Category: Communities of Practice

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Josh Kilbourn: Trampling the Bill of Rights

09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement
Joshua Kilbourn

Found this provocative in its detail.

Guest Post – “Trampling The Bill of Rights”

Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 4:19 pm

I think we can all agree that this best thing about this site is the collective knowledge and wisdom of its members. As such, last week I commissioned “CaliforniaLawyer” to research and author a “guest post” that would deal with the travesty and threat that is the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Fortunately for us, he obliged and his work is presented below.

“All Hail King Obama [Gingrich, Romney, et al.] – New National Defense Authorization Act Renders Constitutional Bill of Rights Mere “Tradition”

Is anyone concerned about the lawlessness and unconstitutionality of the movement to grant the President the power to detain, without trial or representation or due process of law, any citizen that is capriciously perceived to represent a threat to the United States?

Mr. Ferguson is.  I am.  I know you are, too.

Let’s get right to the issue.  The authors of this bill claim that the bill would not enlarge the universe of detainees eligible for indefinite detention in military custody.  FALSE.  The current Authorization for Use of Military Force, that is, the OLD LAW, confines the universe to persons implicated in the 9/11 attacks or who harbored those who were.  The detainee provision in the NEW LAW would expand the universe to include any person said to be “part of” or “substantially” supportive of al-Qaida or Taliban.

Read full analysis with many links.

 See Also:

5 Things to Know About Detention in the Defense Bill

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Koko: Crowd-Sourcing Weather Forecasting

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process
Koko

Koko Sign:  Gorillas better forecasters than computers.

Crowdsourcing Snowstorm's Westward Model Shift

AccuWeather.com, Dec 7, 2011

I was surprised to see this HRRR forecast model prediction of tonight's Northeast snow showing no snow for Harrisburg and York, PA, and showing the axis of heaviest snow (4-8″) over or west of State College, PA. This disagreed with overnight AccuWeather and NWS forecasts that showed it further east. This storm will be a good test of last minute “nowcasting” by the new higher-resolution models that we have access to this winter season. I thought I'd “crowdsource” this forecast on the WeatherMatrix Facebook page so my readers could weigh in.

. . . . . . .

This is an example of how Social Media is revolutionizing weather forecasting, something I'll be writing about in WeatherWise magazine‘s Jan-Feb. 2012 issue, and it's not at all unseen here at AccuWeather — when our company was started 50 years ago, our founder Joel Myers noted that the average consensus forecast of his entire meteorology class would always beat the best daily forecasters – which is why we have a twice-daily map discussion here at HQ to get all of the meteorologists on the same page – an internal crowdsourcing if you will.

Read full post with weather graphics.

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Kristan Wheaton: Corruption USA and More…

Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence
Kristan Wheaton

2011 – a crisis in governance: Protests that marked 2011 show anger at corruption in politics and public sector

Berlin, 1 December 2011 – Corruption continues to plague too many countries around the world, according to Transparency International’s 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index released today. It shows some governments failing to protect citizens from corruption, be it abuse of public resources, bribery or secretive decision-making.

Transparency International warned that protests around the world, often fuelled by corruption and economic instability, clearly show citizens feel their leaders and public institutions are neither transparent nor accountable enough.

TRACE Releases Report on Bribe Demands in the United States Patterns in U.S. Compared to Patterns in Six Other Nations

The United States Report summarizes and analyzes 73 bribery demands in the U.S. reported anonymously to TRACE’s online Business Registry for International Bribery and Extortion (BRIBEline) between July 11, 2007 and November 15, 2011.

A key finding from the United States report is the prevalence of bribe solicitations made in exchange for an undue advantage.  Over one-third of bribe demands in the United States – the highest rate among countries studied to date by BRIBEline – are premised on an improper quid pro quo, such as winning new business (25% of all reported demands), agreeing to attempt to influence a government official in exchange for a bribe (5%) or receiving inappropriate favorable treatment, such as a favorable court ruling (4%).

Phi Beta Iota:  Both recommended for a full reading (neither is very long).

