” who told Socrates that people would behave ethically only if they thought they were being watched, was “the guy who got it right.”

Continue reading “John Steiner: The Righteous Mind – A Book Review”