Category: Policies

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Journal: Turkey’s Emerging Grand Strategy

02 Diplomacy, 08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney Recommends

This op-ed is consistent with what I have learned about and experienced in Turkey.  Chuck

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October 25, 2010

Turkey Steps Out

By ROGER COHEN

ANKARA — Davutogluism is a mouthful. It’s not going to make Fox News any time soon. But if I could escort Sarah Palin, Tea Partiers and a few bigoted anti-Muslim Europeans to a single country illustrating how the world has changed, it would be the home of the D-word, Turkey.

Ahmet Davutoglu, who birthed a foreign policy doctrine and has been Turkey’s foreign minister since May 2009, has irked a lot of Americans. He’s seen as the man behind Turkey’s “turning East,” as Iran’s friend, as Israel’s foe, as a fickle NATO ally wary of a proposed new missile shield, and as the wily architect of Turkey’s new darling status with Arab states. The Obama administration has said it is “disappointed” in Turkey’s no vote on Iran sanctions last June; Congress is not pleased, holding up an ambassadorial appointment and huffing over arms sales.

Nostalgia is running high in Washington for the pliant Turkey of Cold-War days. Davutoglu is having none of it. “We don’t want to be a frontier country like in the Cold War,” he told me. “We don’t want problems with any neighbor” — and that, of course, would include Iran.

Zero problems with neighbors lay at the core of Davutoglu’s influential book Strategic Depth, published in 2001. Annual trade with Russia has since soared to $40 billion. Syrian-Turkish relations have never been better. Turkey’s commercial sway over northern Iraq is overwhelming. It has signed a free trade agreement with Jordan. And now Turkey says it aims — United Nations sanctions notwithstanding — to triple trade with Iran over the next five years.

All this makes the anemic West edgy: The policy has produced 7 percent growth this year. There’s also something deeper at work: The idea of economic interdependence as a basis for regional peace and stability sounds awfully familiar. Wasn’t that the genius of the European Union idea?

Read rest of this very serious article….

Phi Beta Iota: The author produced Alternative Paradigms in 1993, this book is available in English. At the time he was  Professor of Political Science at the International Islamic University in Malaysia.  Turkey is a world power, as is Iran, anyone who cannot get a grip on that reality will be flattened by reality.  The axis between Malaysia and Indonesia, and between Muslims in Asia and Muslims centered on Dubai, is going to strengthen.

Ahmet Davutoglu
Ahmet Davutoglu Strategic Depth
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Journal: Tea Party Manipulated, Idle Angry Minds Being Exploited…

04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Chuck Spinney Recommends

The author of attached article in the Guardian, George Monbiot is a pious Global Warming enthusiast. He probably despises the Koch brothers because they are funding anti-global warming efforts.  But setting the writer's biases aside, as well as his somewhat condescending tone, his report (which is based primarily on the New Yorker’s brilliant expose of the Koch brothers and the new documentary “(Astro)Turf Wars,”) is an excellent summary of how behind-the-scene manipulators are funding the Tea Party movement and are shaping and energizing the Orientation of Tea Party’s collective OODA loop — i.e., the lens thru which its members Observe the world, interpret their all-to-real problems,  provides focus to their anger, and thereby shapes the Decisions guiding their Actions.

The strategic leverage gained by shaping a group's Orientation ought be self-evident at this point: it unleashes and focuses the free-wheeling energy of the individuals to enthusiastically work together for the well being of others without requiring the coercive and ultimately revealing and self-defeating effects of top-down control.

The following quote (near end of article) provides an excellent statement of the strategic aim guiding those shaping efforts.

“Most of these bodies call themselves “free-market thinktanks”, but their trick – as (Astro)Turf Wars points out – is to conflate crony capitalism with free enterprise, and free enterprise with personal liberty. Between them they have constructed the philosophy that informs the Tea Party movement: its members mobilise for freedom, unaware that the freedom they demand is freedom for corporations to trample them into the dirt.”

On the other hand, any strategy grounded in deception must be wrapped in a protective cloak of ambiguity, because a deception builds into the OODA loops of the ‘deceived' the seeds of a crucial vulnerability: Once the ambiguity is penetrated, and the scam is exposed and its effects appreciated, the Orientation of the ‘deceived' will flip and their rage will be energized and focused on the deceivers by the desire for vengeance.  Which is why the passive or active connivance of the mainstream media in the US (most of which is owned by crony capitalists) in supporting the manipulation is central to keeping the game going.

The Tea Party movement: deluded and inspired by billionaires

By funding numerous rightwing organisations, the mega-rich Koch brothers have duped millions into supporting big business

George Monbiot

guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 October 2010 20.15 BST

The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen – and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related.

A “must read” piece of solid British analysis….

Phi Beta Iota: A new set of unwitting fools–no offense intended, but that's the story….those elected under the Tea Party banner will caucus with the Republicans, and that is the truth-teller.

See Also:

Journal: Tea Party “Booboisie”

Review: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

2008 ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig

Review: Shooting the Truth–The Rise of American Political Documentaries

Review: Grand Illusion–The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

Review: Selling Out

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Journal: Mass Media Dying, and Mass Politicians Also

09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

Seth Godin Home

How media changes politics

If you want to get elected in the US, you need media.

When TV was king, the secret to media was money. If you have money, you can reach the masses. The best way to get money is to make powerful interests happy, so they'll give you money you can use to reach the masses and get re-elected.

Now, though…When attention is scarce and there are many choices, media costs something other than money. It costs interesting. If you are angry or remarkable or an outlier, you're interesting, and your idea can spread. People who are dull and merely aligned with powerful interests have a harder time earning attention, because money isn't sufficient.

