Ali Fisher is Director of Mappa Mundi Consulting and a former Director of Counterpoint, the cultural relations think-tank of the British Council. Ali blogs on network mapping and Public Diplomacy at WandrenPD.com
This [above link] is the first in a series of posts that will explore our world of disappearing boundaries – from geographic to linguistic to time to organizational – that create new opportunities and challenges to agenda setting and influence. Wikileaks, as an exemplar non-state actor in this world of “now media,” requires analysis beyond the superficial and polarized debate common in today’s coverage of both the organization and the material it disseminates. The MountainRunner Institute is working to convene a series of discussions with experts across the spectrum, including (ideally) someone from Wikileaks, to discuss the role and impact of actors like Wikileaks and the evolving informational and human landscape. If you are interested in more information or in participating, email me at blog@mountainrunner.us.
Barcelona is known as one of Spain's most vibrant cities, but when Pope Benedict XVI touches down there Sunday, he'll be greeted with something extra colorful: a massive “queer kissing flashmob.”
According to the event's Facebook page, organizers have invited same-sex couples from all over Spain to congregate in front of the city's cathedral Nov. 7 and start kissing as soon as the pope emerges from the building at 10 a.m. Organizers say that though the event will last for a mere two minutes, over 300 people are planning to attend.
Citizens, state and local law enforcement play vital role in uncovering attacks More than 80 percent of foiled terrorist plots between 1999 and 2009 resulted from observations by citizens or law enforcement officials or from law enforcement investigations, according to a new report by the Institute for Homeland Security Solutions (IHSS) that reviewed open-source information on 86 foiled and successful terrorist plots against US targets from 1999 to 2009.
“Since 2001, the Intelligence Community has sought better ways to detect and prevent domestic terrorist plots, said Kevin Strom, senior research scientist and the report's lead author. “What this report reveals is the vital role played by citizens as well as state and local U.S. law enforcement agencies in uncovering such planned attacks.”
Years ago, Robert David Steele, a noted veteran intelligence officer, told HSToday.us that “fifty percent of the ‘dots’ that prevent the next 9/11 will come from bottom-up [local] level observation” and unconventional intelligence from “private sector parties.”
Europe is seeing some of the largest demonstrations since World War II, with labor agitation being the major trademark. The reasons for this labor unrest are easy to see. Let’s look at several facts, starting with unemployment. Europe has always had lower unemployment than the United States. No longer. Since 1982, unemployment (as an average of the EU-15) has been higher in the European Union than in the United States. Actually, unemployment had already started to rise in Europe by the late 1970s, coinciding with the first steps by the EU-15 countries to construct what they later called the European Union. One consequence of forming this Union was higher unemployment, and from that time, unemployment has increased, eventually exceeding that in the United States.
There’s an election Tuesday, and you’re probably going to vote – whether your vote is meaningful or not. Some call voting a “ritual,” which is not at all to say that it’s not meaningful – rituals do have meaning. But the word is that it’s a symbolic rather than functional, practical event. The actual eddies and currents of power feel little or no impact from your single vote.
Where can you have a real impact? Doc Searls and colleagues working through Project VRM and the Internet Identity Workshop are catalyzing a redefinition of the computer-mediated vendor/consumer relationship, with the potential to transform power relationships in markets rather than in the political sphere. However market experiences dominate so much of our daily commitment of attention and thinking, a redefinition of marketplace relationships could be a redefinition of relationship and power more broadly. If we assume symmetry in vendor/consumer relationshiops, we will also assume that the relationship of an elected official to her constituents will be more symmetrical.
I’m reading Doc Searls’ “The Data Bubble II,” which includes a lot of homework – links to other articles and posts I might read to get deeper into the subjects of online identity and relationship as they pertain to marketing and the redefinition of vendor/consumer relationships. Doc quotes John Battelle, who discusses how emerging conversational media inspired an economic model he calls conversational marketing, “simply the tip of a very large iceberg, representative of a sea change in how all businesses converse with their constituents – be they customers, partners, or employees.” Battelle calls it “The Conversation Economy,” for which Doc says “we’re going to need individuals who are independent and self-empowered.”
