Collaboration Zones – Page 1358 – Public Intelligence Blog

TRANSPARTISANSHIP AND MOVING BEYOND PARTISANSHIP

by Tom Atlee

What is “transpartisanship”? In its most common usage, “transpartisan” seems to refer to partisans from across the political spectrum coming together in civil conversation.

I love the term, but find myself thinking of it as a transitional phenomenon. A partisan is a strong (even militant) supporter of a party or position. People assume, in this polarized age, that partisans can't talk and work together. Bringing opposing partisans into visibly creative civil conversation flies in the face of that widespread assumption, and thus serves to undermine the primary narrative of polarization. However, it also has a dark side. Bringing people together as partisans instead of as peer citizens may actually reinforce partisanship as a political reality. I want to move beyond that, as I believe that parties and positions interfere with our ability to generate collective wisdom. (See http://co-intelligence.org/CIPol_beyondpositions.html)

Partisanship has a gift to offer to wise democracy. Partisans invest the time and effort to thoroughly articulate the arguments and evidence for their perspective on each issue. The problem with partisanship is that the partisans then use those articulations to fight each other and batter the public. The alternative is to use the gifts of partisans to help the mass of citizens move beyond partisanship.

An obvious way to do that is through citizen deliberative councils like Citizens Juries and Consensus Conferences. (See http://co-intelligence.org/P-CDCs.html) These councils bring together randomly selected citizens who may be Republicans or Democrats or whatever, but who aren't chosen because of that (except perhaps as part of an effort at demographic balance that includes diverse demographic factors like race, gender, etc.). They are not treated in any special way because of their political beliefs; they are simply peer citizens with the other citizens in the council. They are given (a) a charge to come up with something that benefits their whole community or country (a mandate that lifts them above partisanship) and (b) access to briefing materials and experts who represent the full spectrum of opinion on the issue being deliberated. In other words, the range of partisan viewpoints is represented by their diverse information sources and perspectives, rather than focusing on their positionality as partisan participants. This approach reflects the ideal of citizens as people with common problems and hopes engaging in conversations that creatively utilize their diversity to discover something greater and better than they all came in the room with.

I wouldn't call this transpartisan deliberation. I'd call it citizen deliberation.

Continue reading “Reference: Citizenship Versus Transpartisanship”

2010/12/162010/12/16

Reference: Microsoft, Facebook, & the Future

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, info-graphics/data-visualization, Mobile, Technologies

Bianca Bosker

bianca@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting

Microsoft's Cracked Windows: How The World's Technology Juggernaut Lost Its Buzz And Became The ‘Underdog'

EXTRACT: Its stranglehold on the desktop, while hugely profitable, helped turn Microsoft into an out-of-shape competitor focused on defending turf rather than scoring new hits. In seeking to maintain its dominance on the desktop, it failed to anticipate and plan for the spread of computing to mobile phones, handheld computers, the cloud, and Web-based services delivered by companies such as Google. Now, people can write documents, run spreadsheets and browse the Web without indulging any Microsoft software, steering right around the software giant.

EXTRACT: “It has an executive team that had not truly lived in a world of competition for perhaps a decade, and its performance in the years between 2000 and 2010 have showed this,” says George Colony, CEO and chairman of Forrester Research, a technology and market research firm. “Essentially, the company had no competition for a decade and so it became out of shape and not ready to truly compete.”

EXTRACT: In an op-ed in the New York Times published earlier this year, a former Microsoft vice-president, Dick Brass described the company as “a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.”

EXTRACT: “Apple builds fanatics,” says MIT's Anderson. “Microsoft builds people who are sullen, but not mutinous. Their DNA is large organizations, operating systems, and applications. Their DNA doesn't understand design and the consumer mind.”

EXTRACT: The Pew Research Center's 2010 Mobile Access survey found that 40% of adults in the U.S. now use their mobile phone to go online, compose email, or instant message–a number that will almost certainly swell. “Phones are do or die for Microsoft,” says Foley.

EXTRACT: The only certainty is this: Microsoft will be around in a major way if for no other reason than the dollars at play. “They have more money than God,” says MIT's Anderson

Read the entire deep, thoughtful, world-class piece….

Graphic: Analytic Tool-Kit in the Cloud (CATALYST II)

Worth a Look: 1989 All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation–The Four Requirements Documents

2010/12/16

Reference: Arianna Huffington–Wikileaks About Trust in Government–Or Not

07 Other Atrocities, Analysis, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Arianna Huffington

Posted: December 15, 2010 09:19 PM

The Media Gets It Wrong on WikiLeaks: It's About Broken Trust, Not Broken Condoms

EXTRACT: It's notable that the latest leaks came out the same week President Obama went to Afghanistan for his surprise visit to the troops — and made a speech about how we are “succeeding” and “making important progress” and bound to “prevail.”

