Tom Atlee: #Occupy Listening and Process: Mic Check!

Blog Wisdom
Tom Atlee

#Occupy Listening and Process: Mic Check!

Some people have asked why I am focusing on the Occupy movement. There are so many aspects of transformationally relevant co-intelligencebeing explored in and evoked by this movement, whether or not we are politically involved in or motivated by it. This post is a prime example. It is all about LISTENING and its exploration in and around the Occupy movement. 
One of the most remarkable things about the Occupy movement is that it pays at least as much attention to listening as to speaking out or pushing a particular point of view. True listening – including letting people know they are truly heard – is a rare phenomenon in mainstream society. However, it is fundamental to the kind of transformation the world urgently needs.

In this mailing you will find detailed reflections on processes used by the Occupy movement, including thoughts from some of my favorite process colleagues like consensus practitioner Tree Bressen, Dynamic Facilitation practitioner Rosa Zubizarreta, and Nonviolent Communication practitioner Miki Kashtan. These reflections are but the tip of the iceberg: I see thoughtful discussions about group process spread widely throughout the movement – signs of tremendous grassroots creativity, learning, and evolution in a domain usually confined to process professionals and corporate managers and consultants.

You will also find in this post…

Read full post with major links to related thoughts of others.

Phi Beta Iota:  Tom Atlee survives in a commune totally on donations.  He and his Co-Intelligence work are the single sole only cause for which we actively solicit support.  Here is his Donate Button.  Please–$5-20 means a great deal, it supports our emergence as a truly human collaborative society, overcoming the corruption and selfishness that have destroyed community and the Earth.

Jon Lebkowsky: Memory, Association, and the Pathology of Excessive “Identification” with Anything

Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence
Jon Lebkowsky

Thinking about memory, association, and identification

by jonl

A lesson in memory.

Phi Beta Iota:  Full reflections below the line.  Wait for the aha at the end.  God is what happens when we create community which is inherently in contradiction with our identifying deeply with anything other than God/community.  This is deep and worth swimming in.

Continue reading “Jon Lebkowsky: Memory, Association, and the Pathology of Excessive “Identification” with Anything”

John Robb: Occupy as a Global Contagion for Good

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom
John Robb

OCCUPY NOTE 11/17/11 Contagion #ows

Occupy is an open source protest.  That means it doesn't have a specific message.  It is a container for may groups/motivations/passions held together by simplest of ideas: it is possible to permanently occupy of places of power.  Anyone that tells you it needs to have a specific policy agenda is a) not an expert and b) still living in the 20th Century.

The Occupy approach, a permanent 24x7x365 geographically ubiquitous protest movement, may be about to zoom.  Reinforcements are coming.

From where?  Europe.  However, this reinforcement isn't in the form of bodies on the street or money.  It's VALIDATION (that the global financial/economic/governmental system, as it works today, is a deadly threat to our future) in the form of global financial contagion.  

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Seth Godin: Largest Independent Cyber-Content Sites

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom
Seth Godin

The largest independent content sites

Quantcast makes it easy to see the largest one million sites in the US (by traffic). There's a signficant consolidation going on, with the vast majority of popular sites being owned and controlled by larger, public companies.

Because onine traffic follows, as most things do, a power law curve, the top 100 sites account for a huge amount of overall web traffic–probably more than the next 900 sites combined.

After removing public companies and those that only do commerce, here are the thirty independent companies on the top 100:

facebook.com
twitter.com
wikipedia.org
answers.com
wordpress.com
craigslist.org
tumblr.com
pandora.com
whitepages.com
manta.com
photobucket.com
yelp.com
wikia.com
webmd.com
hubpages.com
metrolyrics.com
inbox.com
squidoo.com
grindtv.com
drudgereport.com
coolmath-games.com
city-data.com
urbandictionary.com
wunderground.com
chacha.com
bleacherreport.com
twitpic.com
deviantart.com
cafemom.com
zimbio.com
typepad.com

