POLICE have served an intervention order via social networking site Facebook banning an accused cyber-stalker from bullying, threatening and harassing another user.
Many people in the United States purchase one or fewer books every year.
Many of those people have seen every single episode of American Idol. There is clearly a correlation here.
Access to knowledge, for the first time in history, is largely unimpeded for the middle class. Without effort or expense, it's possible to become informed if you choose. For less than your cable TV bill, you can buy and read an important book every week. Share the buying with six friends and it costs far less than coffee.
Or you can watch TV.
The thing is, watching TV has its benefits. It excuses you from the responsibility of having an informed opinion about things that matter. It gives you shallow opinions or false ‘facts' that you can easily parrot to others that watch what you watch. It rarely unsettles our carefully self-induced calm and isolation from the world.
I got a note from someone the other day, in which she made it clear that she doesn't read non-fiction books or blogs related to her industry. And she seemed proud of this.
I was roped into an argument with someone who was sure that ear candling was a useful treatment. Had he read any medical articles on the topic? No. But he knew. Or said he did.
You see a lot of ostensibly smart people in airports, and it always surprises me how few of them use this downtime to actually become more informed. It's clearly a deliberate act–in our infoculture, it takes work not to expose yourself to interesting ideas, facts, news and points of view. Hal Varian at Google reports that the average person online spends seventy seconds a day reading online news. Ouch.
Not all books are correct or useful. Not all accepted science is correct. The conventional wisdom might just be wrong. But ignoring all of it because the truth is now fashionably situational and in the eye of the beholder is a lame alternative.
I know this rant is nothing new. In fact, people have been complaining about widespread willful ignorance since Brutus or Caesar or whoever invented the salad… the difference now is this: more people than ever are creators. More people than ever go to work to use their minds, not just their hands. And more people than ever have a platform to share their point of view. I think that raises the bar for our understanding of how the world works.
Let's assert for the moment that you get paid to create, manipulate or spread ideas. That you don't get paid to lift bricks or hammer steel. If you're in the idea business, what's going to improve your career, get you a better job, more respect or a happier day? Forgive me for suggesting (to those not curious enough to read this blog and others) that it might be reading blogs, books or even watching TED talks.
As for the deliberately uninformed, we can ignore them or we can reach out to them and hopefully start a pattern of people thinking for themselves…
Phi Beta Iota: One of the reasons we published 1995 GIQ 13/2 Creating a Smart Nation: Strategy, Policy, Intelligence, and Information was our early emerging sense that US “intelligence” did not know what the Nation needed to know, and neither did the Nation (in the Stephen Colbert sense of word: “Nation, you are stupid!”). America is at a turning point in which most of the foundation jobs have been exported and the menial jobs given over, deliberately, to illegal aliens; the schools have hit bottom, the government is out of control, and Wall Street, while in charge, has looted the Treasury and imploded the economy. The federal government mutters darkly about “federalizing” state and local police and “disarming” the public. What we really need–Thomas Jefferson understood this–is a fully armed, fully educated public that is attentive to its civic duty and will not tolerate corruption among its officials. This is going to be a long struggle. The good news: Obama activated the Davies J-Curve. America expected him to make positive change, he did not, now the myth is exposed. States (we are the United STATES of America) are finally starting to exercise their Constitutional authority to see to their own defenses, and a MAJORITY of the voting public now sees the two-party tyranny for what it is: a corrupt cesspool….one bird, two wings, same shit.
“We are facing the possibility of widespread drought in the coming decades, but this has yet to be fully recognized by both the public and the climate change research community,” said National Center for
Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Aiguo Dai, who conducted the study.
“If the projections in this study come even close to being realized, the consequences for society worldwide will be enormous,” he said.
Parts of Asia, the United States, and southern Europe, and much of Africa, Latin America and the Middle East could be hit by severe drought in the next few decades, with regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea seeing
“almost unprecedented” drought conditions, the study says.
U.S. intelligence agencies have wasted many billions of dollars by mismanaging secret, high-technology programs, the deputy chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence says.
“The American public would be outraged if they knew,” Sen. Christopher S. Bond, Missouri Republican, told The Washington Times. “Billions and billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted.”
Mr. Bond said he was unable to provide details or exact figures because the programs are classified. “I wish I could, but I can't,” he said, adding that “many billions of dollars” were wasted on “just one program” that had been canceled recently.