Thus, as media moves from TV-driven to attention-driven, we're going to see more outliers, more renegades and more angry people driving agendas and getting elected. I figure this will continue until other voices earn enough permission from the electorate to coordinate getting out the vote, communicating through private channels like email and creating tribes of people to spread the word. (And they need to learn not to waste this permission hassling their supporters for money).

Mass media is dying, and it appears that mass politicians are endangered as well.

Phi Beta Iota: For the first time, Seth Godin has caused us to realize that the Koch Brothers funding the Tea Party might be a good thing….it is lighting the path that eventually could be lit by hundreds of millions whose 1-2 dollar contributions will outweight the “loose change” that the super rich are willing to spend on political chicanery.  Joe Trippi was there first, but this is a new spin that we find salutory.

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Journal: Innovation & Collaboration (Two Items)

03 Economy, 04 Education, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Methods & Process
Jon Lebkowsky Home

Steven Berlin Johnson: good ideas

by jonl on October 25, 2010

On October 20, I caught Steven Johnson’s talk at Book People in Austin. I’ve known Steven since the 90s – we met when he was operating Feed Magazine, one of the early web content sites. After Feed, Steven created a second content site, actually more of a web forum, called Plastic.com.

Starting with Interface Culture, Steven has mostly written books, and is generally thought of as a science writer, though I think of him as a writer about culture as well. His book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software was a major influence for those of us who were into social software and the percolation of “Web 2.0.” I related it to my earlier “nodal politics” thinking, and it influenced the collaborative paper created by Joi Ito et al., called “Emergent Democracy.” Steven wrote an analysis of the Howard Dean Presidential Campaign for the book I edited with Mitch Ratcliffe, Extreme Democracy.

Read rest of this post…

Flip it!

by jonl on October 25, 2010

Daniel Pink has a smart article on flip thinking, a trend in innovation. It’s a matter of rethinking sequence logic: for instance, a math instructor finds that it makes more sense to work on problems in class, and follow with the lecture (uploaded to YouTube, where students watch as homework). You experience the tension of the problem first, and get hands-on guidance from the instructor. Having learned your way around the problem, you see the lecture that contextualizes that learning.

While the idea is great, and Pink offers excellent examples where turning sequences around might work, the more compelling lesson is about creativity: we should rethink our habits and routines, and consider re-engineering our processes, as a matter of course. It’s too easy for ruts to form. We avoid disruptive innovation because it can be painful, but it’s productive pain.

Read the media article that inspired this post….

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NIGHTWATCH Extract: Mexican Cartels Threaten Massacres

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, Government, Law Enforcement, Military, Officers Call

Mexico: For the record. Suspected members of the Sinaloa drug trafficking cartel warned that they would kill 135 people after security forces seized 134 tons of marijuana last week in Tijuana, Baja California state, Milenio reported today, 25 October. The warning was made over a police radio frequency late on 24 October reportedly minutes after gunmen killed 13 patients at a drug rehabilitation center in Tijuana.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: This kind of indiscriminate mass murder in retaliation for what are relatively minor interdictions suggests that on the one hand, both the US and Mexican government have not only lost all control of the territory for which they are responsible for providing good order and public safety and security; but also that neither government has an effective intelligence capability to guide operations in detail.  We are reminded of how long it took to hunt down one man in Colombia, Pablo Escobar.   A MAJOR obstacle is the recalcitrance of the US secret intelligence community with $75 billion or more being applied to produce “at best” 4% of what is needed, to reinvent itself and engage in M4IS2: multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making.  The El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) is a massive failure precisely because it embodies all of the handicaps of the past and none of the advantages of the present.

See Also:

Review: Killing Pablo–The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw

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Journal: “True Cost” Meme Gaining Ground

01 Agriculture, 02 Infectious Disease, 03 Economy, 04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

Chris ElamChris Elam

Program Director, Meatless Monday

Posted: October 25, 2010 10:13 AM

Short Film Reveals The Secret Life of Beef

Livestock today consume 5 times as much grain as the entire American population, the average meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to fork, and seven football fields' worth of land is bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals and the crops that feed them.

But it doesn't have to be all doom-and-gloom. We as consumers still have options, which, over time, can change our economy. It's this idea that drives INFORM — the educational and advocacy nonprofit that raises environmental consciousness for the general public through visual media. Its “Secret Life” film series, seen by over 2 million viewers in 80 countries, examines the lifecycle environmental impact of everyday objects we all consume.

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Read rest of article (includes link to YouTube short)

Go directly to YouTube short)

See Also:

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Bio-Economics

Worth a Look: Book Reviews of Capitalism Reincarnated

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Civilization-Building

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Collective Intelligence

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Common Wealth

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Conscious, Evolutionary, Integral Activism & Goodness

"True Cost"
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Journal: 22% Real Unemployment, 1 in 34 Zip $ in 2009

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
GETTY Photo

New Figures Detail Depth Of Unemployment Misery, Lower Earnings For All But Super Wealthy

One out of every 34 Americans who earned wages in 2008 earned absolutely nothing — not one cent — in 2009.

The stunning figure was released earlier this month by the Social Security Administration, but apparently went unreported until it appeared today on Tax.com in a column by Pulitzer Prize-winning tax reporter David Cay Johnston.

It's not just every 34th earner whose financial situation has been upended by the financial crisis. Average wages, median wages, and total wages have all declined — except at the very top, where they leaped dramatically, increasing five-fold.

Read balance of article….

noble gold