Back to voting: the vote is symbolic of your share as a citizen within a power structure that is supposedly of, for, and by the people, though it’s increasingly obvious that votes and voters are manipulable and nodes within power structures are corruptible. In arguing for a more participatory or democratic set of structures, it’s important to know that supposed majorities are also corruptible and can be crazy as hell. We need structures that empower and that also include checks and balances on those empowered. We want to build sanity into the architecture of power, and ease dependence on the ethics and logic of mere mortals. If we build such structures for markets, they will have an impact on governance as well.
(Also interesting: Doc refers to David Siegel on “The Social Networking Bubble.” Siegel says “We’ve overstated and overemphasized the utility of social networking and are now in a marketer’s ‘greater fool’ territory.”)
Phi Beta Iota: Jim Turner coined the term “buycott.” Thomas Jefferson and James Madison understood that an informed public was a nation's best defense against enemies both domestic and foreign. Brother Lebrowsky was a contributing editor to Extreme Democracy, and lives on the bleeding edge where democracy, information, and public minds converge.
Phi Beta Iota: The Editorial Board reviewed this. This site is strictly non-partisan; political propaganda is pointed out not to endorse it, but to highlight the depth of what one author calls Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. This short film demonizes the Democratic incumbent majority while avoiding any reference to the Republican era in which the economy was destroyed (1981 forward), elective wars were started, Dick Cheney performed 23 unnatural impeachable acts and led the telling of 935 lies to the public, and the Wall Street bail-out was foisted on the public, first by the Republicans then by their look-alike lite Democratic partners in crime. BOTH parties are antithetical to the public interest; BOTH parties must be “put down” by an informed public as NEITHER party has the integrity to represent the public interest.
The two previous blasters on this subject forwarded op-ed's that in effect described the strategic aim and strategies of the hidden hands that are fomenting right wing rage. The grand strategic aim of these hidden hands is to lock in their vision of a neofascist New Normal political economy based on a foundation of a more unequal distribution of wealth cemented into place by a pattern of politics and propaganda that prey on the growing insecurities and fears of a diminishing middle class.
This op-ed (also attached below) by Frank Rich enriches the picture further by illuminating the same hologram with a slightly different, but equally valid laser. In the Pentagon, we would call Rich's description a grand tactical perspective of the Cape Job being perpetrated by the hidden hands. These grand tactics are as old as war itself. Sun Tzu called them Cheng and Ch'i, or in more modern parlance, the dazzle and stroke, or the direct and the indirect — hence the term cape job, which conjures an image of using the red cape to capture the attention of the raging bull to set it up for a skewering. Essentially, cheng ch'i operations aim to manipulate the mind (i.e., decision cycle or OODA loop) of one's adversaries (i.e., in this case the increasingly impoverished middle class) to direct their energies against themselves. Rich's analysis fits that description to a tee.
Make no mistake about it, the grand tactics described by Rich are a definitive signature of a war, in this case a class war being waged by an elite oligarchy on the mass of of the people. By its nature, it is a fight to the finish, unlikely to be conditioned by compromise or moderated by enlightened self interest, and in his last paragraph, Rich appears to sense this. Cape jobs may begin insensibly, but if they do not end the conflict quickly, with the victors offering magnanimous terms, the intensity of the conflict builds and eventually the game becomes unavoidably obvious. When that happens the cape job can sow the seeds of unpredictable blow back effects that mutate the form of and escalate the conflict beyond the control of the hidden hands stoking the cheng to stroke their victims — as it did for the German industrialists in the early 1930s (see Rich's last paragraph).
ONE dirty little secret of the 2010 election is that it won’t be a political tragedy for Democrats if a Tea Party icon like Sharron Angle or Joe Miller ends up in the United States Senate. Angle, now synonymous with racist ads sliming Hispanics, and Miller, already on record threatening a government shutdown, are fired up and ready to go as symbols of G.O.P. extremism for 2012 and beyond.
What’s not so secret is that some Republicans will be just as happy if some of these characters lose, and for the same reason.
Entire article below the line, provides deep insight into reality.
