Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 2504 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/07/08

Michel Bauwens: Integrity & Regional/Global Change

Advanced Cyber/IO, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Policies, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Real Time, Serious Games, Strategy, Threats

220px-Michel_Bauwens_crop — Michel Bauwens

Integrity is becoming part of the global agenda. I especially recommend Christian Arnsperger and Mark Whitaker for interesting takes on this.

Toward a Bioregional State (Online Summary)

Whitaker argues that the basis of environmental degradation is not capitalism or market relations. Environmental degradation is supremely caused by unrepresentative state elite decisions and how they manipulate markets to serve particular consolidated materials, so solutions should focus on additional formal checks and balances against these informal ‘ecological tyrannies', via more green constitutional engineering.

Toward a Bioregional State: A Series of Letters About Political Theory and Formal Institutional Design in the Era of Sustainability (Book)

Six Framework Conditions for Global Systemic Change

“The main framework conditions that I believe would be needed for a genuine transition to a sustainable pluri-economy to get off the ground:

(http://eco-transitions.blogspot.com/2011/06/what-transition-part-4-renewing_05.html)

2011/07/082011/07/08

Winslow Wheeler: Congressional Fraud As Usual

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military

WinslowWheeler Cropped — Winslow Wheeler

Weekend Edition
July 8 – 10, 2011

Pork, Dodges and Gimmickry

The Pentagon Remains Immune

By WINSLOW T. WHEELER, Counterpunch

The House of Representatives will soon be debating the new Department of Defense (DoD) appropriations bill. It's expensive – $649 billion, close to another post-World War II high. The bill covers almost all of DoD's expenses for fiscal year 2012 – both routine expenses, such as basic payroll, training and weapons acquisition (known as the “base” budget), and war spending – for Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

Pretending reform and frugality, members of the House Appropriations Committee – Democrats and Republicans alike – packed the bill with pork and gimmicks.

The bill would spend $17 billion more than last year. But House appropriators are calling this increase a cut because it's less than the original defense budget request President Obama sent to Congress in February. That request was made irrelevant by the president's subsequent decision to reduce long-term security spending by $400 billion.

In addition to pretending frugality, the committee apes reform. It explicitly denies the existence of earmarks in the bill, saying in its own committee report, “Neither the bill nor the report contains any congressional earmarks, limited tax benefits, or limited tariff benefits as defined in clause 9 of rule XXI.”

I found many earmarks.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: There is nothing wrong with the US Government–or the economy–that could not be corrected quickly if the public-private sector partnership restored integrity as a non-negotiable starting point. This is what woke George Soros up–he finally realized that the degree of legalized corruption negated all reasonable operating assumptions for doing business.

2011/07/082011/07/08

Chuck Spinney: An Aghan’s Angst Over Corruption

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call

I received this email from an Afghan (Pashtun) friend, who now lives in Europe and has a doctors degree from Oxford

Chuck

I’m sending you this email for two reasons:

1. The account of what has happened is fairly accurate.

2. Because the author's type of belief beggars the imagination: Namely, that a “democracy” can be imposed over-night on a social system that evolved over 2000 years with its own highly developed, deeply ingrained social dynamics, by a bunch of self-interested crooks.

I love his prescription: “The crisis created by Karzai's Court underscores the necessity for a genuine Afghan led dialogue on democratic reform. Options must be explored to strengthen the independence and resilience of Afghanistan's democratic institutions.”

If this could not be done during the past ten years, with this bunch in power, what hope is there that it’ll be ever accomplished with Karzai & Co. still at the helm ?

On the other hand, it’s understandable that he peddles this type of nonsense, because otherwise he’d be out of a job.

Karzais Court

By Jed Ober, Foreign Policy.com, July 7, 2011

In January of this year, Afghan President Hamid Karzai yielded to domestic and international pressure and endorsed the seating of the new Afghan parliament against the recommendation of a Special Court he created to evaluate election fraud claims. Few would have predicted then that six months later Karzai's Court would bring the country to the brink of complete political collapse.

Read full article….

2011/07/07

Mark Zuckerberg: What To Do Once People Are Connected

Advanced Cyber/IO

: Mark Zuckerberg

Social networking is at “an inflection point,” Zuckerberg said.

“When you think about what social networking meant for the last five or seven years, since Facebook has been around, the narrative has mostly been around connecting people,” he said. “Until the last couple of years, most people really had open questions about whether social networking was going to become this … ubiquitous phenomenon.”

“Now,” he continued, “the world probably believes it's going to be everywhere”–whether through Facebook or its competitors. “People generally believe that people want to stay connected to their friends and family and coworkers.”

So, the next five years, Zuckerberg said, is no longer going to be about simply creating a place for people to get connected. It’s going to be about all the things you can do once people are connected. Specifically, “What kind of cool stuff you’re going to be able to build and what kind of new social apps you’re going to be able to build, now that you have this wiring in place,” he said.

