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Phi Beta Iota: Below the line is an email with several links that has been broadcast by and to what we think of as the “thinking man's kum-ba-ya crowd.” They have not gotten a grip on public intelligence in the public interest yet, they are still crawling around the edges of structured organization. Think of them as raw material for GroupOn. A mix of naivete, scary, and inspiring. Please also note, as Tom Atlee has emphasized, that CITIZENSHIP makes “transpartisanship” a moot if not a counter-productive term. The Coffee Party is seriously over-hyped in the material that follows, but the spirit of the note is authentic and merits respect.
‘Net neutrality' sounds nice, but the Web is working fine now. The new rules will inhibit investment, deter innovation and create a billable-hours bonanza for lawyers.
Tomorrow morning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will mark the winter solstice by taking an unprecedented step to expand government's reach into the Internet by attempting to regulate its inner workings. In doing so, the agency will circumvent Congress and disregard a recent court ruling.
Phi Beta Iota: The public is now much more aware that neither of the two political parties can be trusted, and that trust for any given government element, policy, or point of view is contingent on a much deeper examination of bias and motive than many would wish. There are two sides to this issue, irrespective of the competency and good faith of government: on the one side are the corporations, including Google and Verizon, that wish to hijack cyber-space and claim that they own it. This will allow them to charge premium prices for access to high-speed services. On the other are those whose taxes paid for the creation of the Internet in the first place, the US taxpayer–they see the vital importance of open spectrum, open source software, and open source intelligence as the tri-fecta of cyber-freedom. At OSS '92 John Perry Barlow said that the Internet interprets censorship as an outage, and routes around it. Our view is that the corporations will succeed in hijacking cyberspace in the near term, but in the mid-term and beyond OpenBTS and other bottom-up public innovation solutions will restore the noosphere to its rightful owners, the human minds that comprise the World Brain.
Focus on tax package, Republican future, focus on Federal Reserve and oversight if not termination of the Federal Reserve. Focus on danger of central economic planning. Do not attack individuals, but rather the “system.” It's going to get a lot worse. Need more transparency. Everything Fed does is secret and they have a budget bigger than US Congress. They bail out the insiders, not America. Bad economics and not legal under the Constitution. He is pressed hard by interviewers on bubbles existing before the Fed. You pay the price of SHORTER recessions. The debt is liquidated. Today our whole goal is to perpetuate the mistakes. Only thing worse than the Fed would be a “One World” currency. Explicit prohibition against printing money (applies to BOTH the Fed and to Congress). What is really at issue here is NOT the Fed, but rather the role of government in the eyes of the people. Stopping the Fed stops the US Government from being a world policeman and a regulator of our lives and the world.
An investment group with ties to the founder of the company formerly known as Blackwater announced Friday that it has bought the security firm, which was heavily criticized for its contractors' actions in Iraq.
USTC Holdings said in a statement that the acquisition of the company now called Xe Services includes its training facility in North Carolina.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But the statement said owner and founder Erik Prince will no longer have an equity stake and no longer be involved in Xe's management or operations. The company will be managed by a board appointed by the equity holders and will include independent, unaffiliated directors, the statement said.
The ownership group is led by two private equity firms, including New York-based Forte Capital Advisors. Forte managing partner Jason DeYonker has been a longtime financial adviser to Prince, helping him expand the Moyock, N.C., training grounds and negotiating Blackwater's first training contracts with the U.S. government.
“The future of this industry belongs to those companies with the highest standards of governance, transparency, and performance,” DeYonker said.
Phi Beta Iota: Winston Churchill is known for saying Americans always do the right thing, they just try everything else first. Similarly, Russell Ackoff is known for saying that we have to stop doing the wrong things righter, and instead do the right thing. Private Military Contractors (PMC) are the wrong thing! Multinational hybrid task forces are the right thing–cheaper, faster, better in all respects. All we need to bring is integrity and intelligence (decision-support). PMC's loot our own highly qualified human resources; cheat the taxpayer twice over (the government does it once first by hiring them in the first place); and are one step short of air dropping liquid feces over an entire area of responsibility (AOR). Not cool at all. Everyone means well, but this is about as dumb as it gets on all levels of thinking.
Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off.
These phones don't keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.
REMINDER: Environmental Degradation, not Climate Change, is High-Level Threat #3. Climate Change is less than 10% of that, and within Climate Change, mercury and sulfer are more important than carbon. Furthermore, it is not possible to address any one threat without addressing the other nine (e.g. #1 Poverty) with harmonized policies from Agriculture to Water, so the bottom line is that these talks are isolated and worthless. The world needs a serious global strategy with serious analytics, a commitment to understanding true costs of every product and service, and a commitment to bringing the five billion poor into a prosperous world at peace. Anything less is a betrayal of the public trust.
Activist 
