Collaboration Zones – Page 1262 – Public Intelligence Blog

Greater Democracy

Monday 23 May 2011

Essential Tenets for Maintaining our Common Good

An essay written by Alan Page

Introduction:

The “common good” is the collection of what no one person owns, but which all people depend upon for life. A simple example is the air we breathe. No one owns it but we would all perish without it. Now the “common good” is being threatened by many different human activities and policies. Some of these include:

The evolving climate crisis that will affect us all. Just a shift of a few degrees in the global temperature could deliver a fatal blow to the “common good” by changing what is now a benign climate into a hostile one that can no longer sustain “life as we know it”.
The periodic business cycle causes many dislocations that are unnecessary but unavoidable given the current banking system.
Less commonly known and generally off the table is the currency and credit formation function and the ramifications of this prime control system.
The implications for all other functions are very poorly understood, and will be a major consideration of the TENETS.
This compound crisis must be dealt with as if it were a life and death matter.

This document provides some guidance for how to enable humanity to act responsibly in a coordinated fashion without deprivation of anyone’s rights. An attempt is made to recognize the sources of control and motivation that exist and how to enable effective response as if our lives depended on it.

The PDF of the whole essay is here: Tenets CGF101110.pdf

Alan C. Page, Ph.D.
Research Forester

Phi Beta Iota: The full essay contains some very well-developed itemized measures of merit and we strongly second Brother Jock's recommendation.

2011/05/23

Creatives are Underextended….

Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence

Underextended

There is a lot of fear associated with ‘overextended'.

Take too much financial risk, expose yourself to the vagaries of the market and you'll end up stressed, bankrupt and overextended.

Stretch your knee too much in the wrong direction after a long swim and the doctor will tell you that the ligaments are overextended.

Brands that get greedy and put their names in too many places in too many ways (as Tiffany's did a generation ago) get overextended and take a long time to heal.

But what about the more prevalent, more insidious and ultimately more damaging notion of being underextended?

The factory-mindset encourages every worker to protect his time and his effort. Don't volunteer because they'll never give you any slack. Don't push harder because you'll only exhaust yourself. Don't let them speed up the line because it will never slow down again…

Continue reading “Creatives are Underextended….”

2011/05/232011/05/23

US JSOG 3000 Night Missions to Kill–Who? Why?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Military, Peace Intelligence

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends...

U.S. seems to be getting good at killing Taliban, but why?

Friday, May 20, 2011 03:07 AM

BY GEORGIE ANNE GEYER

Columbus Dispatch

While the United States keeps trying to forget about Afghanistan, a new secret program in Afghanistan is quietly boasting of bringing about an end to the decade-long war.

The program is “kill/capture,” and it has been waged by the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, for the past year, with, according to PBS’s excellent Frontline, 3,000 operations in only the past 90 days.

Essentially, it sends special forces out in the dark of night into slumbering Afghan villages to force Taliban leaders out of their hiding places and then shoot them or capture them.

There is only one major problem: It appears rather too often that the American intelligence planners are not certain that the men they are killing or capturing are really Taliban. There is, of course, a larger question: Why are we killing and capturing Taliban when this war was supposed to be about al-Qaida?

Read rest of article….

2011/05/232011/05/23

Ben Franklin’s Strategic Narrative: Honest & Open

Cultural Intelligence

The Junto Club created by Franklin in 1727 is an instructive predecessor to what could be today in the way of “collective intelligence.”

Franklin is a counter example of how things might be done differently.

It is important to understand that the Junto Club put BOTH civic improvement, the “commons”, and personal improvement ahead of the financial gain of the members; but there was nothing wrong if financial gain followed the first two improvements. Hence the Junto Club is also a rebuke to the current Hamiltonian Federalists who champion unregulated free market extreme capitalism over everything else.

Junto in Spanish means “together.” Below from Wikipedia (Junto).

The Junto was a club established in 1727 by Benjamin Franklin for mutual improvement in Philadelphia. Also known as the Leather Apron Club, its purpose was to debate questions of morals, politics, and natural philosophy, and to exchange knowledge of business affairs.

. . . . . . .