Source

Phi Beta Iota: Zuckerberg's brilliance is being retarded by his lawyers, forcing him into a small box. Both Facebook and Microsoft need–but are not “computing”–a strategic analytic framework for achieving M4IS2. Microsoft needs to create CATALYST; Zuckerberg needs to link up with Range Networks and start focusing on the five billion poor. The next big deal is free cell phones and national to regional call centers dealing in substance, ideally all committed to Open Everything, monetizing the information in the aggregate, NOT Internet access, which should be–as the UN has recently suggested–a human right in the emergent information era.

Reference: Microsoft, Facebook, & the Future

Review: The Philanthropy of George Soros – Building Open Societies

2011/07/07

Jon Lebkowsky: Drought No Fireworks A Metaphor

Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence, IO Sense-Making

Uncle Vanya vs Transformers near the 4th of July

It’s a weird culture that mashes Chekhov into the same week with Optimus Prime, but we followed an experience of Uncle Vanya (with terrific performances by Rob Matney and Liz Fisher, and staging that puts you right there on the farm) with a 3D romp through the Transformers universe, and somehow I’m trying to connect the dots. In Chekhov’s play, you could see trouble brewing – Rob says “that Vanya is about the moment before an epochal and cataclysmic culture shift as a culture and these lives look into a future that appears to promise little.” Sound familiar? Transformers, on the other hand, offers a world where one set of massive robotic aliens wants to enslave the human race, and another set – against all logic – are sworn to protect us. A massive battle levels Chicago; at the end, humanity is free from Decepticon enslavement (but not necessarily from our own particularly human enslavements, not addressed in the film, though the nastiest character on board is the human accountant, played by Patrick Dempsey, who makes a devil’s deal with the Decepticons).

While I experienced fanboy delight at the expert use of 3D and exquisitely choreographed robotic battles in the Transformers film, the very real tensions within Uncle Vanya were more real and more compelling. No Decepticons there, but the sense of a subtler, willing enslavement – hard-working farmers exploited by a spoiled elite, and everyone miserable except perhaps the character Sonya, who ends the play with these words: “We shall hear the angels, we shall see the whole sky all diamonds, we shall see how all earthly evil, all our sufferings, are drowned in the mercy that will fill the whole world. And our life will grow peaceful, tender, sweet as a caress. . . . In your life you haven’t known what joy was; but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait. . . . We shall rest.” (This makes me think of the idea of grace in Malick’s Tree of Life, which is probably a reference to the concept of “actual grace”: a supernatural gift of God to intellectual creatures (men, angels) for their eternal salvation, whether the latter be furthered and attained through salutary acts or a state of holiness.)

After Vanya and Transformers, we had a muted 4th of July – in the midst of drought, no fireworks, surely a metaphor for our times.

2011/07/072011/07/07

Seth Godin: The Arrogance of Willfull Ignorance

Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency

The arrogance of willful ignorance

People have come before us, failed, learned, written it down. Scientists have figured out what works, and proven it. Economists have gained significant understanding about the long-term impacts of short-term decisions. And historians have seen it all before.

How dare we, then, decide to just wing it? To skip class. To make up history. To imagine that science is a matter of opinion, something optional, a diversion for the leisure classes… How can we work in the marketing tech field, for example, without knowing about David Ogilvy and Lester Wunderman and Claude Hopkins? Or Kaushik and Shirky?

If you're doing important work (and I'm hoping you are), then you owe it to your audience or your customers or your co-workers to learn everything you can. Feel free to ignore what you learn, but at least learn it.

Phi Beta Iota: Willful ignorance is a form of corruption or lack of integrity.

Review: Day of Reckoning–How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart

Review: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle Review: In the Name of Democracy–American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond

Review (Guest): Idiot America — How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)

2011/07/06

DefDog: Internal US War Over Spy Blimps

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency, Military

The obvious questions, apart from how easy it is to shoot these down, is not being asked: how many deeply-qualified humans could be fielded for the same amount? The obsession with technology continues….and the Air Force has still not solved the triple-whammy of drones: 1) the reality that pilots are cheaper than bandwidth; 2) Gorgon Stare's 50 video channels require 150 individuals (three watches of 50 each) to monitor; and 3) we are still firing very expensive munitions at people whose suspicious activity is squatting to defacate by the side of aroad.

Giant Spy Blimp Battle Could Decide Surveillance’s Future

WIRED Magazine, 6 July 2011

Noah Shachtman

How many giant experimental spy blimps does the military need over Afghanistan, exactly?

That’s one of many questions the Senate Armed Services Committee is asking after an intramilitary battle has erupted over what many expect to be the future of aerial surveillance. The Army and the Air Force each have their own football field-sized airships in the works; the Senate panel wants to know why it should pay for both — especially as the Air Force seems fickle about its model and keeps changing the spy sensors on board. Legislators are asking: What gives?