The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Michael Ostrolenk: The Transpartisan Imperative in Public Policy. Recorded July 29, 2011 as part of The Rutherford Institute's Summer Speaker Series.
Michael was Co-Director for Reuniting America 2006-2007, then President of Reuniting America in 2007-2008. He is now the Executive Director of the Transpartisan Center in Washington DC.
We dolphins are not too thrilled about this idea. Humans have not evolved very far from their Neanderthal roots, and the idea of human hoards invading and polluting the seas is scary to those of us for whom sustainability and resilience comes naturally. Requires further study.
Silicon Valley billionaire reveals plan to launch floating ‘start up country' off San Francisco
Daily Mail, 11 August 2011
PayPal-founder Peter Thiel was so inspired by Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand's novel about free-market capitalism – that he's trying to make its title a reality.
The Silicon Valley billionaire has funnelled $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute, an organization that aspires to launch a floating colony into international waters, freeing them and like-minded thinkers to live by Libertarian ideals.
Mr Thiel recently told Details magazine that: ‘The United States Constitution had things you could do at the beginning that you couldn't do later. So the question is, can you go back to the beginning of things? How do you start over?'
The floating sovereign nations that Thiel imagines would be built on oil-rig-like platforms anchored in areas free of regulation, laws, and moral conventions.
The Seasteading Institute says it will ‘give people the freedom to choose the government they want instead of being stuck with the government they get.'
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Journal: Seasteading and Start-Up Countries
Phi Beta Iota: The idea of seasteading in some form of idealic libertarian island of paradise is fairly distant from reality. Accepting that the libertarians will be armed and alert, this concept fails to account for a) the outlaw sea; and b) the dead sea. There is no solution for any group of humanity that is sustainable absent its embracing all humanity.
Trending today–
Lakoff: How to Rescue the American Dream from the GOP's Nightmare
Phi Beta Iota: This report, while responsible (unlike the current food fight a year later), does not go far enough. It allows the borrowing of one trillion a year to continue, while observing that interest on the debt could reach one trillion a year by 2020. The principle recommendations, all sound but insufficient, are listed in the Overview section.
August 9, 2011
The Whack-a-Mole Endgame Begins in Afghanistan
Americans Have the Clock, But the Taliban Have the Time
By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch
Cap Ferrat, France
Obama’s surge and de-surge has, therefore, created a reinforcing dynamic that is playing into the hands of the insurgents by seducing the United States into increasing its reliance on a pointless, reactive, “whack-a-mole” strategy. Like a judo specialist, the insurgents will use the expenditure of American energies to exhaust American forces and paralyze American political willpower by inducing our military to over and under react to an unfolding welter widely dispersed insurgent attacks
Phi Beta Iota: At home, the teen riots have started in Philadelphia. More riots are certain to follow, and more “random” shootings of anyone representing the US Government are likely west of the Mississippi. This is almost the perfect storm–all that is missing is a water failure in New York City followed by a firestorm, and massive epidemic across California.
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BIG QUESTION: Gold or Virtual Currencies?
As anticipated, we're on the brink of a global economic depression (again).
There's a strong possibility that a long running global depression will lead to a reshuffling of the global economic and political landscape. IF that happens, many of the fiat currencies we currently use will simply evaporate.
Given this backdrop, here's today's big question:
If the dollar and euro implode…
…will the next global currency be gold or networked virtual currencies (like bitcoin)?
Until the new currency platform emerges, the safest hedge for the future is building, buying, or trading for anything that can produce food, energy, water, and products locally.
Phi Beta Iota: George Soros has dumped gold and is largely off the stock market. John Robb is one of the best observers of chaos versus resilience–his advice above coincides with William Greider's finding in Come Home America, to wit, financial offerings are fraud, asset investments (at the local level) are real. What all of this leads up to is that we should all stop investing in old systems, and instead do the right thing: invest in bottom-up localized resilience that yields sustainable benefits for all–real assets for real people.
Here is a presentation by David Eaves (from three years ago), on the importance of collaboration, facilitation, and conflict resolution skills for successful free and open source software and content projects (as well as the need for better on-line tools to support all that):
“Community Management Presentation”
His key point is that “facilitation” (enabling the community) is an essential part of open source software collaborations or open content collaborations, and that we have not prioritized for “facilitation” either in who runs such projects, the companies built around them, how people are trained, or what our online tools are actually good at supporting.
He makes a point that (in round numbers) written text over the web only conveys about 10% of human communication intent, with about another 40% being intonation and the last 50% being body language (so, 90%+ of communicated intent is lost by using text).
He says this is a reason a lot of web communications go wrong with various emotional-related misinterpretations of what people wrote, especially when people have no common face-to-face history together. He presents a model of negotiation where people build “relationship” and “communication”, and then iteratively explore “interests”, “options” to pursue those interests, and “legitimacy” (or likelihood an option will succeed) to find common ground they can work together on as a “commitment” instead of pursuing “alternatives” to the collaboration.
He contrasts that with a competitive up-front take-it-or-leave it style of advocacy for specific actions by others (a style which does not first explore broader common interests that are behind why the specific actions are desired, where common ground might be easier to find by taking a step back from the specific apparent conflict to see a bigger picture of common interests and creative ways to pursue those together).
He suggests that every conversation has four aspects (Inquire, Paraphrase, Acknowledge, and Advocate) and says people spend too much time on “Advocate” to the exclusion of these other important aspects and related skills. In general, he suggests these communications issues are why so many free and open source projects have problems and that we need better tools to support this sort of facilitation across all aspects of a project (coding, marketing, fundraising, tracking defects, providing support, etc.).
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