John Robb: Solar Farming, Localized Power Resilience

05 Energy, Blog Wisdom
John Robb

SOLAR FARMING

Photovoltaic (PV) technology (aka solar panels) is advancing steadily.  That advance will occur regardless of whether we have an economic depression or booming prosperity.  This advance means that price of PV modules are dropping at a rate of 7% per year (as it has been doing that for decades). This means that by 2020, the price of a PV module (with micoconverters etc. included) will likely be close to $1 a watt (not including installation, which is also falling).  That puts PV tech within the range of being cost competitive with today's alternatives.  As an added benefit, it's possible that modules that approach this level of cost efficiency might also be locally printable (as in: they could be made in a 3D fab or grown in a bio-lab).

Naam-solar-moore_s-law-5 (1)The implication: for those communities able to deploy it in quantity, it will mean increasingly inexpensive energy for as many years into the future as you want to project.  For those that don't, you will increasingly fall behind.

There is a caveat though. The real potential for this technology isn't going to be found in a large number of big, commercial solar complexes.  Why?  The infrastructure and investment necessary to make this happen on a scale that really matters doesn't exist in the US or EU anymore.  We are broke (and even if we weren't, NIMBY is nearly impossible to overcome as the record of new power line construction over the last 30 years attests to).  So, it should be easy for us to conclude that it won't get built at national/regional level (if you think otherwise, I have a planet I'd like to sell you).

Fortunately, there is a ray of hope.  For those of us building resilient communities, we WILL see this infrastructure deployed.  How?  Through the hard word and dedication of a resilient entrepreneur: the solar farmer.   The solar producer that keeps his/her entire community fed with increasingly inexpensive and bountiful solar energy, 24x7x365 (via energy storage for round the clock production).

A Platform For Local Solar Farming

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NIGHTWATCH: Iran – Turkey – Brazil Nuclear Axis

01 Brazil, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Officers Call

Turkey-Iran:  A senior Iranian official recently said Iran is willing to share its nuclear technological capability with neighboring, friendly countries, which could include helping Turkey build an atomic power plant.

For years Turkey has tried to build a nuclear power plant, but no Western country has been willing to help, the official said, adding that this is true for other countries in the region. Iran is also willing to cooperate with Brazil in the nuclear field, he said.

Comment: Energy policy provides a basis for an expansion of Iranian influence and presence in the Middle East and Brazil.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota:  The insanity of US foreign and security policy is breath-taking, and only explainable in the context of an out of control government that is advancing pathological short-term corporate interests.  Brazil does not need Iran's help on nuclear energy.  What is interesting here, in combination with the French-German-Russian Axis [and more distantly, India-Pakistan and China-Asia] is the isolation of the US Government – the world is beginning to isolate the pathogen.

John Robb: Understanding Pathogenic Behavior

03 Economy, Blog Wisdom, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Sense-Making, Military
John Robb

THE ART OF PATHOGENIC WARFARE

Within human social and economic systems, pathogenic behavior is spreading.  This is particularly true among powerful, successful, and wealthy people (finance, economics, politics, etc.) in the developed world.  What specifically do I mean by pathogenic?  An ever greater number of these people are adopting behaviors that are actively hostile to the human systems we rely upon.  They actually think it is OK to put these systems at risk for personal benefit.  This is very dangerous.  Given the massive amounts of network, technological, and financial leverage that's currently available to these people, even a single bad actor can wreak global havoc like never before (as in, they could cause an economic collapse that's so severe that it could kill more people than every war we've ever had to date, combined).

So, why is this happening and how can we prevent it?  This has been a tough section of the book I'm currently writing.  Fortunately, I think I'm starting to unravel it.   Here we go.  In order to understand why some bad actors are willing to do grievous harm to the complex systems they rely upon, we need to visit the cutting edge of microbiology.  Let's start that exploration with a look at an amazing article by Brett Finlay in the Scientific American called, “Stopping Infections: The Art of Bacteriological Warfare.”

Good, Neutral, and Bad Bacteria

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