Collaboration Zones – Page 1344 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/01/112011/01/11

US Loses Face & Standing with China & Pakistan

02 China, 02 Diplomacy, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Military, Officers Call, Policy, Strategy, Threats

NIGHTWATCH Extract China-US: Special comment. International news services broadcast video and translations of Chinese Minister of Defense Liang insulting and hectoring the US, represented by the Secretary of Defense. The Chinese tasked Secretary Gates to defend and to explain to the Chinese why the US sells weapons to Taiwan and conducts naval training in the Yellow Sea. China demanded they stop. Instead of rejecting the Chinese demands and leaving, Gates tried to defend what needs not defense in Asia – US national policy.

A couple of points are worth noting. The tongue lashing Gates endured at a Singapore conference last year by a Chinese general clearly was no accident. That insult focused on the same issues as the latest. Gates should have walked out of the Singapore meeting last year and should have walked out of today's session. It remains unclear what the US hoped to gain that merited humiliation.

China is not ready to be a cooperative partner in international security affairs as some analysts contend; resents and resists the tutelage or guidance that some analysts think the US must offer; and has no intention of becoming more open in response to US requests if only because the US wants it so badly.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: See our Memorandum on Chinese Irregular Warfare. The US Government has hit bottom in terms of lacking legitimacy at home and credibility abroad. Ideology is not a substitute for intelligence, and civility is not a substitute for cultural understanding.

US bends to Pakistan's wish

By M K Bhadrakumar Asia Times Online

The unscheduled visit by United States Vice President Joe Biden to Islamabad this week underscores Washington's embarrassment and anxiety that it stands excluded from a regional initiative on Afghan peace process that could be about to take off. The rapid sequence of events over the past fortnight has taken Washington by surprise.

Read entire analysis of role played by Turkey, Russia, and Iran…

DefDog Comment: Most insurgencies last past 10 years it almost always requires a political settlement….thus we are seeing what could have been accomplished at the beginning by understanding the Pashtun and sitting down, Jirga style, and asking for UBL, who was granted sanctuary under the Pasthun Honor Code, Pasthunwali…..no cultural understanding has resulted in a 10 year waste…

Phi Beta Iota: The US Government is suffering from multiple disconnects–from its public, from reality, from strategic analytics, from cultural intelligence–from ANY intelligence relevant to all challenges at all levels–and finally, from integrity. Integrity is what allows well-intentioned people to cope with ambiguity. When they give up their integrity, they yield the field to those with political, ideological, and financial ambitions, and the public interest suffers–as does the welfare of our Armed Forces in harm's way.

2011/01/102011/01/10

Journal: Banks Own Obama, His Mind, His Time

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends...

The author is a former chief economist of the IMF and is now a professor at MIT. Chuck

The Bill Daley Problem

By Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers (out in paperback on Monday)

Baseline Scenario, 9 January 2011

Highlighted extracts:

The Bill Daley Problem is completely bipartisan – it shows us the White House fails to understand that, at the heart of our economy, we have a huge time bomb.

…largest U.S. banks – have far too little equity and far too much debt relative to that thin level of equity…

Today’s most dangerous government sponsored enterprises are the largest six bank holding companies: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley.

No one can show significant social benefits from the increase in bank size, leverage, and overall riskiness over the past 15 years. The social costs of these banks – and their complete capture of the regulatory apparatus – are apparent in the worst recession and slowest recovery since the 1930s.

Paul Volcker gets it; no wonder he has resigned. Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, gets it. Tom Hoenig, president of the Kansas City Fed, gets it. Elizabeth Warren, the tireless champion of consumer rights, gets it. Gene Fama, father of the efficient financial markets view, gets it better than anyone.

This is not a left-right issue – again, look at the list of people who co-signed Professor Admati’s recent letter to the Financial Times. This is a question of technical competence. Do the people running the country – including both the executive branch and the legislature – understand economics and finance or not?

Top bankers, including Bill Daley, have pulled off a complete snow job – including since the crisis broke in fall 2008. They have put forward their special interests while claiming to represent the general interest.

Bill Daley now controls how information is presented to and decisions are made by the president. Daley’s former boss, Jamie Dimon, is the most dangerous banker in America – presumably he now gets even greater access to the Oval Office. Daley is on the record as opposing strong consumer protection for financial products;… [Emphasis added.]

Read the full posting….

