Looting Libya: Insider View of Reasons for War….

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 05 Energy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government, IO Sense-Making, Military, Peace Intelligence
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The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System

by Prof. Peter Dale Scott

Centre for Research on Globalization, 29 April 2011

EXTRACT:

As  Ellen Brown has pointed out, first Iraq and then Libya decided to challenge the petrodollar system and stop selling all their oil for dollars, shortly before each country was attacked.

Continue reading “Looting Libya: Insider View of Reasons for War….”

Patch.com: Hyper-Local Online News & Views

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, IO Sense-Making
John Steiner

I rarely promote major media outlets such as AOL, but the past few months I have been geting a LOT of good quality local news to fill the gap left by ailing local newspapers with AOL's venture called patch.com. With community based and locally edited editions for towns and communities all across the nation, Patch has become a major local source for news, events, and perspectives in my own community. At first skeptical, I tried it and found it a wonderful new way the internet can become a new source for local news and information!

Check it out at patch.com and find a location near you, or become your own news source by starting one if your area lacks one.

Today I found out that AOL and Huffington Post have merged, and Arianna herself announced a new “blog” section for each local patch across the country. Here's is her announcement:

Continue reading “Patch.com: Hyper-Local Online News & Views”

The Role of Facebook in Disaster Response

Advanced Cyber/IO, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, IO Technologies
Patrick Meier

The Role of Facebook in Disaster Response

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Patrick Meier|

I recently met up with Facebook colleagues Simon Axten and Matt Perault to discuss the role that they and their platform might play in disaster response. So I thought I’d share some thoughts that come up during the conversation seeing as I’ve been thinking about this topic with a number of other colleagues for a while. I’m also very interested to hear any ideas and suggestions that iRevolution readers may have on this.

There’s no doubt that Facebook can—and already does—play an important role in disaster response. In Haiti, my colleague Rob Munro used Facebook to recruit hundreds of Creole speaking volunteers to translate tens of thousands of text messages into English as part of Mission 4636. When an earthquake struck New Zealand earlier this year, thousands of students organized their response via a Facebook group and also used the platform’s check-in’s feature to alert others in their social network that they were alright.

But how else might Facebook be used? Continue reading “The Role of Facebook in Disaster Response”

Immense Possibilities: TV Show & Web Community

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Policies, Real Time, Threats
John Steiner

Hi All:  This is well worth paying attention to, checking out and even sampling.  Do see the great endorsements below.  Learn more about my old friend and colleague, Jeff Golden, the creator of this remarkable new program.   Immense Possibilities is also interactive. As you'll see from the website, Jeff is looking for our input and collaboration.  Congratulations to Jeff for creating a new public forum for what's working and for those making a true difference in these challenging times and are offering solutions of great benefit, who so often don¹t make it into mainstream news. May this show become part of the “:new main stream”.

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD.

Cheers,  John

From: Jeff Golden

Dear Friends:

Suppose you found a public television program that brought you stunningly creative people who

¨    Craft brilliant projects that strengthen their communities for hard times to come

¨    Unite people across political and philosophical divides

¨    Connect Millenials, Gen X- and Y-ers, Baby Boomers and Elders in compelling ways

And suppose it was right there on your computer or television  every Tuesday evening. Would that be worth your time?

Tuesday evening, May 24, 7:30 pm:  Frances Moore Lappé

http://www.immensepossibilities.org

In the right-hand corner you'll see a box to enter your email address.

If you do that, you¹ll get a message about once a week on what IP is doing.  We will not, repeat not, pass your address onto anyone else for any reason.  Every message we send to you will have an easy option to unsubscribe.

Hope you'll give IP a try.

IMMENSE POSSIBILITIES is a weekly public television program, followed by an interactive webcast, that pull together the work of Jeff Golden  and other social inventors who share a clear set of beliefs, values and goals.  If these align with your own, and you share our passion for boosting possibilities that can forge a healthier future than the one that seems likely if we don¹t change and innovate, let's work together.

All the best,
Jeff

Dutch Royal Academy Demands Open Data Plans

Advanced Cyber/IO, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making
Michael Ostrolenk

Open Access, Open Data are rocking forward….

Tip of the Hat to Frank van Harmelen at Twitter for the leads.

