Phi Beta Iota: Anyone educated in the 1960's and 1970's will remember Pervcival and Paul Goodman's Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life. The strategy devised by the Earth Intelligence Network celebrates this concept.
The plethora and pace of the development of these one-off “solutions”
is killing me ….the collective defense and intelligence community
apparently can't keep up with themselves in order to prove who is more
irrelevant…. we continue to throw good money after bad.
The Pentagon’s top researchers have rushed a classified and controversial intelligence program into Afghanistan. Known as “Nexus 7,” and previously undisclosed as a war-zone surveillance effort, it ties together everything from spy radars to fruit prices in order to glean clues about Afghan instability.
The program has been pushed hard by the leadership of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They see Nexus 7 as both a breakthrough data-analysis tool and an opportunity to move beyond its traditional, long-range research role and into a more active wartime mission.
But those efforts are drawing fire from some frontline intel operators who see Nexus 7 as little more than a glorified grad-school project, wasting tens of millions on duplicative technology that has nothing to do with stopping the Taliban.
“There are no models and there are no algorithms,” says one person familiar with the program, echoing numerous others who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the program publicly. Just “200 lines of buggy Python code to do what imagery analysts do every day.”
Phi Beta Iota: The mind boggles at the idiocy of “reality mining” where the only reality that can be “computed” is digital, and actual reality is a 15th century pre-analog illiterate society. The comments at the end of the article are earthy and on target. The US Government in the aggregate has lost both its intelligence and its integrity.
I recall that Viet-Nam era secret writing was blown by an Admiral in his memoirs, causing all future terrorists and secret police to photocopy incoming and outgoing mail. This appears to be publicity we could have done without.
‘The capability of doing mass tracking is possible.’
EXTRACT
Around the world, TruePosition markets something it calls “location intelligence,” or LOCINT, to intelligence and law enforcement agencies. As a homeland security tool, it’s enticing. Imagine an “invisible barrier around sensitive sites like critical infrastructure,” such as oil refineries or power plants, TruePosition’s director of marketing, Brian Varano, tells Danger Room. The barrier contains a list of known phones belonging to people who work there, allowing them to pass freely through the covered radius. “If any phone enters that is not on the authorized list, [authorities] are immediately notified.”
I don't usually present another organization's fundraiser in the middle of our Co-Intelligence Institute fundraiser, but this is an exception I feel strongly about.
Generating real wisdom together – not just knowledge and resources (as valuable as these are) – requires talking together. Furthermore, vast domains of our humanity flourish and deepen through conversation. And in both cases, the QUALITY of conversation makes all the difference in the world.
Collectively humanity now knows a lot about how to make powerful, enjoyable, meaningful conversations. A large and rapidly growing field of study and practice stewards these deeply human technologies and explores how to develop them further and use them better for broader benefit. These people bring to life a fundamental co-intelligence precept – accessing the wisdom of the whole on behalf of the whole.
Some of the most dedicated and creative people among those professionals are members of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. It is a home base, a learning community, an unparalleled resource – and it could be more. In my opinion, tNCDD nurtures one of the most important networks for the future of the planet. I consider its thrival essential. Furthermore, I have the highest respect for its co-founder and director, Sandy Heierbacher, a grounded, heartful, effective change agent. Her contribution to us all awes me.
NCDD's resource center alone is a priceless gift to each and every one of us. See, in particular, their Beginner's Guide and their “Best of the Best” page .
It goes without saying that I value any support you can give the Co-Intelligence Institute, But I want to urge you here to lend your support to NCDD, whether or not you donate to CII. As I tighten my own belt, I have given NCDD $100. Please read the note below that Sandy sent to me and other NCDD members and consider what you can do.
In January, a time when many scientists concentrate on grant proposals, Jennifer D. Calkins and Jennifer M. Gee, both biologists, were busy designing quail T-shirts and trading cards. The T-shirts went for $12 each and the trading cards for $15 in a fund-raising effort resembling an online bake sale.
The $4,873 they raised, mostly from small donations, will pay their travel, food, lab and equipment expenses to study the elegant quail this fall in Mexico.
. . . . . . .
In the crowd funding genus, MyProjects is a different species from Kickstarter. All projects on the site have been vetted by scientists and already receive financing from Cancer Research UK. And the funds are guaranteed regardless of whether the MyProjects goal is reached. Mr. Bromley calls it “substitutional funding.”
. . . . . . .
The quail project was one of thousands that Cassie Marketos, a community editor at Kickstarter, has approved. “It’s one thing to buy a book about quails,” she said. “But to know that you played a small part in making it happen is a much different experience.”
Phi Beta Iota: The world is in an intermediary stage toward governing without government. The era of outrageous fraud, waste, and abuse–massive investments by the government of tax-payer funds on the basis of ideology or special interests, not intelligence with integrity–is coming to an end. Participatory democracy, alternative localized or specialized currencies that cannot be taxed, and intelligence-driven self-governance that is open to all stakeholders (Panarchy), are all emergent.
Phi Beta Iota: This really excellent article is highly recommended along with a look at the only book in English out just now, Geo-Engineering Climate Change: Environmental Necessity or Pandora's Box?. The fragmentation of knowledge, the corruption of governments and industry, and the abuse of secrecy to conceal the real dimensions of earthquake and tsunami creating technologies–High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program or HAARP being one set–all suggest that precautionary science has been set aside, and catastrophic initiatives are being undertaken on a foundation of very inadequate understanding. This is the kind of global challenge and response that should be within the purview of a Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) Centre that can be relied upon to produce “The Virgin Truth.”
