Category: Communities of Practice

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Tom Atlee: Public Wisdom Suggested Reading

11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Book Lists, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Tom Atlee

* Titles marked with an asterisk are particularly important to this topic.

Baldwin, Christina, Calling the Circle: The First and Future Culture (Bantam, 1998)

Briggs, John and F. David Peat, Seven Life Lessons of Chaos: Spiritual Wisdom from the Science of Change (Harper Perennial, 2000)

Briskin, Alan, Sheryl Erickson, Tom Callanan, and John Ott, The Power of Collective Wisdom: And the Trap of Collective Folly (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009)

*Brown, Juanita with David Isaacs and The World Cafe, The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2005)

*Callenbach, Ernest, and Michael Phillips, A Citizen Legislature (Bookpeople, 1985)

Amazon Page

Capra, Fritjof, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (Anchor, 1997)

*Chickering, A. Lawrence and James S. Turner, Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life (Da Vinci Press, 2008)

*Crosby, Ned, Healthy Democracy: Bringing Trustworthy Information to the Voters of America (Beaver's Pond Press, 2003)

Dahl, Robert A., Democracy and Its Critics (Yale University Press, 1991)

Dowd, Michael, Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World (Plume, 2009)

Ellinor, Linda and Glenna Gerard, Dialogue: Rediscover the Transforming Power of Conversation (Wiley, 1998)

*Fisher, Roger, William L. Ury, and Bruce Patton, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Penguin Books, 2011)

*Fishkin, James S.,  When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (Oxford University Press, 2011)

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Intelligence Online: Egypt’s Army Chief US Army War College Thesis Critical of US for Being Blind to the Religious Dimension of Middle Eastern Power and Politics

Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Military
Click on Image to Enlarge

Sedky Sobhy's thesis makes the rounds

Glad to see that a bunch of news outlets picked up the thesis by Chief of Staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces Sedky Sobhy I highlighted a few days ago. Some wanted to interview me but unfortunately I was not available, but here's a couple of links.

Research paper offers insight into Egypt's new armed forces chief (McClatchy)

Professor Douglas Lovelace, the director of the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute and Sobhy's adviser, remembered him as a “bold thinker,” charming and a “very impressive officer” who often offered thoughts counter to the conventional thinking at the time.

“I do recall he was provocative and an original thinker,” Lovelace said. “It was not surprising that he would either fail completely or rise to the top.”

Egypt general's paper offers insight into thinking (Reuters)

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Greg Palast: Nine Ways the GOP Will Steal the 2012 Elections

Communities of Practice, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Knowledge
Greg Palast

Greg Palast on How the GOP Is Planning to Steal the 2012 Election

EXTRACT:

In all, 5,901,814 legitimate votes and voters were tossed out of the count in 2008. In '12 it will be worse. Way worse.

THE BOOK:  Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps

The ‘9 Easy Steps'

1 Purging is the use by partisan election officials of computer databases that identify voter characteristics (race, ethnicity, residence location, etc) to remove from registration rolls names of persons likely to be sympathetic to the “wrong” political party. Plausible pretexts for the removals are sometimes offered, but often not. Purging is what Katherine Harris did to tens of thousands of Florida voters in 2000, claiming the mostly black voters were felons when they were not.

Amazon Page

2 Caging is the mailing of do-not-forward, first-class letters to selected groups and using letters returned as ‘evidence' that voters' listed addresses are fraudulent. Partisan election officials can then strike the voters' names from registration rolls and/or throw out their mail-in ballots. This can happen en masse to military people serving overseas and voting absentee from their home addresses. Likewise to students away at school, and even to voters whose addresses on registration rolls contain fatal typos made, accidentally of course, by election data entry workers.

3 Spoiling is accomplished in a variety of ways. A famous one is to put punched-card voting setups in districts tending to the “wrong” party. Then disqualify all votes where the voter did not manage to punch the hole all the way through, as in the infamous “hanging chads” in Florida in 2000.

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Mini-Me: One Million Strike in Indonesia – For Labor, Not Religion

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Indonesia: One million on strike

Ted Sprague

Militan Indonesia, Tuesday, 09 October 2012

Amazing! There is no other word that can describe the situation on October 3. Workers all over Indonesia went on strike and took to the streets. This first national general strike in half a century truly raises expectations and hopes that it will be a turning point for the Indonesian labour movement.