The WikiLeaks cables present quite a different picture. What emerges is one reality (the real one) colliding with another (the official one). We see smart, good-faith diplomats and foreign service personnel trying to make the truth on the ground match up to the one the administration has proclaimed to the public. The cables show the widening disconnect. It's like a foreign policy Ponzi scheme — this one fueled not by the public's money, but the public's acquiescence.

The cables show that the administration has been cooking the books.

EXTRACT: For the Obama administration, it appears that accountability is a one-way street. When he had the chance to bring the principle of accountability to our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and investigate how we got into them, the president passed. As John Perry Barlow tweeted, “We have reached a point in our history where lies are protected speech and the truth is criminal.”

Any process of real accountability, would, of course, also include the key role the press played in bringing us the war in Iraq. Jay Rosen, one of the participants in the symposium, wrote a brilliant essay entitled “From Judith Miller to Julian Assange.” He writes:

For the portion of the American press that still looks to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, and that considers itself a check on state power, the hour of its greatest humiliation can, I think, be located with some precision: it happened on Sunday, September 8, 2002.

That was when the New York Times published Judith Miller and Michael Gordon's breathless, spoon-fed — and ultimately inaccurate — account of Iraqi attempts to buy aluminum tubes to produce fuel for a nuclear bomb.

Continue reading “Reference: Arianna Huffington–Wikileaks About Trust in Government–Or Not”

2010/12/162010/12/16

Reference: The Private War of LtCol Tony Shaffer

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Shaffer’s book rips the lid off several stories the bureaucrats wanted to suppress: the role of a program named Able Danger in yielding information that could have uncovered the 9/11 plot; Operation Dark Heart, which could have nabbed Al Qaeda’s number two leader; and early indications that Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, actively supported the Taliban. These are the incendiary bombs the censors tried to defuse. And this is the real story of Tony Shaffer’s book.

Private War JPEG — Playboy Article Online

PDF Copy without Advertising

Phi Beta Iota: The Playboy folks did not do their homework–the destruction of an entire first edition is not unprecendented, it was done by CIA to the first printing (1972) of Col L. Fletcher Prouty's The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (Skyhorse, 2008). While the title is hyped and the good Colonel was not aware of the over-arching financial crime families that the US Government has secretly supported and in some instances actually spawned from scratch, his general point to the public was clear: what is done in our name under the guise of secrecy is often criminal, generally unconstitutional, and almost always very costly in long-term blood, treasure, and spirit over both the short and the long term. What is at issue here is straight-forward: either we have a government that works in the public interest and displays integrity at every level, or we do not. It is not only the political “leaders” who have lost their integrity, but the professional “leaders” as well. Until the truth of this is understood by the majority of the American people, nothing will change.

See Also:

Reference: The Fraud-Based US Economy

Reference: Mortgage Fraud in Detail

Journal: Wall Street Financial Crime Spree Spins On….

Journal: The Wall Street Pentagon Papers–Biggest Scam In World History Exposed–Are The Federal Reserve’s Crimes Too Big To Comprehend?

2010/12/16

Reference: The Fraud-Based US Economy

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Congressional Research Service, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, General Accountability Office, Intelligence (government), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Office of Management and Budget, Officers Call, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Waste (materials, food, etc)

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends...

The attached blog, “Failing to Prosecute Wall Street Fraud Is Extending Our Economic Problems,”

is a cut-and-paste accumulation of a variety of outlooks. Most are based on analyses or accumulated wisdom, but some appear based on hunches, ideologies, etc. Taken together, however, they paint a horrifying picture of the American political economy and our prospects for the future. Moreover, that picture does not change materially if you throw half of the pastings away. While the implications of fraud, per se, are clear, the horrifying picture of what is happening emerges when one tries to generalize on the description.

The anonymous guest author is telling us, in effect, that the neural network of our political-economy — i.e., the information system that provides the wherewithal for implicit and explicit homeostatic guidance and control – – has become so corrupted by fraud and disinformation that a pervasive atmosphere of confusion, menace, fear, mistrust, and alienation is breaking down the system into non-co-operative activities, thereby creating a kind of paralysis of will that, left unchecked, will prolong and deepen our economic crisis. <

One psychologist insightfully likened the situation to trauma and post traumatic stress disorder on a national scale.

Any student of Colonel Boyd's theory [1] of competition and conflict (Patterns of Conflict) and his idea of the OODA loop will immediately recognize the symptoms of confusion, menace, fear, mistrust, and alienation, expressed below. These are the emergent properties of decision cycles, or Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) Loops, that have been folded back inside themselves and have become focused inward and are disconnected from their environments, but connected to some kind of internal dynamic that feeds on itself. Of course, Boyd was discussing military strategy and the art of winning by wrecking his adversary's OODA loops to undermine his adversary's organic cohesion, while preventing his adversary from doing the same thing to him.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss his ideas as applying only to the art of war. That is because Boyd's aim was to describe in a generalized sense how the human mind works in any conflict involving a clash of independent wills, what the mind's strengths and weaknesses are, and how these strengths and weaknesses play out in the competition that is the essence of life.