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Michel Bauwens: Reclaiming the Right to Insolvency

Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
Michel Bauwens

Reclaiming the Right to Insolvency

 

Michel Bauwens
5th December 2011

Excerpted from Franco Berardi:

“A new concept is coming out from the fogs of the present situation: a right to insolvency. We’ll not pay the debt.

The European countries have been obliged to accept the blackmail of debt, but people are refusing the concept that we have to pay for a debt that we have not taken. Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Debt the first 5000 years, (Melville House, 2011), and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, in La fabrique de l’homme endetté (editions Amsterdam, 2011), have started an interesting reflection on the cultural origin of the notion of debt, and the psychic implications of the sense of guilt that the notion of debt brings in itself. And, in his essay, Recurring Dreams The Red Heart of Fascism, the Anglo-Italian young thinker Federico Campagna locates the analogy between the post Versailles Congress years and the present in the debt-obsession:

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  Gripping.  Mankind is at a philosophical turning point.  Organized people are confronting organized money, and the integrity of humanity is in the balance.

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DefDog: SASC Questions Sanity of Pentagon InfoOps

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Military
DefDog

The Pentagon may have hit a speed bump in the expansion of its growing worldwide information operations…………

A speed bump for Pentagon’s information ops

The Pentagon may have hit a speed bump in the expansion of its growing worldwide information operations.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has asked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to assess the effectiveness of a series of news and information Web sites that have been initiated by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in recent years in a bid to counter extremist messaging. The so-called “influence Web sites” are maintained by various overseas commands and operated by defense contractors.

For fiscal 2012, SOCOM sought $22.6 million in the Overseas Contingency Operations account — primarily intended to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — for the initiative.

Congress, over the past few years, has been pressing the Pentagon to justify the hundreds of millions of dollars spent overseas under various headings such as “strategic communications” and “information operations.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  No one now serving in the US Government actually has a clue what Information Operations (IO) should be, because no one now serving in the US Government can combine intelligence and integrity to get to holistic analytics with deep “true cost” data.  IO is all information in all languages all the time.  Secret intelligence is 10% of all-source intelligence and all-source intelligence is 10% of IO.  IO includes policy, acquisition, and operations feed-back loops that must be transparent, truthful, and replete with trust–that pretty much eliminates ALL inter-agency and intra-agency information.  We've learned nothing since 1992.

See Also:

2011 Cyber-Command or IO 21 + IO Roots

2011 from 1999: Setting the Stage for Information-Sharing in the 21 st Century (Full Text Online)

2008: Creating a Smart Nation (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

Paul Fernhout: Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)

Search: Steele USMC C4I 1990′s

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John Robb: Libertarians Give Up Sea, Focus on Honduras

08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Hacking, Methods & Process
John Robb

Libertarian seasteaders give up on the sea, focus on autonomous regions starting with Honduras.

Former “Seasteaders” Come Ashore To Start Libertarian Utopias In Honduran Jungle

Forgoing the plan to build independent floating cities away from chafing laws, some libertarians—led by Milton Friedman’s grandson, no less—have found something better: desperate countries willing to allow the founding of autonomous libertarian cities within their borders.

The seasteader-in-chief is headed ashore. Patri Friedman (that’s Milton Friedman‘s grandson to you), who stepped down as the chief executive of the Peter Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute in August, has resurfaced as the CEO of a new for-profit enterprise named Future Cities Development Inc., which aims to create new cities from scratch (on land this time) governed by “cutting-edge legal systems.” The startup may have found its first taker in Honduras, whose government amended its constitution in January to permit the creation of special autonomous zones exempt from local and federal laws. Future Cities has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to build a city in one such zone starting next year.

. . . . . . .

The brainchild of New York University economist Paul Romer (read his thoughts on FCI here), a charter city combines a host nation’s vacant land (in this case, Honduras) with the legal system and institutions of another (e.g. Canada) and residents drawn from anywhere. Romer’s central insight is that good governance is transplantable—rather than wait for a basket case nation to come around begging, a charter city could help show it the way, as Hong Kong did for Deng Xiaoping.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  The focus on eradicating corruption from day one is most interesting.  While  the group does not appear to have fully thought through their role as a magnet for criminals, there are regions of Africa, Latin America, and even the now warming Arctic North that could permit this kind of innovation to test its premises.