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.
Abraham Lincoln
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.
Select bibliography of terrorism resources
Standard Note: SN/HA/5866
Last updated: 8 January 2013
Author: Diana Douse
Section: Home Affairs Section
A selective bibliography of terrorism resources. This includes reports on terrorism legislation by the Independent reviewer and government policy.
Alexander Horne is the library specialist on terrorism relating to the UK. Ben Smith is the library specialist on international terrorism.
This information is provided to Members of Parliament in support of their parliamentary duties and is not intended to address the specific circumstances of any particular individual. It should not be relied upon as being up to date; the law or policies may have changed since it was last updated; and it should not be relied upon as legal or professional advice or as a substitute for it. A suitably qualified professional should be consulted if specific advice or information is required.
Social Media Intelligence (SMI) — A (very) short introduction
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Phi Beta Iota: WARNING NOTICE: Right now the Subscribe is set to inform via email every time the Journal is updated. Recommend you wait to subscribe until they change this to a daily digest.
This is what is happening to American society almost without comment or public discussion. What this report misses is that as our government is currently structured each state has two senators. We now have Federal Senators who represent a few hundred thousand people, and others that represent tens of millions. As the emptying of rural America continues this trend will be exacerbated, and it will lend force to the Gre! at Schism Trend.
We are entering into a very interesting period of transition moving power back to the states. This is part of the Great Schism Trend. The Theocratic Right, unable to control national policy in the way they would like, have realized that they can get control at the state level — in certain states. And they have. As a result they are implementing their social vision. In some Red value states it is now almost impossible for a poor woman to get re! productive healthcare or a pregnancy termination. And, as this report makes clear, in those same Theocratic Right value states they are now going to impose their Randian economic vision. It is going to be interesting to see how this turns out. So far Red value states are generally recipients not donors; their programs are made possible through the underwriting of Blue value states.
Mali-France: Last Friday, France began its direct intervention in the Malian civil war, at the request of the Bamako government after Islamists, terrorist and jihadis captured a key town on the road from the north to Bamako. The immediate French objective was to stop the jihadis at Konna and to deter them from moving farther south to capture Bamako. Konna had been the boundary between the Islamist and government held regions.
French Rafale fighter jets bombed Islamist rebel targets in central Mali for three days. With French Air Force support, Malian forces – almost certainly with French ground forces –recaptured Konna on Saturday, a day after it was seized by Islamist rebels.
A Malian rebel spokesman said the French also bombed targets in the towns of Gao, Lere and Douentz, over the weekend.
France's Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said French intervention on Friday had prevented rebels from seizing Bamako itself. He said air raids would continue in the coming days. He also said that France has deployed about 550 soldiers to Mali, split between Bamako and the town of Mopti, 500 km northeast, as part of “Operation Serval” – named after an African wildcat.
The French foreign minister made it clear that France was now targeting Islamist bases in the north of Mali and said Algeria, which shares a long border with Mali, had given permission for its air space to be used for bombing raids “without limit”.
Islamist rebels reportedly were abandoning Timbuktu and other northern towns to try to escape the French air attacks for which they have no defense.
Individual Skype with Robert $100, Group Skype $250.
You are free to be an entreprenuer, I have no problem addressing a full auditorium you collect $500 or more, donate $250.
My objective is to reach as many as possible across the USA and elsewhere, with a simple message: “the truth at any cost lowers all other costs.”
I will email you a receipt and then we can coordinate directly on timing.
I can speak on any topic across the 98 categories in which I read, and am particularly conscious of the topics covered in the below two lists of lists of books I have reviewed, and of course the discipline of intelligence, which is retarded and corrupt as practiced in the USA. I also recommend my 6 Star List.
I will say with clarity that I am certain that integrity is coming back into vogue. Those of us that have been the gold standard for integrity during these dark days will be valued again in the future, and we will reverse the terrible directions imposed on us all by white collar criminals and their self-made political servants.
Available for short and longer-term assignments, globally mobile as a geographic bachelor. Have brain, will travel.
The Solution is the Systems Perspective—-the Key Component Is Human Compassion—-and Common Sense Tells Us That It's Best to Keep Networks Intact and Change How They Function, Rather Than Destroy Them and Star from Scratch.
Lately I've been thinking about two realities:
1. When the economy crashes, there's no traditional solution to the problem because the scale and complexity of the global interdependence of national currencies is unprecedented.
2. Networks can take a long time to form, so it's generally a bad idea to eliminate them and start from scratch, especially if you try to eliminate all of them at once and start all of them from scratch. That's a recipe for disaster. That's what happened in the Russian Revolution, and look how that turned out. That's what Mao tried to do, and look how that turned out.
So I've been trying to understand this looming crisis from the standpoint of banking, since banks are the institutions that control and manage money. So I'm doing some research so I can understand the problem, when it occurs to me that people who are already in the banking industry could show us all the solution if they had the proper mindset—-the mindset which this blog is devoted to exploring.
If someone in the banking industry could be made to see what you and I can see—-if they could be trained to see humanely, ethically, and holistically, and to start seeing things from the systems perspective and the perspective of complexity—-then they would probably instantly see the solution to the currency and banking problem, because they know the system. And if their creativity was inspired by the same mindset that your creativity and my creativity are inspired by, they could write a better book about it, instantly, than you or I could in a dozen years. And they could see concrete solutions, where you and I would only see abstract solutions.
