SharpInsights #53: Modern Advice From a Long-Dead Roman
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman dramatist, Stoic philosopher, politician, and history's earliest proponent of competitive intelligence. Wait…what?
One of Seneca's most famous quotes is a management mantra: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” For executives making decisions in a recession-battered marketplace, “preparation” means more than skimming last year's sales figures or catching up on trade magazines.
Competitive intelligence reveals the current, comprehensive, objective truth about your product or service, brand, company, customers, and industry. The cold hard truth can lead to a warm fuzzy feeling for managers who apply their CI preparation to opportunity.
India-Russia: India will buy 250 to 300 advanced stealth fighter aircraft from Russian, according to Defence Minister A.K. Antony, as he announced the deal worth nearly $30 billion. Antony and Russian Defense Minister Serdyukov said Russia would supply the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) as well as 45 transport aircraft. India also will jointly manufacture the fighters under license for ten years.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: The future of the Indian Air Force appears to be linked primarily to Russian rather than US firms. This agreement thinly hides an Indian strategic judgment about the threats it faces from China and Pakistan, about the US as a supplier for coping with those threats compared to the Russians.
India is making long term preparations to be ready for a major war after ten years that will require fifth generation fighters because the most likely enemy – presumably China – also will have those air capabilities. The Russians are willing to sell India the aircraft and to license the technology. The US is not building significant numbers of fifth generation fighters and will not sell them even to Israel.
The Indians, Russians and Chinese do not share the US strategic outlook favoring small wars and counterinsurgency forces.
Phi Beta Iota: Since the mid-1990's, when the best minds associated with the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute turned decisively away from the two-major theater war model, and we presented the 1+iii (One Plus Triple Eye) strategy, the US has been incoherent with respect to strategic policy, acquisition, and operations. Ideology is not a substitute for intelligence, and technology is not a substitute for thinking.
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Below, as a memory aid and brought forward from the second post that named the Virtual Cabinet, are the elements and proposed leaders within the Vice Presidency for Education, Intelligence & Research, each linked to more information about them as individuals. Access America, to implement and sustain Electoral Reform, was added at the suggestion of Jim Turner.
A couple of quotes from two of our Founding Fathers have guided me for decades:
Thomas Jefferson: A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.
James Madison: Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
The USA in particular, but Europe as well, is coming off a few decades of ethical and intellectual decline. Philosophy has been displaced by ideology, thinking displaced by technology, and particularly the technology for war. America has become a cheating culture, led by a Cheater in Chief (regardless of which of the two party tyranny wings he is closest to) and a Congress of Cheats who abdicate their Article 1 responsibilities and betray the Republic every single day of their pathetic unethical existence.
Although the Vice President for the Commonwealth is the Principal Vice President, the Vice President for Education, Intelligence, and Research is arguably the most important Vice President, the key figure in rethinking and reinventing and reinvigorating the American body politic. This is also the Vice President that would have my direct encouragement to run for office in 2020 when my two terms are done with.
Access America is placed under this Vice President's oversight because citizenship, education, and voting are like the DNA spiral of the Republic. None can exist effectively without the other two.
Faith and culture have been denigrated for too long. Fundamentalism is blind, ignorant, and often racist. Faith is the opposite of fundamentalism — it inspires acceptance of the universal Golden Rule, it inspires clarity, diversity, and integrity. America is one nation, under God, and whether one chooses to believe in the God of collective community on Earth or the God of divine Providence, God is alive and well and America the Beautiful cannot do without God and faith and respect for the sacredness of life.
Culture joins with faith as the “glue” of a civilization, and culture, the home for conventions proven over time, is vital to the transmission of the lessons of civilization that are not taught in classrooms, but rather lived in multi-generational communities. One cannot have a Nation without a culture. It is culture that embraces diversity, assimilates diversity, and yet maintains the integrity of the whole.
We know that our educational system is in the basement. It will take a great deal of money to do a complete make-over of our national educational system, one reason why I am so pleased to place the bloated, wasteful, and largely ineffective national intelligence community–and its budget–under the direct influence of Vice President Michael Bloomberg.
Within intelligence, which is about decision support, not about secrets, we will implement the various initiatives I have defined in my Human Intelligence Trilogy. The centerpiece of our national intelligence reform will be the Open Source Agency, starting at $125 million a year and growing quickly to $3 billion a year as a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), but remaining firmly under the budgetary and policy control of the Vice President.