More than 1 million workers struck in more than 20 districts and 80 industrial zones. Ports and industrial zones were blocked. Workers conducted factory “sweepings” to rally other workers to strike as well. (“Sweeping” is a recent militant tactic often used by Indonesian workers, whereby they go from factory to factory to rally other workers to strike, often forcing the owners to open the factory gates and stop productions).Where owners prevented their workers from joining the strike by closing the factory gates, masses of workers from outside took down those gates to liberate their brothers and sisters. The following short reports give a picture of the militancy of the workers and the dimension of this general strike.

Read full article reporting region by region.

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Event: 11 Oct Dublin – Drawing Lots for Democracy

Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Government

The Lottery as a Democratic Institution: A Workshop

  • Dates: Thursday, 11 October 2012 (9am to 4pm) and Friday, 12 October (9.15am to 12pm)

  • Venue: Trinity College Dublin

This workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary research team from across Europe to consider the lottery as a democratic institution. The event is being jointly organised by Gil Delannoi (Science Po), Oliver Dowlen (UCL) and Peter Stone (Trinity College Dublin).

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Chuck Spinney: Questions Not Asked in Presidential Debates

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Military
Chuck Spinney

National Insecurity Questions That Won’t Be Asked in the Presidential Debates

How Bad Will Things Get in Afghanistan?

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY.

Counterpunch, October 08, 2012

For reasons that were quite clear well before the Afghan “surge” began (see here and here), America’s Afghan adventure is now ending without achieving its goals. The prospects for a civil life in Afghanistan are likely to become even more remote than they were before we intervened.  Indeed, some experts think the ground work has been laid for an even more destructive civil war than that which occurred after the Soviets left Afghanistan with their tail between their legs in 1989.  Only time will tell how bad things will be, but it is a virtual certainty that events will be ugly and murderous.

One would expect a healthy accountable democratic government, intent on learning from its errors, would be inclined to seek an understanding of how it got itself into such a mess.

For example, will there be soul searching lessons-learned exercise by a military that repeated most of the strategic and tactical blunders it made in Vietnam? To wit: it dumbed down strategy into a mindless attrition strategy driven by body counts and assassinations in the name of winning hearts and minds.  It substituted high-cost contractor-intensive technologies for low-cost tactical smarts in a guerrilla war.  It over-relied on air power and killing from a safe distance.  It allowed its reactive obsessions with force protection to the displace tactical initiative of small unit commanders.  And perhaps most decisively, it relied on a fatally flawed grand strategy to quickly create a huge, materiel-intensive, indigenous army out of whole cloth, trained and equipped in the US military’s image.  Don’t expect to hear any questions about these issues in the Presidential debates.  And don’t expect to see any serious introspection by a military – industrial – congressional complex (MICC) intent on perpetuating its lucrative business-as-usual.

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Marcus Aurelius: As Military Suicides Rise, DoD Focuses on Private Weapons

Ineptitude, Military
Marcus Aurelius

Troops' concerns are well-founded.   A few years ago, a company commander in the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, KY, developed his own multi-faceted program that caused a big flap.  He had his own policies, registration forms, etc.  Believe he was requiring troops living off-post and owning private weapons to turn those weapons into the company arms room for “secure storage,” etc.  Vastly exceeded both his authority and anything remotely reasonable.  Troops are right to be scared of stuff like this.

As Military Suicides Rise, Focus Is On Private Weapons

By James Dao

New York Times, October 8, 2012, Pg. 13

With nearly half of all suicides in the military having been committed with privately owned firearms, the Pentagon and Congress are moving to establish policies intended to separate at-risk service members from their personal weapons.

The issue is a thorny one for the Pentagon. Gun rights advocates and many service members fiercely oppose any policies that could be construed as limiting the private ownership of firearms.

But as suicides continue to rise this year, senior Defense Department officials are developing a suicide prevention campaign that will encourage friends and families of potentially suicidal service members to safely store or voluntarily remove personal firearms from their homes.

“This is not about authoritarian regulation,” said Dr. Jonathan Woodson, the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. “It is about the spouse understanding warning signs and, if there are firearms in the home, responsibly separating the individual at risk from the firearm.”

Dr. Woodson, who declined to provide details, said the campaign would also include measures to encourage service members, their friends and their relatives to remove possibly dangerous prescription drugs from the homes of potentially suicidal troops.

Read full article.