Phi Beta Iota: It is actually tens of billions. If you take General Tony Zinni's estimate that secret intelligence provided him with, “at best” 4% of what he needed as commanding general of the US Central Command (USCENTCOM), then engaged in two wars and several “expeditions,” and you take $75 billion a year as the now public amount, what you end up with is a range: $72 billion wasted at the high end, or our personal estimate, $66 billion wasted at the low end. This is reprehensible. It is also misleading to suggest that the new reviews of over-spending on new initiatives will cut waste. The waste is in the “base” and it is the base that needs to be churned by cutting 20% a year for each of five years running (yes, that does add up to 100%). For a still valid detailed review that had inputs from the top two guys for national security and C4I at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) at the time, see 2000 ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World.
I wonder if people who insist upon using the i-word ever think about the impact it has on human lives. “What part of ‘illegal' don't you understand?!” they say. Well, as an undocumented immigrant, I need people to understand the traumatic effect this racist language has on us and our families. Many people who don't experience this reality don't seem to realize the inescapable feelings of inferiority it creates. Or that we can get to a transparent, thorough dialogue on human rights and humane immigration solutions only when we remove the i-word as a central piece of the conversation.
COMMENT by Robert David Steele Vivas as Posted at Huffington Post
I like this, a great deal. Am cross-posting it to Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.
I strongly agree that allowing corporations to abuse the environment, communities, and their employees with the added protection of “personality” is a travesty, and one that my Virtual Cabinet has already addressed here at Huffington Post.
The URL for the Virtual Cabinet is: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-david-steele
With respect to how the USA has treated immigrants over the centuries, I am now ready to say that this abusive exploitation, of Chinese, of Irish, of others, combined with our genociding of the Native Americans and our enslavement of Black Africans, needs to be defined and treated as “Other Atrocities,” one of the high-level threats to humanity identified by the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenge, and Change.
My review of their report is here: http://phibetaiota.net/2008/05/a-more-secure-world-our-shared-responsibility-report-of-the-secretary-generals-high-level-panel-on-threats-challenges-and-change-a-more-secure-world-our-shared-responsibility-report-of-the-s/
However, what really touches me about this note [disclosure: I am a white Hispanic] is the author's clear angst over the racism that he has felt, and his very articulate call for a dialog and understanding. This is where I think we need to go, and I will address this with the Virtual Cabinet in the weeks to come.
PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan—The Taliban's influence in northern Afghanistan has expanded in recent months from a few hotspots to much of the region, as insurgents respond to the U.S.-led coalition's surge in the south by seizing new ground in areas once considered secure.
Taliban militants stop traffic nightly at checkpoints on the road from Kabul to Uzbekistan, just outside Baghlan province's capital city of Pul-e-Khumri, frequently blowing up fuel convoys and seizing travelers who work with the government or the international community.
Deja Vu Back Centuries
In many areas here and the rest of the north, the Taliban have effectively supplanted the official authorities, running local administrations and courts, and conscripting recruits.
– – – – – – –
The Taliban have consolidated their war gains by tapping into broad disillusionment with the incompetence and venality of Afghan government officials.
“People don't love the Taliban—but if they compare them to the government, they see the Taliban as the lesser evil,” said Baghlan Gov. Munshi Abdul Majid, an appointee of President Hamid Karzai.
Phi Beta Iota: Based on what we now know about Viet-Nam, we predict that the military-industrial complex will declare victory in November 2012, and inform the new President that the US military has been entirely “used up” in Afghanistan and Iraq, and therefore we need to increase the Pentagon budget to rebuy the military from scratch.
On Sunday, 60 Minutes reported on a visit to San Diego, where a yearly “Stand Down” event for homeless veterans is designed to change lives in just three days.
A skeptical Scott Pelley found that while the event's clean, safe and empathetic environment can't fix the problems homeless veterans face, the event serves as a “ceasefire” to show vets that they aren't alone.
Phi Beta Iota: There are two threads here, the first being that attention is healing and nurturing, whether it is new-borne babies or hardened vets. The second is that this is a complete break from treating homeless vets or homeless anyone as “the other” that is not “noticed” as if they did not exist. San Diego has done a good thing with this annual event, it ought to take place all across America.
