Category: Communities of Practice

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John Robb: Bitcoin is surging out of start-up status

03 Economy, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics
John Robb

JOURNAL: Bitcoin is getting past start-up cruft

A Bitcoin wallet ID for me: 18YYkAMVyZVt6gzpZvBEF5RgsJ7aT7a8Yh

Bitcoin, the digital currency system, is starting to mature. As is always the case, maturity isn't based on age (weak correlation) or success level. It's based on experience. More specifically, maturity is based on how many difficulties the system overcomes. The greater or more fiendish the difficulties successfully navigated, the more maturation gained.

Few systems have been through meat grinder of experience as much as bitcoin. From the media to pundits/experts to (the) government to hackers to criminals. Even a bubble! Everyone has taken a shot at it. Despite all of this, it is still trading at around ~ $4. The software is getting better (there is encryption built into the desktop wallet now). The core system remains intact and unbroken despite a huge number of attacks.

Most importantly, people are starting to learn how to handle real/tangible digital cash. Handling digital cash, particularly lots of it, is serious business. It needs to be protected and you can't leave it in the care of anybody you don't trust.

Essentially, bitcoin has repeatedly proven that digital currencies can work in the wild.

NOTE: The most interesting us of bitcoin to me? If it was used as a PLATFORM for private currencies or publicly traded securities rather than as simply as a currency.

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Marcus Aurelius: WSJ on Viet-Nam War – Lack of Integrity

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, DoD, Intelligence (government), IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call, Policy, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy
Marcus Aurelius

Well, this is harsh w/r/t Westy…

Wall Street Journal
October 8, 2011
Pg. C5

Bookshelf

The War Over The Vietnam War

By Max Boot

Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam. By Lewis Sorley, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 416 pp., $30

September 2006. Violence levels are spiking in Iraq. Every day brings reports of more suicide bombings, more IEDs, more death and destruction. So bad has it gotten that the Washington Post reveals that a senior Marine intelligence officer has concluded “that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.”

This was the situation when I was among a dozen conservative pundits escorted into the Oval Office for a chat with President George W. Bush. I asked him why he didn't change a strategy that was clearly failing. He replied that he had no intention of micromanaging the war like Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have personally picked bombing targets in Vietnam. This commander in chief vowed to respect the judgment of his chain of command.

Phi Beta Iota:  Full text with added links below the line.  This review and the book are largely crap.  Viet-Nam was lost for two reasons: because all historical and indigenous influences were for the residents and against the occupiers; and because the US Government was corrupt and was in direct support of a Catholic mandarin and his sister who took corruption, torture, and exploitation of a Buddhist et all land to new heights.  The review misses two of the most important books on the matter, one, Triumph Foresaken that supports the “we could have won” argument, the other, Who the Hell Are We Fighting? that makes it clear that the corruption of intelligence and the corruption of military and political planning were at the heart of America's failure in Viet-Nam.  Westmoreland was not a bad man, but he represented–as most Army leaders do today–the orthodox, the West Point Protective Association, the Army above Republic, the “go along to get along,” and of course the toxic brew of “leadership” that is arrogant, inattentive, poorly educated, and not at all concerned about the welfare or their troops.  In the US Army today, “education” is for show or ticket punching, not to actually learn anything useful to the future.

Full Text and Links below the Line.

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John Robb: Occupy (Insert XYZ) – Capitalism’s Crisis

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Government
John Robb

OCCUPY (Insert Your City Here): Protesting Capitalism's Crisis

Let me spool you up on what's going on with the Occupy movement.

It's an open source protest (there's lots about how open source protests and insurgencies work on this blog, in posts all the way back to 2004).  So, it's not like the protests you've seen in the past (just as the insurgency in Iraq was different than 20th Century insurgencies).

This protest is more like what we saw in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, etc.  You know, the protests that toppled governments.  The big difference between this protest and those protests is that it's not directed at governments.  It's aimed at companies.  Not just any companies, it's aimed at the banks that run/own the global economy.  The heart of the global Capitalist system.