The Dutch Approach to Research Data Infrastructure

See Also:

2004 Statement by Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science on Access to Research Data from Public Funding

2009 Open Government Data Netherlands Update

2009 Open Data and the Future of Funded Research

2011 Open Research Data Day 18th May

2011 Open data: an international comparison of strategies

2011 [PDF] A Global Perspective on Open Access Amsterdam, January 20, 2011

Sterling Seagrave: Reflections of an Old China Hand

02 China, 03 Economy, 03 India, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, History, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Sterling Seagrave

Gold rising further except for profit taking bursts. China is buying all the gold it can get, and unloading all the paper dollars it can dump.. Other countries, including Russia are buying gold. I can see the Yuan or RMB playing a larger role as a global currency, but most people are too ignorant of China to accept the Yuan quickly or easily. The Swiss have a huge mass of gold well stashed, so I can see the Swiss franc playing a larger role. It's hard to make a forecast for the Euro, although it will almost certainly survive the US dollar. It's also possible that the Swiss might make a deal with the EU that would result in the Euro being backed by Swiss gold. Now that the head of the IMF has been burned at the stake, his very good brain is of no further use. The EU is scrambled eggs right now. Sarko can't survive without a miracle. India's potential will take a very long time to organize and get rolling; I went to school there and it's a seething cesspit.  It's time for the US to get out of foreign wars, but unlikely that it will because of the weapons market. Obama seems impotent. The Pentagon and its corporate backers and partners seems to be deciding policy. I'm not happy about Petraeus at the agency.  I think the USG and the US are totally hosed. Desperate for a new demon. Good time for Lee Kuan-yew to retire. Wise of him. The immediate future does not look good. War and more war. Civil war. Revolution. Take your pick. The cupboard is bare. It's all been looted. What a mess America has made since 1945. Moments of glory, decades of folly and stupidity….  Israel and the Palestinians are a parody of the world as a whole.

I think the last real ingots of gold in Manhattan were in the basement of the Twin Towers. The Fed and the Treasury don't dare be transparent or audited, because whatever real (solid) gold they ever had was moved to Malta and other offshore or mountain stashes long ago, replaced with Play-Dough. Christ, even the Bureau of Engraving and Printing stops now and then to change engraving plates and produce “Presidential dollars” to be used as bribes by the White House (ever since Truman); we have that from a guy who is now retired after running the shop  since 1945. The satellite imagery boys, where I have sources, dream of being about to electronically penetrate the earth to a depth of 100 feet or more from satellites but when I last checked 3 or 4 years ago they were still dreaming. They fiddle with HAARP trying to achieve earth-penetration, and only end up causing huge earthquakes and tsunamis; measurements already show the poles have begun to shift partly due to melting ice masses, but also due to fiddling with HAARP. The Fukushima quake and tsunami have been attributed to fiddling with HAARP, possibly the Sumatra disaster as well. Not all scientists are smart and prescient. We're damn lucky they haven't already blown us to smithereens, while scratching their backsides. Never forget that the Fed has always existed as a fraud by intent and design. President Wilson commented years after enabling the Fed in 1913: “I have destroyed my country.”

See Also:

INTERVIEW WITH STERLING AND PEGGY SEAGRAVEOSS.Net, Inc.

Review: Gold Warriors–America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold

Amazon’s Broken User Experience

03 Economy, 04 Education, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, IO Sense-Making
Jon Lebkowsky Bio

Doc Searls has posted a slideshow explaining how Amazon’s user experience is broken, in the context of a discussion about vendor relationship management (VRM), which is about evolving a world where customers have at least symmetry in the power relationship of customer and vendor. The slides are old (January 2010) and things might have changed, but I don’t think they’ve changed as much as they should’ve, because I still experience similar frustrations when I visit Amazon.

Phi Beta Iota: Amazon is a great company with an extraordinary cloud offering and enormous potential they have chosen to leave unattended.  They rejected a 2007 proposition (Amazon as the Hub of the World Brain) that would have seen them create a markeplace for informed relationships and knowledge by  the call or page, and they have rejected all suggestions for enabling buyers, readers, and reviewers to “co-create” the Amazon experience.  It's a pity mostly because the world need multiple forms of M4IS2 hybrids, and this is something Amazon could have provided as a service of common concern, with both the cloud for melded shared information and the authors and their readers as the human intelligence component.