The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Venessa Miemis is a futurist and digital ethnographer, researching the impacts of social technologies on society and culture and designing systems to facilitate innovation and the evolution of consciousness. She is currently pursuing a Masters in Media Studies at the New School in NYC.
She is the principal organizer with Doug Rushkoff of CONTACT, a new event.
An Idea Worth Spreading: The Future is Networks
Venessa Miemis. March 16 2010
This weekend I experienced a snowcrash; a moment where the seemingly disparate pieces of information floating in my head came together. A synapse fired, a new connection was made, and I was brought to a new level of consciousness, a new way of seeing the world. In reading this over, it almost sounds obvious, but it took me a while to get here. I hope that by sharing with you, it’ll help you “get it” too. So let me take you on my thinking trail.
See Also:
How to Communicate if the US Government Shuts down the Internet
16+ Projects & Initiatives Building Ad-Hoc Wireless Mesh Networks
A Metathinking Manifesto [Who's the Architect?]
Continue reading “CONNECT First, the Collective Intelligence Will Happen Naturally”
Watchdog Group Files Formal Complaints To Disbar And Prosecute Clarence Thomas For 20 Years Of False Statements, Financial Conflicts Of Interest, And Using His Decisions On The Supreme Court To Enrich His Wife
Pressure Building On Department Of Justice To Take Action
Washington, D.C.– February 8, 2011, ProtectOurElections.org filed two formal complaints against Justice Clarence Thomas for falsifying 20 years of financial disclosure statements, engaging in financial conflicts of interests, and using his decisions on the Supreme Court to enrich his wife. The first complaint, filed with the Washington D.C. Bar Disciplinary Committee, seeks Justice Thomas’ disbarment. It has 19 exhibits and can be viewed online.
Tunisia: ‘I have lost my son, but I am proud of what he did'
The mother of the street vendor who set himself on fire, and triggered protests across North Africa, talks to Kim Sengupta
The street vendor who set himself alight, sparking an uprising which swept away 23 years of dictatorship in Tunisia and triggered protests across North Africa, had been beaten down by years of poverty and oppression by the authorities, his family told The Independent last night.
Mohamed Bouazizi – whose desperate act, copied in countries including Algeria and Egypt, has become a symbol of injustice and oppression – had lost his land, his living and had been humiliated by local officials.
Will Egypt Revolutionize Democracy Itself?
by Tom Atlee
Thomas Friedman suggests that the special strength of Egypt's youth-led revolutionary movement has been “the fact that it represented every political strain, every segment and class in Egyptian society.” But then he turns around and says that diversity “is also its weakness. It still has no accepted political platform or leadership.”
Of course, from a majoritarian electoral perspective, he's right. But perspective that may not provide the most potent and useful democratic approaches for Egypt's future — or ours.
If Egypt's 21st century revolutionaries want their revolution to turn the world, they will make this supposed weakness — their inclusive diversity — into the greatest strength of their emergent democracy. They will cherish, develop and institutionalize their cross-section diversity AS a political platform AND AS the principle underlying their new forms of democratic leadership.
My advice: Make random selection as fundamental to Egyptian democracy as majority vote will be. Properly institutionalized, random selection is harder to manipulate and co-opt than elections.
Continue reading “EGYPT: Can Democracy by Randomly Revolutionized?”
Makeshift helmets made by the Egyptians while making the revolution.
From the inventors of McNamara's electronic line (which failed spectacularly in Vietnam) comes the Electronic Coup/Revolution Predictor (EC/RP)! This is explained below in the attached Wired report.
The EC/RP is merely the latest effort in DARPA's continuing campaign to overthrow Boyd's Law* (i.e., Machines don't fight war wars, people do, and they use their minds) by taking the mind out of the military's Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) loop, and hardwiring what little is left of it with a automated predict-decide-act computer algorithm — the goal, apparently, being to make stupid decisions faster.
This particular DARPA boondoggle is bizarre even by DARPA's tolerant standards for lunacy. That is because the EC/RP is aimed predicting discontinuities in order to remove uncertainty from the future.
Continue reading “DARPA as Poster Child for Out of Control Budget”