Phi Beta Iota: Our generous and well-intentioned philanthropists appear to be unaware that the Federal Reserve, Morgan Chase, and Citi-Bank have pulled a Bernie Maddoff on them–they think they are being “taken care of” at the very moment when everything they have worked so hard for is most vulnerable to a massive melt-down. The control of the President's mind and time is the ultimate victory for anyone seeking to control the White House. It is “checkmate” against We the People. None of the bureaucracies in the Executive–and certainly not the so-called “intelligence community”– are capable of rescuing the President–he is a happy captive.

2011/01/102011/01/10

Reference: Digital Lost & Found

Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence

Lost in a digital world

Allison Miller, aged 14, sends and receives 27,000 text messages a month. Hey, that's only about sixty an hour, every hour she's awake. Some say that the problem of our age is that continuous partial attention, this never ending non-stop distraction, addles the brain and prevents us from being productive. Not quite.

The danger is not distraction, the danger is the ability to hide. Constant inputs and unlimited potential distractions allow us to avoid the lizard, they give the resistance a perfect tool. Everywhere to run, everywhere to hide. The advantage of being cornered with nowhere to turn is that it leaves you face to face with the lizard brain, unable to stall or avoid the real work.

I've become a big fan of tools like Freedom, which effortlessly permit you to turn off the noise. An hour after you haven't kept up with the world, you may or may not have work product to show as a result. If you don't, you've just called your bluff, haven't you? And if you do, then you've discovered how powerful confronting the fear (by turning off the noise) can be.

Ten years ago, no one was lost in this world. You had to play dungeons and dragons in a storm pipe to do that. Now there are millions and millions of us busy polishing our connections, reaching out, reacting, responding and hiding. What happens to your productivity (and your fear) when you turn it off for a while?

2010 Social Media Infographic

Mindjumpers created this graphic showing various social media happenings last year – interesting choices. You can go to their site to let ‘em know what they left out.

Phi Beta Iota: Click on the image to give it it's own page, then click again to enlarge to full viewing size. They left out GroupOn, among others, but seeing this list, in combination with Seth's Godin's blog, reminds us that digital crack is alive and well and consuming our youngsters.

This is the 21st Century digital equivalent of 24-hour cable television as discussed by Bill McKibben in Missing Information.

This is the OPPOSITE of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus.

2011/01/092011/10/22

Strong Signals: Truth or Tyrannicide + RECAP

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence

Phi Beta Iota: The shooting of an elected official, a judge, and multiple others in Arizona is a strong signal. It was anticipated by the book TYRANNICIDE The Story of the Second American Revolution, a work of fiction that anticipated a nation-wide spree of attacks on elected politicians now known not to represent the public interest–but we never anticipated the book being other than a cultural icon, a rhetorical call to arms. Now it is real.

Col Dr. Max Manwaring, USA (Ret), one of the most authentic scholar-warriors we have, nailed it in his edited work, The Search for Security–A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century. Security comes from LEGITIMACY, and the hard truth Washington and Wall Street must face is that they both lack legitimacy in the eyes of the majority (roughly, 70%, assuming a 15% extremist band on either end of the two-party tyranny).

This is not about “tone.” This is about substance. You can screw all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you cannot screw all of the people all of the time. America is at an internal fork in the road. 9/11 was the rest of the world being pissed. Arizona is about the heartland being pissed. FOCUS!

Below is a RECAP of just a few of the many signals justifying public rage at the betrayal of the Republic by elected politicians selling out to Wall Street and special interests. The Nation is so out of balance that it is on the verge of imploding. Lies kill us all. Now here is the GOOD NEWS: a restoration of integrity, with transparency leading to truth and truth leading to trust, would push back the anger. The super-rich evidently do not realize this, but they are on the brink of a violent push-back when they can avoid all push-back simply by stepping back and letting the legitimacy of government be restored–one simple elegant solution: Electoral Reform (1 Page, 9 Points).

2011/01/092011/01/09

Reference: Harvard Discovers “Shared Value”

03 Economy, 04 Education, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Strategy

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you,
then they fight you, then it appears in the Harvard Business Review,
and then you win while Harvard claims it was their idea…

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (apocryphal)

The Big Idea: Creating Shared Value

by Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer

How to reinvent capitalism—and unleash a wave of innovation and growth.

Read Key Ideas Summary

The capitalist system is under siege. In recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the broader community.