Franklin describes the formation and purpose of the Junto in his autobiography:

I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding year, [1727] I had form'd most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the Junto; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss'd by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased.

Learn more….

2011/05/22

Reflections on Tyranny versus Crowd Power

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Open Government

Sacrificial Crowds and Radical Power: A Meditation

by Justin Rogers-Cooper, 19 May 2011

Advocate (CUNY Graduate Center)

In early January the BBC reported that Mohammad Bouazazi, a Tunisian college graduate who illegally sold fruits and vegetables in Sidi Bouzid, had died from his self-inflicted burns. He had set himself on fire by dousing his body with petrol when police confiscated his produce. He didn’t have the proper permits. Public protest had been rare in Tunisia before. When he died, the BBC reported that “a crowd estimated at 5,000 took part in his funeral.” The crowd chanted the same message together, out loud: “Farewell, Mohammad, we will avenge you. We weep for you today, we will make those who caused your death weep.”

Safety copy below the line–note ending on Bush-Obama “crowd control” plans.

Continue reading “Reflections on Tyranny versus Crowd Power”

2011/05/222011/05/22

Carterizing Obama–Netanyhu Tells Him Off…

05 Energy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency

This important essay by Robert Parry contextualizes Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's arrogant stuffing of President Obama, which took place after Obama gave a weak-kneed speech on the Middle East. If Parry is right, a really dirty game is in the offing.

And look at the banality of language that provoked Netanhahu: Obama's speech purported to analyze the implications of the Arab Revolt with an analysis that was viewed as being weak, inept, and self centered by some Arabs (e.g., see this cogent analysis of his language) as well as his goals for the pursuit in the Arab-Israeli peace process: namely a return to Israel's 1967 borders, with some land swaps, in return for the security of a Jewish state within these borders (a choice of language that may have been an attempt to appease Netanyahu*).

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*Mr. Obama's language was somewhat ambiguous when he said the primary Israeli-related goal of the peace process was to establish conditions for Israel as a Jewish state
and the homeland for the Jewish people.” But it does raise a question of whether he is acceding to the sectarian interpretation of a Jewish democracy demanded by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has made recognition of Israel as aJewish nation-state a prerequisite for any final agreement with the Palestinians. This kind of sectarian definition in a democracy has unknowable ramifications for the non-Jewish minority making up 20% of Israel's citizens. For a discussion of this issue, see Isabel Kirshner, “Some Question the Existence of Israel as a Jewish State,” New York Times, 24 October 2010.

Netanyahu Sets Limits for Obama

This public rebuke raises questions about whether Netanyahu will now try to sink Obama’s reelection the way earlier Likud leaders undermined President Jimmy Carter

by Robert Parry, Consortium News, May 21, 2011

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Oval Office rebuke of U.S. President Barack Obama – and the Republicans’ immediate attempt to exploit the dispute to peel away Jewish voters – suggest that American politics may be in for a replay of Campaign 1980.

Continue reading “Carterizing Obama–Netanyhu Tells Him Off…”

2011/05/21

$1bn fraud at Kabul Bank upsets UK pull-out from AF

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government

Note buried within the report about classification of documents……..

$1bn fraud at Kabul Bank puts UK's Afghan pull-out in peril

IMF and Britain's foreign aid department both withhold money for reconstruction

By Jonathan Owen and Brian Brady

Sunday, 22 May 2011

EXTRACT:

The Department for International Development (DfID) confirmed last night that it had followed the lead of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in withholding contributions to bankroll hundreds of “nation-building” projects in Afghanistan.

The move, to “protect taxpayers' money”, came as the full extent of the scandal at Kabul Bank – described as the biggest fraud in modern times – became clear. A secret US government report into the debacle “indicates that insiders at Kabul Bank used fraudulent loans to misappropriate $850m (£525m), representing 94 per cent of outstanding loans”.

. . . . . . .

And it notes that, in addition to oversights by Deloitte, which failed to spot and report warning signs of fraud, a team from PwC didn't identify any fraud at Kabul Bank and gave it “a clean bill of health” – something
that “may have acted to delay understanding of the gravity of Kabul Bank's true financial condition both among the examination staff and the international community”, according to the document.

Full Story….