Collective decision making began in the Americas long before the deliberations that produced the Mayflower Compact. In research done for the Kettering Foundation, Ruth Yellowhawk showed that a legacy of tribal deliberation has carried over into modern day decision making.
The foundation wishes to delve more deeply into this legacy and its contemporary applications as part of its study of citizen decision making worldwide. To continue their research, Kettering has established the Ruth Yellowhawk fellowship.
Fellows are selected on the basis of proposals to tell the stories of either historical or contemporary decision making that includes accounts of how problems were identified, issues were framed, decisions were made, and actions taken.
Every now and then potentially game changing innovations show up. Wikileaks is one of them, something that shifts the relationship between centralized power and broader national and international populations. We don't know what exactly will happen with it, but we do know that we're on a different playing field now.
I want to highlight two other potential game changers.
Published 23 August 2005, the Ludwig von Mises Institute article by Pierre Lemieux discusses the actual decline of resource prices–including “scarce” resources–and the reason: advances in human ingenuity. This supports our basic proposition on this web site, that the single best investment that could be made to create a prosperous world at peace is to give the five billion poor free access to the Internet so as to nurture and harvest their brainpower.
Until his death in 1997, economist Julian Simon predicted a continuous decline in resource prices. In 1980, he made a famous bet with environmentalist Paul Ehrlich. Simon’s bet was that a $1,000 basket of any five metals chosen by Ehrlich would be worth less (in constant dollars) 10 years later. Ehrlich lost. In 1990, the value of the basket at current market prices was down more than 50%. Ehrlich had to send a $576.07 check to Simon, representing the drop in the basket value. In fact, the prices of all the metals chosen by Ehrlich had fallen.[5]
In his challenging 1981 book The Ultimate Resource, Simon showed that resource prices had generally decreased over time. The relative price of oil (in terms of other goods) has fallen by perhaps as much as two-thirds between the 1860s and today. During the same period, the price of oil in terms of salaries has decreased by more than 90%.
This latest revision of the Information Operations Primer provides an overview of Department of Defense (DoD) Information Operations (IO) doctrine and organizations at the joint and individual service levels. The IO Primer begins with an overview of Information Operations, Strategic Communication and Cyberspace Operations. (Note: as the emergent concepts of Strategic Communication and Cyberspace continue to assume increasing importance, the Primer has expanded to include discussion and input of these topics). At each level it describes strategies or doctrine, agencies, organizations, and educational institutions dedicated to the information element of national power. Finally, the document concludes with an IO specific glossary and hyperlinks to information operations, strategic communication and cyberspace operations related websites.
This is a document prepared primarily for use by the staff, faculty, and students of the U.S. Army War College. Wherever possible, internet web sites have been given to provide access to additional and more up-to-date information. The book is intentionally UNCLASSIFIED so that the material can easily be referenced during course work, while engaged in exercises, and later in subsequent assignments.
Some say the internet is the only field of effective protest-activism left — in the face of intractable establishment power, the growing militarization of local police and so forth. That may be a bit melodramatic, but the hacker group Anonymous has been giving it a shot with their actions that started in June of this year. What I didn't know until I saw this video (uploaded July 7th) is that Anonymous claims to be rolling out a one-year, three-phase plan, of which the first phase recently concluded. Here's their video manifesto — full of sound, fury and gung-ho chest-beating, but also entertaining and provocative.
Phi Beta Iota: The video is a blast–very professional, deeply developed. We are ALL “anonymous” in the face of tyranny. Anonymous Attack is the alter ego of Public Intelligence. When no one goes to jail for crashing the US Economy, the US Government loses all legitimacy and credibility. Lies are neither patriotic or helpful. Epoch A is crashing. Epoch B is emergent. Our focus is on non-violent intelligence (decision-support) with integrity in the public interest. In the face of the vastly more destructive actions of the governments and corporations, and the benign corrupt neglect of non-governmental organizations, we can understand digital destructive attacks in the name of public justice. Learn more about our public intelligence plan below. May God Bless and Preserve the American Republic as it was originally conceived, not as it has been corrupted. “Ideas are bullet-proof.”