Click on Image to Enlarge

So, why have governments suffered disintermediation (either consciously or subconsciously by these protestors)?  This protest is ignoring governments and standard political processes because:

  • governments are much weaker than the global economy (they are bankrupt, hollow shells of what they were at the end of the Cold War),
  • they are too ineffectual and/or corrupt to change anything even if they are coerced (see the US, Ireland and Greece for recent examples),
  • too little will change even if the government changes parties (see the US for how lame politics and politicians have become).

What Occupy is Really About

The real reason we are seeing this movement right  now is because

Capitalism, the last great ideological system, is in crisis.

This isn't merely a crisis of outcomes (economic depression, financial panic, etc.), it's a crisis of BELIEF.  While people generally believe in the idea of capitalism, a critical mass of people now think that the global capitalist system we currently have is so badly run, so corrupt, so terrible at delivering results that it needs either a) a complete overhaul or b) we need to build something new.

In short, in its tiny way, this protest may be the start of a reformation of the church of capitalism.

A splintering that may change everything….  For better or worse depending on how well you did in the old, corrupt system.

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Robert Steele: Trip Report – Occupy Wall Street 6 October 2011 – Second American Revolution is Real

11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Hacking, InfoOps (IO), IO Deeds of Peace, IO Deeds of War, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Mobile, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Threats
Robert David STEELE Vivas

I visited New York City 6-7 October 2011.

First I met with Alexa O'Brien, one of the brilliant minds behind U.S. Day of Rage and its focus on Electoral Reform and non-violence as an absolute.  [My memo that Fox news still has not read is here.]

Although they are also focused on a Constitutional Convention, as Lawrence Lessig has been, I reiterated the point that Electoral Reform is the one thing that can be demanded today (no later than 6 November, one year prior to Election Day), with severe consequences for every elected person if Congress fails to pass Electoral Reform by President's Day (February 2012), to include recall or impeachment, and camp-outs at their offices and in public spaces near their homes through to Election Day 2012.

Photos and Additional Comments Below the Line

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Marcus Aurelius: Romney Slams Obama, Postures At VMI

02 China, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency
Marcus Aurelius

Romney Criticizes Obama at Military College

This morning, Mitt Romney used his foreign policy address at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina to criticize what he called the Obama administration's “feckless policies of the last three years.”

“I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world,” Romney said, with an audience of cadets sitting behind him. “Not exceptional, as the president has derisively said, in the way that the British think Great Britain is exceptional or the Greeks think Greece is exceptional. In Barack Obama’s profoundly mistaken view, there is nothing unique about the United States.”

Romney criticized the president on cutting the defense budget, as well. “I will reverse President Obama’s massive defense cuts,” he said. “I will begin reversing Obama-era cuts to national missile defense and prioritize the full deployment of a multilayered national ballistic missile defense system.”

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Tom Atlee: Dawning Realizations re Occupy Wall Street

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
Tom Atlee

Dawning realizations re Occupy Wall Street

It is slowly dawning on me that I've seen events very similar to Occupy Wall Street.

The first time was on the Great Peace March in 1986 which started out from Los Angeles as a hierarchical mega-PR event with 1200 people and tons of equipment. It suddenly and traumatically went bankrupt in the Mojave Desert two weeks later. 800 marchers went home. 400 marchers didn't. It took them (us) two weeks sitting around an BMX track in Barstow to reorganize with no formal leaders (but tons of ambient leadership) and little support (but tons of vulnerability that soon attracted grassroots support). As we re-started our 3000-mile trek with 400 people, it turned into a 9 month miracle of self-organization (I mean, where DO you put 400 people each night 15 or so miles further down the road?!!), out of which came my first experiences of and ideas about collective intelligence, which led to my life work today. The lives of hundreds of other people were transformed by that March, whose emergent troubadours sang “echoes of our care will last forever..”. The folks at Occupy Wall Street are doing a similar experiment in passion-driven self-organization.

The other comparable events I've seen were run by Open Space and World Cafe – especially Open Space.

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