Here's a little-spoken truth learned via crowdsourcing:
Most people don't believe they are capable of initiative.
Initiating a project, a blog, a wikipedia article, a family journey. Initiating something even when you're not putatitively in charge.
At the same time, almost all people believe they are capable of editing, giving feedback or merely criticizing.
So finding people to fix your typos is easy.
A few people are vandals, happy to anonymously attack or add graffiti or useless noise.
If your project depends on individuals to step up and say, “This is what I believe, here is my plan, here is my original thought, here is my tribe,” then you need to expect that most people will see that offer and decline to take it.
Most of the edits on Wikipedia are tiny. Most of the tweets among the billions that go by are reactions or possibly responses, not initiatives. Q&A sites flourish because everyone knows how to ask a question, and many feel empowered to answer it, if it's specific enough. Little tiny steps, not intellectual leaps or risks.
I have a controversial belief about this: I don't think the problem has much to do with the innate ability to initiate. I think it has to do with believing that it's possible and acceptable for you to do it. We've only had these doors open wide for a decade or so, and most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it. [Emphasis Added.]
There's a huge shortage… a shortage of people who will say go.
(from left to right) Tom Ricks of Foreign Policy magazine and The Washington Post, along with fellow FP editors Joshua Keating and Blake Hounshell all rushed to discredit Hersh and the contents of his January 17th, 2011 speech.
It seems unusual for a staid, respected publication (one that has received three National Magazine Awards in just this past decade) to start treating a celebrated journalist (who himself has won two National Magazine Awards in just this past decade) as if he were nothing more than a paranoid crank.
It seems unusual, but it’s exactly what the staff of Foreign Policy has done to Seymour Hersh, following a lecture the venerated reporter gave at Georgetown University’s campus in Doha, Qatar. You may know Hersh as the dogged investigator who exposed the My Lai Massacre during Vietnam. You may know him as the staff writer for The New Yorker who published some of the earliest pieces on Abu Ghraib in May 2004. You might even know him as the man derided and then vindicated for claiming that Dick Cheney was running a secret assassination squad right out of the Vice President’s office. (In truth, the squad was and is a bipartisan affair, initiated under Clinton and still operative under Obama.) Read more….
Phi Beta Iota: Sy Hersh is as honest as it gets. Foreign Policy used to be a reputable, imaginative endeavor. This is now the second time it has been disreputable and ignorant. Inquiry has established that Moises Naim, the extraordinary editor who took Foreign Policy from nothing to being twice as good as Foreign Affairs, has moved to other duties within the Carnegie Endowment, and it is clear to us that with his departure, Foreign Policy has lost its integrity as well as its intelligence.
In the vast literature of intelligence-related memoirs, the new book Long Strange Journey by Patrick G. Eddington stands out in several ways.
Eddington entered the intelligence arena as an imagery analyst for the CIA's National Photographic Intelligence Center. Imagery analysis is a predominately technical activity and is not normally considered a hotbed of intrigue or controversy. Nor has it been widely featured in the intelligence “literature of discontent.” Eddington provides an introduction to the world of light tables, mensuration and the now-defunct world of the NPIC analyst.
Then Eddington himself defies easy stereotyping. As an Army veteran, a political conservative, and a person of faith, he might have been voted least likely to rock the boat and to become a whistleblower. But that's what he did. Continue reading “Secrecy News: CIA Culture In Detail”
Wikileaks just released a motherload of info on the taboo subject of Saudi Arabian royal rents.
The 1996 cable — entitled “Saudi Royal Wealth: Where do they get all that money?” — describes legal and illegal ways that royals grab money, according to Reuters.
For legal ways, there's the monthly allowance given to thousands of princes and princesses. This ranged from $800 a month for “the lowliest member of the most remote branch of the family” to $270,000 a month for sons of Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud.
For illegal ways, schemes include skimming $10 billion yearly from off-budget projects related to defense and infrastructure. One Saudi prince complained: “One million barrels per day” go entirely to “five or six princes.”
It's nothing to start a revolution over, but the sheer scale of payments might anger the Saudi people. The big concessionary social-welfare package offered last week was worth only $37 billion. Big anti-government protests are scheduled for later in March.
Phi Beta Iota: The cable is also valuable in demonstrating that the US Government (regardless of party in power) chose to sell our soul for Saudi crude.
Step one: Open all doors. Learn a little about a lot. Consider as many options as possible, then add more.
Step two: Relentlessly dismiss, prune and eliminate. Choose. Ship.
The problem most people run into is that they mix the steps and confuse them. During step one, they aren't open enough, aren't willing enough to consider the impossible. And then, in step two, fear of shipping kicks in and they stay open too long, hold on to too many options and hesitate.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/26/2011 20:53 -0500
If you think what’s happening in Egypt won’t happen within the United States, you’ve been watching too much TV. The statistics speak for themselves.
In previous Revolution Roundups, before we were knocked offline, we featured mass protests by the people of Ireland, Italy, Britain, Austria, Greece, France and Portugal, as the Global Insurrection contagion spread throughout Europe. And now, as we have seen over the past month, North African and Middle Eastern nations have joined the movement as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, Gabon, Mauritania, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria have taken to the streets en masse.
The connection between this latest round of uprisings and the prior protests throughout Europe is one the mainstream media is not making. We are witnessing a decentralized global rebellion against Neo-Liberal economic imperialism. While each national uprising has its own internal characteristics, each one, at its core, is about the rising costs of living and lack of financial opportunity and security. Throughout the world the situation is the same: increasing levels of unemployment and poverty, as price inflation on food and basic necessities is soaring.
Whether national populations realize it or not, these uprisings are against systemic global economic policies that are strategically designed to exploit the working class, reduce living standards, increase personal debt and create severe inequalities of wealth. These global uprising, which have only just begun, are the first wave of the inevitable reaction to the implementation of a centralized worldwide Neo-Feudal economic order.
The global banking cartel, centered at the IMF, World Bank and Federal Reserve, have paid off politicians and dictators the world over — from Washington to Greece to Egypt. In country after country, they have looted national economies at the expense of local populations, consolidating wealth in unprecedented fashion – the top economic one-tenth of one percent is currently holding over $40 trillion in investible wealth, not counting an equally significant amount of wealth hidden in offshore accounts. Read More….
In previous 