Civil Society – Page 214 – Public Intelligence Blog

This is interesting!

EXTRACT (12 Literacies)

01 Play: the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving. Having a strong sense of play can be helpful when you pick up a new piece of technology that you've never used before, when you're trying to write an essay and your outline isn't functioning as you'd hoped, and when you're designing anything at all, from a dress to a web page to a concert's program.

02 Performance: the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery. Being able to move fluidly and effectively between roles can help you when you're exploring online communities, when you're trying to decide what actions are ethical, and when you're shuffling between home, work and school.

03 Simulation: the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes. Being able to interpret, manipulate and create simulations can help you understand innumerable complex systems, like ecologies and computer networks – and make you better at playing video games!

Continue reading “Pierre Levy: New Media Literacies (12 of Them)”

2011/08/022011/08/02

Penguin: TwitterGate – Gingrich Leads Political Corruption in Cyberspace, 92% Fake, Palin, Romney, Bachman, Pawlenty All Fake 70% of Their “Followers”

Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

92 percent of Gingrich’s Twitter followers are fake, search firm says

Newt Gringrich’s campaign denies the allegations, claiming they never used “agencies” to inflate the presidential candidate’s Twitter follower numbers.

GlobalPost, 2 August 2011

A social media analytics site says that 92 percent of Newt Gingrich’s 1.3 million Twitter followers are fake. The New York-based company, PeekYou, used an algorithm to evaluate whether Gringrich’s followers were real individuals, ABC News reports. It found most of Gringrich’s followers were business accounts, private accounts, anonymous accounts with no other web presence or spambots.<

. . . . . . .

PeekYou has also analyzed the Twitter accounts of the other Republican presidential hopefuls, according to Gawker, and has found that Gingrich is not the only GOP politician with a large spambot following. PeekYou claims that only 20 percent of Sarah Palin’s followers, 26 percent of Mitt Romney’s followers, 28 percent of Michele Bachmann’s followers and 32 percent of Tim Pawlenty’s followers are real humans.

Read full story….

Phi Beta Iota: Useful metrics emerge from this–extrapolating and by extention, everything about Gingrich can be presumed to be 92% fake unless proven otherwise, and everything about the other Republicans as 70% fake unless proven otherwise. Cyberspace is very unkind to those who lie for a living.

2011/08/02

Chuck Spinney: Israeli Ethnic Cleansing of the Bedouin

05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military

Palestinians fear for ancient West Bank water source

By Tom Perry, Reuters

RASHAYIDA, West Bank | Thu Jul 28, 2011 6:43am EDT

(Reuters) – – Hewn from rock, the cavernous cisterns which dot the desert beyond Bethlehem have for centuries harvested winter rain to provide shepherds and their flocks with water through summer.

Under a baking sun, an elderly Bedouin explains how cisterns he remembers from childhood, many of them restored to full working order in the last few years, are once again helping his goat-herding community to survive.

That, he concludes, is why the Israeli authorities who control the West Bank have demolished at least three in the area since November.

“Maybe they are doing this to make us leave. We will not leave,” said Falah Hedawa, 64, sitting on cushions in his tent home pitched in the hills that slope down to the Dead Sea.

Out into the desert, a stagnant pool marked the spot where one of the cisterns, chiseled out of a hillside, had stood until its recent demolition. A mud trail on the otherwise dry ground indicated where the water inside had drained away toward a wadi, a valley which becomes a river when the rain falls.

Israel has demolished 20 rainwater collection cisterns in the West Bank in the first half of this year, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which monitors conditions in the Palestinian territories.

Read full article…

Phi Beta Iota: There are two crimes against humanity here, the first against the Palestinians, the second against the centuries old cisterns that collect winter water.

The Attack on the Liberty–The Untold Story of Israel’s Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship

2011/08/01

Winslow Wheeler: Defense Cuts, Defense Flim-Flam

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DoD, Government, IO Impotency, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Open Government, Peace Intelligence, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Technologies

WinslowWheeler Cropped — Winslow Wheeler

There are numerous misleading and misinformed assertions being made about the defense spending parts of the debt deal.

The White House's “fact sheet” asserts a $350 billion savings in the “base defense budget.” The $350 billion in defense savings that the White House declares apparently uses a different “baseline” (basis of comparison) and pretends that a two year cap the bill establishes on “security” spending will extend to ten years. Most misleading of all, it assumes that all savings in the “security” category (which includes DOD, DOE/nuclear weapons, all State Department related spending, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security) will occur only in DOD spending. In fact, the “security” category was designed to broaden the base for “defense” cuts and to lessen the impact on DOD. The undocumented $350 billion in “security” savings will actually translate into lesser reductions in DOD spending, but the amount is unknown. The actual amount will be decided by Congress in the future.

2011/08/01

John Steiner: Rebuild the Dream Pressures Democrats

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of Peace

To Rebuild the American Dream, Put Pressure On Democrats

EXTRACT

It would be great if progressive change could be achieved solely by pressuring Republicans, but that’s not how it works. It’s not just Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Congressmember Michelle Bachmann, and the Tea Party that hold back change – it’s the many Democrats who betray campaign promises to reward wealthy donors/corporate interests and/ or to “broaden” their base.

Read full article…

2011/07/312011/07/31

Tom Atlee: Making Wise Decisions on Public Issues

About the Idea, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Officers Call, Open Government, Policies, Policy, Reform, Standards, Strategy, Threats

Dear friends,

I have worked for several months to develop the ideas in this article and to articulate them in an accessible way. They are fundamental understandings underlying the co-intelligence vision of a wiser democracy.

If the ideas intrigue you, you can find a longer version with more detailed guidelines and references online. I wrote the abstract below to make it easier for you to see the whole pattern at once. I hope you find both versions interesting and useful.

Coheartedly,
Tom

============

GUIDELINES FOR MAKING WISER DECISIONS ON PUBLIC ISSUES

by Tom Atlee

As a civilization we have tremendous collective power, but we don't always use it wisely. We can make good decisions, but we face messy, entangled, rapidly growing problems with complex, debatable causes. Efforts to solve one problem often generate new ones. We need more than problem-solving smarts here. We need wisdom.

A good definition for wisdom here is

the capacity to take into account
what needs to be taken into account
to produce long term, inclusive benefits.

To the extent we fail to take something important into account, it will come back to haunt us. But often we only realize we overlooked something long after our decision has been implemented. Certain practices – because they lead us to include more of what's important – can help us meet this challenge. Here are eight complementary ways to do this. The more of them we do, and the better we do them, the wiser our collective decisions will be.
Continue reading “Tom Atlee: Making Wise Decisions on Public Issues”

2011/07/31

Chuck Spinney: Europe’s Far Right Connects to Israel

Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Law Enforcement

07/29/2011 04:20 PM

The Likud Connection

Europe's Right-Wing Populists Find Allies in Israel

By Charles Hawley, spiegel online

Islamophobic parties in Europe have established a tight network, stretching from Italy to Finland. But recently, they have extended their feelers to Israeli conservatives, enjoying a warm reception from members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition. Some in Israel believe that the populists are Europe's future.

Phi Beta Iota: Politicians and “leaders” have been grossly negligent about population policies including assimilation of legal immigrants, stopping illegal immigrants, educating the population, enforcing cultural expectations (e.g. not allowing women to be abused, part of assimilation). Both Europe and the USA have been mis-managed by lowest common denominator “leaders.”