So, it should not be surprising that many politicians, businessmen, and scholars have recognized that Boyd's general ideas can be tailored to any kind of competition or game (just google “OODA loop”) and have sought gain by exploiting these ideas against others. Most people, however, instinctively evolve similar if less well defined ideas, because if Boyd's synthesis of the OODA loop is correct, these dynamics are innate in the evolved wiring of left and right hemispheres of our brains [2], and therefore will exhibit their outward manifestations in repetitive patterns in conflicts over time — which brings back to the tapestry of confusion, menace, fear, mistrust, and alienation and the counter weights that are necessary to overcome them.

Viewed through the lens of Boyd's theory of competition and conflict, the attached blog clarifies one question about the players in the economic game in particular: The information assembled below clearly shows who is the hoser and who is the hosee.

One final point, history has shown that once an nation's political-economic OODA loops become infected by the virus of corrupted information it is very very hard to clean it out. The hosing will continue unless ruthless action roots it out, otherwise, we will experience continued disintegration ending in a sudden collapse, like what happened to Rome on a grand time scale or to France's Third Republic [3] on a more tangible time scale.

With this background in mind, now read the attached blog and draw you own conclusions about what is needed to re-oreint the corrupted political-economic OODA loops that are leading America to ruin.
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NOTES:

[1] A short bio of Boyd and his theories as well as the briefing slides he used to explain his theories can be found in the Boyd folder here. Robert Coram's excellent biography of Boyd and his theories can be found here.

[2] See, for example, my analysis of how Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton and John McCain here.

[3] William L. Shirer's Collapse of the Third Republic, is a case study in how the dry rot of inward focus in the 1930s set France up for its sudden collapse in during the German invasion of May 1940. His description of how the flow information among the military and political leaders became corrupted during the invasion is a microcosm of how inwardly focused OODA loops, lubricate by menace, mistrust, and fear result inevitably in the breakdown of cohesion, paralysis, chaos, and collapse.

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ATTACHED BELOW THE LINE IN FULL for Information Availability Assurance Into the Future

Failing to Prosecute Wall Street Fraud Is Extending Our Economic Problems

Posted By Guest Author On December 15, 2010 @ 8:30 am In Think Tank

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/12/failing-to-prosecute-wall-street-fraud-is-extending-our-economic-problems/print/

Continue reading “Reference: The Fraud-Based US Economy”

2010/12/162010/12/16

Journal: US Gap Between Rich & Poor Widens by Factor of 10

Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Corporations, Corruption, Methods & Process, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy, Threats

Gap Between Rich and Poor Follows Geographic Lines, U.S. Census Data Shows

By Timothy R. Homan – Dec 15, 2010

Bloomberg

The gap between the haves and have- nots in the U.S. is being drawn along geographic lines, Census Bureau data showed yesterday.

The number of counties where median household income decreased is almost 10 times the number that saw an increase, according to a Bloomberg analysis of Census figures comparing an average of the years 2005-2009 with 2000. The government figures also showed a concentration of wealth and education in coastal states.

“The dispersion of income is larger than it’s ever been,” said Douglas Besharov, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. “There used to be a much wider spread of incomes within geographic areas than there is now. There’s much more of a clumping together.”

Phi Beta Iota: In the 1970's an era when “whole systems” thinking tried to flourish only to be crushed by the emergent merger of the two-party tyranny and Wall Street, there was a vital comparative international studies reference, “Banks & Textor,” or more properly, Arthus S. Banks and Robert B. Textor, A Cross-Polity Survey (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1963). We strongly suspect that today the USA would be qualified a failed state, certainly so if the 1% of the population hoarding the bulk of the wealth were isolated as an extraneous factor contributing little of value to the larger economy while siphoning off one fifth of the asset value through legalized financial crime. There is clearly a need for a return of the Banks & Textor model, but with the added sophistication of distinguishing between negative factors of domestic production (excessive concentration of wealth, legalized mortgage clearinghouse fraud, Wall Street derivatives fraud, and Federal Reserve fraud, prison factories and prisons, hospitals, and marginalized enterprises among others).

2010/12/152010/12/15

Worth a Look: Steel on Wheels–The Dylan Ratigan Show (MSNBC)

About the Idea, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process, Policies

For the past few years, in response to the topics I speak about on my television show and write about on The Huffington Post, people have asked me how they could contribute to help fight for what I call “Truth to Power.” Previously there has been no mechanism to allow people to participate in this, but it is clear that we need to form an Alliance – a formation of like-minded individuals fighting for the same ideals.

With that, let me invite you to join The Alliance to help us all fight for the truth. It is clear that our country is divided in two – not left and right, but those who wish to change the status quo for better, and those who wish to keep it to protect their interests.

The problem is that the Democratic and Republican parties have lost their focus. Instead of fighting to empower the people, they are now only fighting to keep their own power. Only through the full engagement of the people can we change this.

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Steel on Wheels–The Dylan Ratigan Show (MSNBC)”