SharpInsights #53: Modern Advice From a Long-Dead Roman
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman dramatist, Stoic philosopher, politician, and history's earliest proponent of competitive intelligence. Wait…what?
One of Seneca's most famous quotes is a management mantra: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” For executives making decisions in a recession-battered marketplace, “preparation” means more than skimming last year's sales figures or catching up on trade magazines.
Competitive intelligence reveals the current, comprehensive, objective truth about your product or service, brand, company, customers, and industry. The cold hard truth can lead to a warm fuzzy feeling for managers who apply their CI preparation to opportunity.
India-Russia: India will buy 250 to 300 advanced stealth fighter aircraft from Russian, according to Defence Minister A.K. Antony, as he announced the deal worth nearly $30 billion. Antony and Russian Defense Minister Serdyukov said Russia would supply the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) as well as 45 transport aircraft. India also will jointly manufacture the fighters under license for ten years.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: The future of the Indian Air Force appears to be linked primarily to Russian rather than US firms. This agreement thinly hides an Indian strategic judgment about the threats it faces from China and Pakistan, about the US as a supplier for coping with those threats compared to the Russians.
India is making long term preparations to be ready for a major war after ten years that will require fifth generation fighters because the most likely enemy – presumably China – also will have those air capabilities. The Russians are willing to sell India the aircraft and to license the technology. The US is not building significant numbers of fifth generation fighters and will not sell them even to Israel.
The Indians, Russians and Chinese do not share the US strategic outlook favoring small wars and counterinsurgency forces.
Phi Beta Iota: Since the mid-1990's, when the best minds associated with the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute turned decisively away from the two-major theater war model, and we presented the 1+iii (One Plus Triple Eye) strategy, the US has been incoherent with respect to strategic policy, acquisition, and operations. Ideology is not a substitute for intelligence, and technology is not a substitute for thinking.
Anti-immigration crusader Lou Dobbs has been relying on undocumented, illegal workers in his stables and homes
by Isabel McDonald
Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
Phi Beta Iota: A careful reading of the entire piece suggests that all of the illegal workers were hired by others, e.g. stable owners, transport companies, landscaping companies, and that Dobbs was an indirect beneficiary of their services. This is an example of “Deep Corruption” that is endemic but not necessarily individually assignable.
Shareable presents an excerpt from Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, Rushkoff’s introduction to his bold-yet-accessible work. On Tuesday, October 12, Shareable will run an exclusive interview with Rushkoff, followed with an online discussion on October 13 and 14 between Rushkoff and the entire Shareable community. We invite you to take part in the discussion of these provocative and compelling ideas.
When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them.
In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It’s really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.
For while digital technologies are in many ways a natural outgrowth of what went before, they are also markedly different. Computers and networks are more than mere tools: They are like living things, themselves. Unlike a rake, a pen, or even a jackhammer, a digital technology is programmed. This means it comes with instructions not just for its use, but also for itself. And as such technologies come to characterize the future of the way we live and work, the people programming them take on an increasingly important role in shaping our world and how it works. After that, it’s the digital technologies themselves that will be shaping our world, both with and without our explicit cooperation.
UPDATE: 7 Oct 10 Rally Point Identified for 30 Oct Sanity Rally
Sanity Rally (Inside the Red Dotted Lines)Jon Stewart Full Story Online
Jon Stewart Plans ‘Restoring Sanity' Rally to Counter Glenn Beck Event–October 30
“We're looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat, who feel that the loudest voices shouldn't be the only ones that get heard, and who believe that the only time it's appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on some is when that person is actually Hitler,” Stewart says on his Daily Show website.
The date, Oct. 30, “has no significance whatsoever,” Stewart says gleefully. “Ours is a rally for the people who've been too busy to go to rallies, who actually have lives and families and jobs (or are looking for jobs) — not so much the Silent Majority as the Busy Majority. If we had to sum up the political view of our participants in a single sentence . . . we couldn't. That's sort of the point.”
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And lest anyone think it's just about answering Tea Party conservatives and the Beck-a-palooza last Aug. 28, Comedy Central's other wild and crazy news satirist, Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report, says he'll hold a competing rally the same day, called “The March to Keep Fear Alive” to combat “creeping reasonableness.” Stewart's people “want to replace our fear with reason,” Colbert wrote. “But never forget ‘reason,' is just one letter away form ‘treason.'”
Short Review
Phi Beta Iota: These two individuals are making a huge contribution. The is no underestimating the common sense of the American people BUT they have to be engaged, their voices heard, and integrity maintained in the three branches of government.
The Huffington Post is doing a very fine job of raising key issues, but in isolation and out of context. Here is one story they have brought forward. As Cleveland found out when they had to raze to the ground 11,000 abandoned units, foreclosures come with very heavy social and financial costs. It is not to late to stop all foreclosures and evictions as we recommended in October 2008, to no effect. America is going through a multi-dimensional crisis without any leadership whatsoever. One way to understand the crisis is to study the Revolution Matrix and the Negative Book List. The Positive Book List requires some semblance of leadership and legitimacy, at this time not to be found in America, outside of the Virtual Cabinet at The Huffington Post, which does not really exist–it could, but it does not.
It is a pity that last week's Senate Armed Services committee hearing on “Department of Defense Efficiencies Initiatives” did not get more coverage, as there were some startling assertions made.
Consider what Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) said. McCaskill, by the way, is more qualified than most members of Congress to talk on the subject of contracting. During her years as a prosecutor she conducted performance audits on state programs. She was named as one of the select senators to sit on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, formerly known as the Truman Committee. In fact, she was a co-sponsor of a major bill that established a modern day Truman Committee called the Wartime Contracting Commission, charged with investigating wasteful, fraudulent and abusive contracts in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In addition to working to establish a committee to examine wartime contracting, in 2009 she was named chairman of a new subcommittee that investigates contracting abuses throughout the federal government. The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight strives to root out government waste by focusing on contracts and the means by which the federal government provides accountability to those contracts.
So when she says the following we should pay attention:
I–I'm a conservative person when it comes to estimating numbers, because of my auditing background. I think it's very conservative to say that we've had $100 billion go up in smoke in Iraq, from bad contracting, that it's not as if there weren't competing people who could have been brought in; it just was easier not to. And so, I urge you to keep us posted on how you're integrating that kind of contracting into the contracting reforms.
Phi Beta Iota: It occurs to us, reading this, that “Deep Corruption” is the equivalent of “Deep Secrecy.” Deep Corruption is corruption built into the system as legal or “within the bounds of reasonable dishonesty.” Individuals can claim to be honorable, and believe themselves to be honorable, but in “going along” they are in fact part of Deep Corruption.