Even worse, the more business has begun to embrace corporate responsibility, the more it has been blamed for society’s failures. The legitimacy of business has fallen to levels not seen in recent history. This diminished trust in business leads political leaders to set policies that undermine competitiveness and sap economic growth. Business is caught in a vicious circle. [Emphasis added.]

Read entire article…

Phi Beta Iota: Legitimacy is the foundation of good order and commerce. That Harvard is beginning to get this is a very good sign. The authors also skirt the most interesting point, which is that “who does what” is changing, and we (this they do not address) are moving toward HYBRID networks that accomplish things together, on the basis of SHARED INFORMATION and consensus sense-making. When Alvin Toffler introduced in detail the concept of PowerShift, the most powerful concept he brought forward was that of information being a substitute for time, space, capital, and labor–and violence over the same–he was setting the stage for moving beyond the age of date or information, and into the age of cyber-collaboration to create shared value–what one author calls Non-Zero. NOW we are finally starting to get somewhere…toward what Tom Altee calls Evolutionary Activism driven by advanced cyber-information operations: creating shared value begins with creating shared information.

2011/01/092011/01/09

Journal: Rise and Role of Concentrated Wealth in USA

03 Economy, Commercial Intelligence

Dear friends,

Most people — at least in the US — think of wealth as a source of happiness. Rich people can, seemingly, get what they want, secure themselves from suffering, and improve the lives of others through their philanthropy. While this story true in many ways, it is also very incomplete. The lives of many rich people can be as filled with suffering, stress, alienation, and constrained humanity as the lives of poorer people.

But beyond these individual considerations, I want to highlight the historic role for concentrated wealth, a role often overlooked in popular imagination. Concentrated wealth has power, and that power inevitably shifts things in the way societies work, for better and/or for worse.

History demonstrates that concentrated wealth plays a significant role in the evolution of societies by being a source of (a) social injustice, (b) distortions of democratic process and/or (c) positive social transformation.

All too often, this evolutionary impact is accompanied by — or even invoked by — tremendous suffering and destruction. If we want societies to evolve more consciously — that is, with more awareness, compassion, intelligence, wisdom, and collective choice — we might work to minimize the injustice and erosion of democracy (a and b) and maximize positive social transformation (c).

CONCENTRATED ENERGY

The concentrated energy contained in concentrated wealth is like the concentrated energy contained in fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and natural gas contain the solar energy of ancient sunlight stored for millions of years and then tapped to fuel the industrial and technological revolutions and the globalization of economy, culture and destiny that have totally transformed our world.

Concentrated wealth contains the energy of billions of laborers, thinkers, creators, and players of economic games. It was born from and feeds the industrial, technological and global revolutions. It is almost as if the concentrated energy of fossil fuels has been transferred into concentrated wealth to induce further transformation of society.

This immensely powerful energy has the potential to release the forces of conscious evolution at the whole-society level. As we know, it also has the potential to accelerate the degradation of our earthly home along with the human communities and cultures that live here. And, of course, it has the potential to become historically irrelevant, to dissipate itself in the pursuit of trivial material pleasures and possessions or in charities that serve only ego, the status quo, or current generations at the expense of future ones.

FOUR ARTICLES

Continue reading “Journal: Rise and Role of Concentrated Wealth in USA”

2011/01/092011/01/09

Evolution and Social Change I

03 Environmental Degradation, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Peace Intelligence, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Strategy

Prior Conversations Leading Up to This One:

Journal: Get America Working–A Conversation Part II

Journal: Get America Working–A Conversation Part III

Journal: Get America Working-A Conversation Part IV Enter usfruct (husbandry of the planet) and Spiritual Ecology

Tom Atlee:

Dear Alexander,

I'm afraid I don't have much useful to offer to Robert's initiative at this time. But I wanted to briefly note, for you and others, that evolutionary science writer Connie Barlow and former fundamentalist evangelical Christian minister Michael Dowd offer another, complementary, angle on evolution and religion (including their own thoughts on the relevance of evolutionary psychology) at Thank God for Evolution and The Great Story.

Michael is translating Christian theology into terms not only consistent with but expressive of a sacred understanding of science-based evolution. (He half jokes that he is a CreaTHEist, while Connie is a CreAtheist!) He is currently doing some remarkable interviews with luminaries in the field of Evolutionary Christianity. At the very least, their work should provide you with some additional juicy quotes…

Review: Thank God for Evolution–How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World

Review: Earthspirit–A Handbook for Nurturing an Ecological Christianity

Continue reading “Evolution and Social Change I”