Graphic: Water Stress After Technology
03 Environmental Degradation, 12 Water, Earth Orientation, Policies-Harmonization, Strategy-Holistic CoherenceGoogle Owns You…What’s Your Problem?
Advanced Cyber/IO, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, IO MappingGoogle Memo Reveals Importance of Android Location Database
Just how important is location-based data to Google? Just how important is it for the sun to rise each morning? Same deal.
This question comes in the wake of eyes turning toward mobile handsets—specifically, Apple's iPhone and smartphones based on Google's Android OS—for the information they collect about the various wireless access points and cell phone towers the devices connect to (or notice) throughout the course of a given day.
Australia Considers Switch to Danish Monarchy
Offbeat FunA Danish monarchy may suit our needs better
Sydney Morning Herald, May 2, 2011
With the royal wedding once again bringing the Australian republic debate to the surface, I've realised that another recent royal wedding brings an interesting third option to the table. Australia could stay as a monarchy but change its allegiance to the Danish crown. After all, the crown princess and likely future Queen of Denmark is Australian, and the future heirs to the Danish throne will all have Australian heritage. The same cannot be said for the House of Windsor.
There are other advantages too. Denmark has had a carbon tax since 1992, their economy has not gone broke, and instead they have grown to become a leader in renewable energy technologies. Perhaps they can help us with ours.
Copenhagen is a nicer city than London, and the Danes don't whinge as much. It would give us a reason to move our capital to Hobart, which is much nicer than Canberra.
For the foodies, Denmark has the world's best restaurant. Perhaps the only downside is that the Danes don't take cricket seriously enough.
Adam Micolich Redfern
Integrity, lacking in the White House…..
Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Media
The hip, transparent and social media-loving Obama administration is showing its analog roots. And maybe even some hypocrisy highlights.
White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news.
The Chronicle's Carla Marinucci – who, like many contemporary reporters, has a phone with video capabilities on her at all times –shot some protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel.
Update: In a pants-on-fire moment, the White House press office today denied anyone there had issued threats to remove Carla Marinucci and possibly other Hearst reporters from the press pool covering the President in the Bay Area.
Chronicle editor Ward Bushee called the press office on its fib:
There’s Something Happening Here…[or Not]
Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence
There’s Something Happening Here…
May 1, 2011
by Venessa Miemis
I came across this post from Dave Pollard via Twitter the other day, and found it so provocative that I am compelled to crosspost. (I emailed Dave and he gave me his permission.) After I retweeted it, a few people wrote back saying it was overly pessimistic and doom-and-gloomy, but after looking through some of Dave’s other posts, he seems to actually be quite optimistic that the power of local community and resilience can “save the world.” Some other posts of his work checking out – A Framework for Personal Action, How to Save the World Reading List, and a really neat list of 65 Essential Abilities for a Relocalized World. Anyway, the piece just made me go “hmmm,” so I wanted to share. The original can be found here.
Phi Beta Iota: We agree with the deep dismay, we do not agree with the forecast.
The ONE THING that is agile and resilient in the face of catstrophic complexity is the human brain–all of them, all the time.
Industrial Era governments and corporations and non-governmental organizations are now pathologically inept, and must be replaced by hybrid networks that share information and achieve sustainable progress through trust and consensus.
Chuck Spinney: Obama’s Failure of Intelligence & Integrity
Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Policies
My friend Jeff Madrick, and old fashioned liberal democrat in the best sense of the term, has penned a pithy analysis of the anti-empirical madness now dominating the contemporary American political economy. Jeff concludes that the Right ignores its track record, particularly regarding the clear economic effects of tax cuts, and is rarely challenged on the issue. Madrick is correct. The question is why?
More precisely, why is political debate shaped more by a new dark age of irrational romantic ideology than the by the rationality and empiricism bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution?
For what it worth, here is my answer: Money. (What follows is my view, and should not be attributed to Jeff.)
Look no further than at a Democratic Party that has sold out, and in so doing, forgot its roots, having grown arrogant, effete, and soft in the comfortable aftermath of its dominance under Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson, each of whom, whatever his faults, was at least a fighter. The real problem corrupting our warped politics has less to do with the Right Wing Wrecking Crew than with the rise of wimpish neo-liberal and pro-defense Democrats (e.g., like Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama), who are now being reinforced by the so-called progressives, who are willing to go along with Obama's strategy of appeasing the right wing wreckers, rationalizing that any alternative to Obama will be worse. A more reliable pathway to strategic defeat is hard to imagine. Maybe the wrecking crew's winner-take-all politics of fang and claw ought to be answered by a more principled politics of fang an claw.
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Obama's Failure of Intelligence & Integrity”
Four Weapons Against Humanity
07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), IO Secrets, Military, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the commons,
But lets the greater villain loose
That steals the commons from the goose.
– 16th century English rhyme
March 23, 2011
Four weapons
Posted by leavergirl under civ, problem of power, traps
Anthropologists have noted three main pathways to power. I say there are four. And out of these pathways come four types of weapons used against us, and four types of weapon industries. One of these has been obvious to all, two became more and more visible as the 20th century progressed, and the last needs far greater exposure than it 
has received. What are those weapons? What are the main ways to inflict damage on human beings by those who seek to dominate?
Read concise elegant discussion of each of the following:
1. Physical Weapons .. 2. Economic Weapons .. 3. Ideological Weapons including Religion & Rote Education .. 4. Government as a Weapon
Phi Beta Iota: There are two literatures that are relevant here, the first represented by such books as Tragedy & Hope and its introductory companion the Naked Capitalist, and the second by a less well known but amply robust literature on the sovereign individual. A general strike and a refusal to pay taxes are the legitimate last resort of an abused public. Similarly, a public demand for Electoral Reform, absent which the legitimacy of any government is ended in the eyes of all, can be equally compelling. The times they are a'changing. We have high hopes for 2012 as the year of awakening and reconciliation based on truth.
See Also:
