Category: Communities of Practice

EDIT of 21 January 2013:  I have gotten both sharp criticism from folks I revere, and complements.  I am more than willing to delete this, but I am more interested in having people think outside the lines.  I've made some revisions, adding issues and readings in each section.   Email me as you please, robert.david.steele.vivas [at] gmail [dot] com.  I'm doing this to raise some ethical nuances, not to deny or revise history.  Relevance to today:  the “government” rarely tells the truth, and the “reasons” it gives for doing things that ultimately benefit the few at the expense of the many are generally, at best, “flimsy” and at worst, “calculated lies.”  All institutions are lacking in both intelligence (decision-support) and integrity (holistic transparent analytics).  Wars are a form a global crime, they are not fought for the reasons given, and the public ALWAYS loses while bankers ALWAYS gain.  We need to change that.  Thomas Jefferson had it right — we need to be better armed than the government — not just guns, but intelligence with integrity.  That's what I think about.

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A colleague I respect very much suggested I watch Lincoln, the new movie, for an understanding of a leadership style that worked.  Having dismissed the movie because of its erroneous depiction of the Civil War as being about slavery (it was actually a war for and against secession, and a war of conquest from the north of the south), I demurred.  Today I read the following from Bill Clinton speaking to an adoring crowd in Hollywood, and it put me to thinking about the point my colleague was trying to make:

“A tough fight to push a bill through a bitterly divided House of Representatives: Winning it required the president to make a lot of unsavory deals that had nothing to do with the big issue.” A little shrug. “I wouldn't know anything about that,” Clinton said. His audience laughed.

President Abraham Lincoln's struggle to abolish slavery “reminds us that enduring progress is forged in a cauldron of both principle and compromise,” Clinton went on. This film “shows us how he did it, and gives us hope that we can do it again.”

I have known for some time that I am viewed as uncompromising, perhaps even arrogant, in my insistence on intelligence with integrity, and my intolerance of the civil service and uniformed leaders who pander to politicians who shake down corporations and banks for campaign contributions, and then discount the public treasury by 95% solely for the purpose of getting their 5% kick-back, without any deep thought of the public interest, and certainly without considering any ethical evidence-based decision-support.  Those same civil service and uniformed leaders are never held accountable for failure and roll over into retirement jobs with the industries they have not been holding accountable themselves.  At the end of the day, 50 percent of every federal dollar is waste, and the other 50 percent is primarily beneficial to the recipient of the taxpayer revenue, not to the taxpayer.

A mass murder and an alleged suicide are very much on my mind these days.  The mass murder is that of Sandy Hook, and the alleged suicide is that of Adam Swartz.  I am quite certain that the government is covering up the facts on Sandy Hook, and not investigating the death ostensibly by hanging, of Aaron Swartz.  I will return to these in my conclusion.

First I will touch on The War, Principle, on Compromise, and then on Citizen Intelligence / Counterintelligence and finally on Autonomous Internet.

Continue reading “Reflections on Lincoln, Principle, Compromise, Autonomous Internet & Citizen Intelligence / Counter-Intelligence 2.0 with Meta-RECAP”