Paul Fernhout: Encouragement for the Sick at Heart – Planning for US Collapse, Learning from Soviet Collapse

Blog Wisdom
Paul Fernhout

Always remember Howard Zinn's remarks:

“In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.”

Also, check your vitamin D level from all your indoor work (humans are not adapted to life without lots of sunlight) and eat more veggies and omega 3s, and try other holistic stuff to maintain your balance in difficult times.

There is always a lot of corruption and confusion in any system under yin/yang tension. It is still worthwhile to focus on the green shoots that may someday grow into something better for a time.

You can ask yourself, what can be legally and honorably be put in place *now* to be ready for if/when the corruption and confusion in Washington collapses under its own weight? What world do you want to see emerge if that system collapses? What would you stand ready to offer to others as specific systems to use and specific social networks to expand if, as in Egypt, the US government falls from its own excesses and people turned to you and said, now what?

Continue reading “Paul Fernhout: Encouragement for the Sick at Heart – Planning for US Collapse, Learning from Soviet Collapse”

Seth Godin: Focus on the Dissatisfied, Seeking Real Change

Blog Wisdom
Seth Godin

People looking for ‘more of the same' aren't actively looking

While there may be a lot of them, they're satisfied with what they've got, which means that they're hard to attract.

No, the real opportunity is in reaching out to the dissatisifed, to those in search of something new.

Phi Beta Iota:  Obama was elected by an expanded “base” seeking more of the same; today, with the exceptions of Gary Johnson and Ron Paul, the Republican candidates are all focused on the wing-nut base.  The “base” is roughly 20% on each end of the spectrum–Obama won with 30% of the total eligible voters–44% did not vote.  That's the 44% that could elect a sane honest President and a sane honest coalition team in 2012–that 44% could be expanded to 66% by embracing the sane honest Republicans and the sane honest Democrats who are disgusted by the pervasive corruption and illegitimacy of the wing nut vs nanny state mobs that today define America to the rest of the world–“idiot America,” “predatory America.”  We can do better.

DefDog: Skilluminati Invocation–Manifesto for Action

07 Other Atrocities, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
DefDog

Disgust is gaining traction…..

An Invocation Against the Inevitable

1 September 2011

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” – McLuhan

Skilluminati Research has been a very cynical project…until now. Change of policy: there are no sufficient excuses for inaction. There is no point to all this research if I'm not capable of using it for something real. What interests me now is Synthesis. How can we build a politics that takes all of this horrible shit for granted and still provides a master plan?

In 2011, Hope and Change are hollow brand names and representative Democracy itself is hollowed out, broken for decades. Distrust of government has gone from a fringe position to a bipartisan consensus. If you think all that adds up to a “Now is the Time” pep talk, you're not hearing me at all. We are more fucked than ever. The situation is not “ripe,” it is fundamentally out of control and irreversible. …so what then?

The Machine is bigger than you can think. It snakes through every aspect of your life, it networks an entire planet of political powerbrokers, banking cartels, intelligence agencies, arms dealers, cult leaders, secret societies and royal families. From cynical operatives to true believers, from corporate boardrooms to secret bases, the Machine is too vast an ecosystem to model accurately. Both in human terms and hardware specs, much of the infrastructure is classified — and that's just the stuff the military is doing. Every serious effort to reform this system to date has gotten nowhere. …so what now?

Read full manifesto….

Safety copy (text only) below the line.

Continue reading “DefDog: Skilluminati Invocation–Manifesto for Action”

Paul Fernhout: Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)

10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence, Government
Paul FernhoutE

EDIT 4 Sep 2011: Link and misc. fixed.

Dear IARPA staff-

The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA’s current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue.

To address that pervasive threat from unrecognized irony, it would help to re-envision the CIA as a non-ironic post-scarcity institution. Then the CIA could help others (including in the White House) make more informed decisions to move past this irony as well.
Continue reading “Paul Fernhout: Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)”

Cynthia McKinney: Libya Eyewitness Tour Final Report

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Cynthia McKinney

On today, the anniversary of the overthrow of King Idris in Libya, the neo-colonial powers met in France to continue their drive at the new carve-up of Africa. This set of circumstances makes many of us very sad.

I had a dream last night.  I was caught in the midst of intense fighting–street fighting:  house to house.  I guess I was channeling what the typical Libyan is feeling and has been feeling for the past 6 months.  In my chats with DIGNITY Delegation members, one thing is clear:  we are traumatized by what is happening to the lovely people of Libya.  But imagine, if we feel that way, how must they feel?  Terrorized and worse.

When the DIGNITY Delegation of journalists was there, we could already see the impact of the bombing on patients in the hospital, children trying to understand what was happening, women trying to soothe their families, men trying to carry on with their normal activities, shopkeepers trying to eke out a living despite fighting and bombing all around them, Black Libyans who felt threatened by their fellow countrymen and the outsiders who have streamed into the country, siding with NATO and openly boasted of killing dark-skinned Libyans (who number between 50% and 58% of the population, according to one of the Libyans who joined us on the tour, now returned to his country, not the 30% written in the special interest press) and non-Libyan Africans.
Continue reading “Cynthia McKinney: Libya Eyewitness Tour Final Report”

John Robb: Resilient Curiosity, Cities Under Seige

Blog Wisdom
John Robb

LINKS: August, 31 2011

Some items of interest:

  • Biocurious is a biohackerspace opening in Sunnyvale. Local software, hardware, and bio labs that connect to a global, R&D effort via online networks. A neighborhood location where professionals (formally educated) and amateurs (in the best sense of the word) can work together on building new things and improving on old ones. Every RC should have one…
  • Fake Facebook to harvest protestor identities in Syria.
  • The systemic threat presented by an overnight, term collateral swap market.
  • William Gibson on people and cities.
  • Talk by Stephen Graham on Cities Under Siege. Simply: an overview of military efforts to build systems that pervasively monitor all urban inhabitants. Seen as a way to control “feral” cities at a distance. This is the seed for how modern city states will be controlled in a neo-feudal system (after capitalism's crisis causes modern nation-states to disintegrate).
  • Cities as operating systems.
  • Lanier on the future. “What we have to do to create liberty in the future is to monetize more and more instead of monetize less and less, and in particular we have to monetize more and more of what ordinary people do…” NOTE: I'm not a fan of Lanier's thinking. Not sure why he gets as much play as he does.
  • English translation of a Bundeswehr report on peak oil. (PDF)
  • How solar can follow Moore's Law.
  • United States food insecurity

Phi Beta Iota:  We are a fan of Lanier.  See his essential “A Contrarian View” as published in Mark Tovey (ed), COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (Earth Intelligence Network, 2008).

Venessa Miemis: 4 Trends in Context Awareness & Mobile Web

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom
Venessa Miemis

4 Trends in Context Awareness & the Mobile Web

August 30, 2011

We are moving towards a reality where the web just is. It surrounds us, it’s in our pockets, and it can provide us contextual information about the world around us. Below are a few trends towards a location-aware web:

1. The Move Towards Mobility
2. Smartphones Become Digital Wallets
3. An Information Layer on Reality
4. Gaming Goes Social

Read full posts with graphics and many links….

Phi Beta Iota:  This is true, at best, for the top third of the one billion rich.  It is nowhere near true for the five billion poor, who will be lucky to have the basic mobile phone with digital cash, and call centers to educate them and monetize their aggregate knowledge.  There is a great deal to be done, and most of it will be about harnessing and harvesting Human Intelligence (HUMINT), not about technical gadgets and back office web sites.