Research is largely dead in America. The universities have sold out to corporations, the patent system is ignorant, corrupt, or both depending on the domain, the “web of knowledge” is virtually non-existent with a plethora of sub-disciplines and no “integrating” umbrella. No one is studying “true cost” of every element of every supply chain, and we only have 67 people studying computer code at the offensive and defensive levels of play. A third of the secret intelligence budget will be used to revitalize research, but in a multidisciplinary, firmly ecological, and very multinational manner. Open Everything will be our battle cry.
The Vice President for Education, Intelligence, and Research will also oversee the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the new Strategy Center that David Abshire has long championed and Tony Zinni wrote about in The Battle for Peace, and the new Truth & Reconciliation Centre that we invite three prominent internationalists to lead for our common well-being. All three of these are not now, but should be, intelligence-driven organizations. I will of course take a personal interest in all three of these. Before I die, I want to help America achieve a “clean sheet” rebirth as a world power, one that acknowledges the truth of its past sins, and reconciles sincerely toward creating a prosperous world at peace. Information and intelligence, not guns and violence, are the only means to achieve this goal.
Now as with Vice President Kucinich, I am giving Vice President Bloomberg nine general marching orders.
1. Voting will become mandatory in stages over four years, as part of the Electoral Reform program.
2. Education will be year-round, life long, blended with free online learning and call centers.
3. Everyone, including immigrants, will come together in national service at 18 and again at 38.
4. The Open Source Center will empower all eight tribes of intelligence, will be firmly rooted in “true cost” investigations of every product and service, and will have as its objective the use of intelligence to eradicate the ten high-level threats to humanity by harmonizing spending by all across the twelve core policy domains.
5. The Open Source Center will be the parent but not the controller of the Multinational Decision Support Centre and the global network of regional and national intelligence and call centers.
6. All research funded by the public will remain in the public domain.
7. Open Spectrum and Free/Open Source Software communications and computing are a priority.
8. Every citizen will have free health insurance; we will buy all drugs overseas and wholesale.
9. The Strategy & Truth & Reconciliation Centers will have as their objective the creation of a prosperous world at peace within twelve years, 75% within eight years, 50% within four years.
I will address long-needed specifics about the draconian reforms needed in the secret world in a later posting. For now I will simply say that in combination with the above initiatives, we can and should be able to reduce funding for secret intelligence sources and methods to $25 billion a year in 2012 dollars.
In recent years, McGonigal has grown especially interested in the way that massively multiplayer online gaming generates collective intelligence, and interested in the way that the collective intelligences thus generated can be utilized as a means of improving the world, either by improving the quality of human life or by working towards the solution of social ills. She has expressed a desire that gaming should be moving “towards Nobel Prizes.”[1] These ideas informed her collaboration in World Without Oil (2007), a simulation designed to brainstorm (and potentially avert) the challenges of a post-peak oil future.
”]Reality is broken, says Jane McGonigal, and we need to make it work more like a game. Her work shows us how.
Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.
Anti-immigration crusader Lou Dobbs has been relying on undocumented, illegal workers in his stables and homes
by Isabel McDonald
Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
Phi Beta Iota: A careful reading of the entire piece suggests that all of the illegal workers were hired by others, e.g. stable owners, transport companies, landscaping companies, and that Dobbs was an indirect beneficiary of their services. This is an example of “Deep Corruption” that is endemic but not necessarily individually assignable.
Shareable presents an excerpt from Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, Rushkoff’s introduction to his bold-yet-accessible work. On Tuesday, October 12, Shareable will run an exclusive interview with Rushkoff, followed with an online discussion on October 13 and 14 between Rushkoff and the entire Shareable community. We invite you to take part in the discussion of these provocative and compelling ideas.
When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them.
In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It’s really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.
For while digital technologies are in many ways a natural outgrowth of what went before, they are also markedly different. Computers and networks are more than mere tools: They are like living things, themselves. Unlike a rake, a pen, or even a jackhammer, a digital technology is programmed. This means it comes with instructions not just for its use, but also for itself. And as such technologies come to characterize the future of the way we live and work, the people programming them take on an increasingly important role in shaping our world and how it works. After that, it’s the digital technologies themselves that will be shaping our world, both with and without our explicit cooperation.
Robert David Steele
Reality is broken, says Jane McGonigal, and we need to make it work more like a game. Her work shows us how.
