Synchronized action is a powerful form of resistance against repressive regimes. Even if the action itself is harmless, like walking, meditation or worship, the public synchrony of that action by a number of individuals can threaten an authoritarian state. To be sure, synchronized public action demonstrates independency which may undermine state propaganda, reverse information cascades and thus the shared perception that the regime is both in control and unchallenged.
For those of you interested in how global guerrilla warfare theory is being applied in the wild, here's a book for you: Deep Green Resistance (by Derrick Jenson, Aric McBay, and Lierre Keith). Here's a little on their ecowarfare strategy from their website, and some more on how they use open source warfare and systems disruption. At this point, nearly every meaningful insurgency in the world is using OSW (open source warfare). From some of the folks behind the London riots to al Qaeda's new “Open Source Jihad” to Lulzsec/etc. Fortunately for these groups, the US military and their consultants are mired in 20th Century counter-insurgency (COIN), fighting farmers/herders in global backwaters.
Vinay Gupta has put up 4.3 Gb of data/presentations/thinking on surviving state failure. Some good STAR TIDES stuff in there.
Debt “agreement” cuts $1.5 trillion over ten years, while leaving in place the existing budget that borrows 1 trillion a year for ten years.
The net debt INCREASE is 8.5 trillion.
The US Government at it is formed at present, and dominated by a two-party system that shuts out all common sense while embracing Big Oil, Wall Street, and the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC), is incapable of governing Of, By, and For We the People.
S&P got it right. The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.
Every now and then, a creative act comes out of nowhere, a giant leap, a new way of thinking apparently woven out of a brand new material.
Most of the the time, though, creativity is the act of reassembling many elements that are already known. That's why domain knowledge is so critical.
The screenwriter who understands how to take the build that went into the classic Greg Morris episode of the Dick Van Dyke show and integrate it with the Maurce Chevalier riff from the Marx Bros… Or the way Moby took his encyclopedic knowledge of music and turned into a record that sold millions… if you don't have awareness and an analytical understanding of what worked before, you can't build on it.
That's one of the reasons that the recent incarnation of the Palm failed. The fact that the president of the company had never used an iPhone left them only one out: to make a magical leap.
It's not enough to be aware of the domain you're working in, you need to understand it. Noticing things and being curious about how they work is the single most common trait I see in creative people. Once you can break the components down, you can put them back together into something brand new.
Paul Jacob is president of Citizens in Charge, a non-profit, non-partisan group working to protect and expand voter initiative rights, and the Citizens in Charge Foundation, a charitable foundation conducting research on the initiative process, educating the public and litigating to defend the petition rights of Americans.
Early last week, insider Republican and CNN columnist David Frum lashed out at the GOP’s Tea Party wing, writing: “You can’t save the system by destroying the system.” I responded on This is Common Sense:
If the system has put America on a crash course with disaster, then that system must be replaced. With a better one.
When I wrote that I had not yet fully comprehended the full import of the goofy creation (by the debt deal) of what Rep. Ron Paul calls a Super Congress — the select committee of senators and representatives to be put in charge of budgeting, with the rest of Congress not allowed to amend their proposals, just vote yea or nay.
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
Albert Einstein
The US education system is in crisis, putting the long-term future of the economy in question. The evidence is well-known. A root cause of the crisis is the application of the factory model of management to education, where everything is arranged for the scalability and efficiency of “the system”, to which the students, the teachers and the parents have to adjust. “The system” grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and parents alike.
“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.” […] “…by some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.” — Pearl Buck, Winner of a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.
In a blog post last year entitled “Marijuana and Divergent Thinking”, Jonah Lehrer explains that many creative
tasks require the cultivation of an “expansive associative net, or what psychologists refer to as a “flat associative hierarchy.” What this essentially suggests is that creative people should be able to make far-reaching connections among all sorts of seemingly unrelated ideas, and to not dismiss one possible connection just because it seems far-fetched.
Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in whicwe perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.
The Imaginary Foundation says that “to understand is to perceive patterns” and this is exactly what all great thinkers have done throughout the ages: they have provided a larger, dot-connecting, aerial view of things that subsumes the previous paradigm. As Richard Metzger has written:
What great minds have done throughout history is provide an aerial view of things. A larger more encompassing view that often subsumes the previous paradigm and then surpasses it in completeness with the vividness of its metaphors. Consider now how the evolving notions of a flat earth, Copernican astronomy and Einsteinian physics have subsequently changed how mankind sees its place in the cosmos, continuously updating the past explanations with something superior.
