Category: Collaboration Zones

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Journal: Move Your Money–and Use Your Vote

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence

Strengthening Banking in the Public Interest

Sunday 03 January 2010

Returning our business to community banks is a great start. However, community banks are not suffering from a lack of customers so much as from a lack of the capital they need to make new loans, and investment capital today is scarce. There is a way out of this dilemma, demonstrated for more than 90 years by the innovative state of North Dakota – a partnership in which community banks are backed by the deep pockets of a state-owned bank.

Arianna Huffington just posted an article that has sparked a remarkable wave of interest, evoking over 4,500 comments in a mere three days. Called “Move Your Money,” the article maintains that we can get credit flowing again on Main Street by moving our money out of the Wall Street behemoths and into our local community banks.

Use Your Vote

Ralph Nader has spent decades seeking to restore both government and corporate accountability.  Eight electoral reforms were drawn from his book Crashing the Party–Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender and are available for any citizen to use in order to agitate for non-violent legal ethical reform at the local, state, and national levels.

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Journal: National Intelligence or National Goat-F…?

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics

Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first president to take office in the Age of Terrorism. He inherited two struggles — one with Al Qaeda and its ideological allies, and another that divides his own country over issues like torture, prosecutions, security and what it means to be an American. The first has proved to be complicated and daunting. The second makes the first look easy.

NATO official: US spy work lacking in Afghanistan

Eight years into the war, the U.S. intelligence community is only “marginally relevant” to the overall mission in Afghanistan, a senior intelligence official for the international forces wrote in a report released less than a week after seven CIA employees died in a suicide attack.

Intelligence Overhaul Ordered For Afghanistan

The overhaul announced Monday will broaden the scope of intelligence gathering from hunting down extremists to gathering information about local attitudes, concerns, people and leaders as part of an effort to win over the Afghan population.

Webster Tarpley on Nigerian Staging by Rogue Moles in US Intelligence

Officials in the Obama White House are considering the possibility that the Christmas day attempt by Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Mutallab to blow up an airliner about to land in Detroit was deliberately and intentionally facilitated by unnamed networks inside the US intelligence community. This was the gist of a report by Richard Wolffe delivered in this evening’s edition of cable network MSNBC’s Countdown program, hosted by Keith Olbermann: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#34694889.

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Journal: WIRED to IC–You’re Tired, Get Wired….

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Threats, Topics (All Other)

Full Story Online

Pink Slips, Spyblogs, and More New Year’s Resolutions for the Intelligence Community

Michael Tanji spent nearly 20 years in the US intelligence community. A veteran of the US Army, Michael has served in both strategic and tactical assignments worldwide, and has participated in national and international analysis and policy efforts, including projects for the NIC, NSC and NATO. A Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow. Michael lectures on intelligence issues at The George Washington University. He is also an occassional contributor to the Weekly Standard and is the editor of _Threats in the Age of Obama.

A near-successful bombing on Christmas, a suicide attack on the CIA — it’s been a rotten ten days for the U.S. Intelligence Community. And unless things change in a serious way, the spy agencies can expect many more rotten days ahead. But there are some steps that the IC can take in 2010 that could mean fewer failures, more success, and more lives saved. Think of them as New Years’ resolutions for the spy agencies.

Pink Slips.    Go All In for 2.0.    Align Policy with Practice.    Get Real About Training.    Open Back Up.

Terrorism, transnational crime, cyber security: all problems that are only going to get worse as the world gets more wired and interconnected; all problems that cannot be addressed without a strong intelligence apparatus. The security of the nation is every administrations primary responsibility, which makes resolving to spend political capital on these low-cost, high-return efforts no-brainers.

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Journal: Evidence of Nigerian Terrorist Being Staged

09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Full Story Online

Evidence shows Nigerian bomber event was staged

All evidence shows that the nigerian bomber event was staged and was a set up.

Watch the CNN interviews with three adults on the airplane.

. . . . . . .

Secondly, there was a man that filmed the entire event. He filmed the entire event from the beginning to the end.

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Journal: Resistance to Federal Mandates Grows

08 Wild Cards, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Policies, Real Time, Threats

Resist DC: NH Legislators Look to Nullify Federal Gun Laws

While the bill’s title focuses on federal gun regulations, it has far more to do with the 10th Amendment’s limit on the power of the federal government. It states, in part:

The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution for the United States guarantees to the states and their people all powers not granted to the federal government elsewhere in the constitution and reserves to the State and people of New Hampshire certain powers as they were understood at the time that New Hampshire ratified the Bill of Rights, particularly the Tenth Amendment in 1790. The guaranty of those powers is a matter of contract between the State and people of New Hampshire and the several States comprising the United States as of the time that the compact was agreed upon and adopted by New Hampshire and the several States comprising the United States.

The regulation of inter-state commerce was delegated by the People of the Several States to the federal government in the US Constitution. Since the regulation of intra-state commerce was not delegated to the federal government, this authority, as codified in law by the 10th Amendment, remains with the State governments or the People themselves.

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Journal: Online Kindness Class Gains Traction

Cultural Intelligence

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Kindness taught in Seattle school's online class

A small private school in Seattle offered a kindness class this fall, part of a larger movement that started more than a decade ago. Offered online, the class had 250 people — the most ever — who lived as far away as Poland.

Book on Same Theme

By Linda Shaw Seattle Times education reporter

If you recently found a shiny gold dollar coin in downtown Bellevue, thank the kindness class. Ditto if you stumbled upon a piece of glass art in Pioneer Square, or a lottery ticket taped to a bus shelter with a note saying, “This may be your lucky day.”

Since mid-September, the 250 people in Puget Sound Community School's online course learned about kindness by practicing it.

Along the way, they took emotional risks, repaired relationships, improved their outlook on the world, and realized that kindness is contagious.

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Journal: Bio-Engineering Ramps Up

Earth Intelligence

FullStory Online

Researchers engineer bacteria to turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel

(Nanowerk News) Global climate change has prompted efforts to drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels. In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis. The research appears in the Dec. 9 print edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology and is available online.

Nature Biotechnology 27, 1177 – 1180 (2009)
Published online: 15 November 2009 | doi:10.1038/nbt.1586

Direct photosynthetic recycling of carbon dioxide to isobutyraldehyde