Reference: Paul Williams on America Now

Blog Wisdom

Paul Williams aka Tall Paul (Movies not Songs)

VEGETABLES, ANIMALS AND POLITICS.

At waking up, this morning, the sun almost hitting the solar panels,’
a mandala of a shining star of grass in my third eye.

Happens whenever I pull weeds too.
Or trim the zumac tree.
Or in the old days, when I pulled the mustard after a rain.
Tons of mustard.
Went to mustard heaven at night and flew over fields of mustard.

Happens with grasses too—king’s grass.
Is this vegetable heaven?

Picking grass yesterday, wondering if each bunch of grass connected to its main root was one soul.
So many seasons.  So many years.  So many souls.
Mountains of souls.
Were there hierarchies of souls?

If there were too many souls for all the bodies extant now, do some of them go into grass?

When you drive all night and lie down to sleep, and see the cars still coming in the mind’s eye, just a repeat of what you saw on the road…

But I see such pure color, vibrant, shining rays of light in the the mind’s grass…

Picking up on collective consciousness of plants? Downloading the day at night with a niche collective consciousness?

I pulled grass out of the pebbled driveway for only twenty minutes yesterday, yet got these bursting green blades of grass shining in my closed eyes…

Am I now just hypersensitive and/or connected to the vegetable and mineral world, now from years of lending my energy to them–rather than reading numbers on papers in a board room?  Is that why gurus prefer mountaintops to board rooms?

Downloading… but its not just down loading, its shedding the negative energy that has attached itself to the pure thing itself—when you download, you wash it off, and see it purely, its essence.

Downloaded “bad” experience is accepted as pure experience, and becomes part of the storage of experience to make wisdom… for instinctual right actions to prevail in the present: cognizant but not affected by them..

Also, this morning (somehow related) my old roommate, Thorstein Veblen’s grandson, like Barak Obama, schooled in governance at Harvard–not  a co-joined teaching with economics as they do at Oxford—PPE–politics, philosophy and economics…  Obama and John Veblen, unlike Thorstein, ignorant of economics and the history of economic theory.

So we get Americans like John Veblen and Barak, brilliant people who understand governing, negotiating, game playing but all within the envelope of politics, as they know it.

When faced with an economic problem of enormity, they turn to the best economists, e.g. Summers, Geitner… “best” being most “successful “in the [old failing ]system..

Just when we needed a President who had clear vision or comprehensive economic understanding of how the system must change in order to work.

We didn’t need Babe Ruth to hit a home run, we needed Abner Doubleday to change the rules of the game!

FDR was not a compromising black/white man intent of binding the nations wounds like Abe; FDR was a pure-bred Harvard philosopher king who reveled in being hated by banks and powerful oligopolies..

Like the undergraduate John Veblen, who made Thorstein turn in his grave, the brilliant Obama could never pick someone as an advisor who was outside the power box—Obama is a schooled power broker and speechifier..

But what was broken, is broken, is the system.  Pack the courts, put an army of unemployed to work, tax the rich, redistribute the wealth, you can keep the balanced tension between capitalism and planning, but we need a heavy hand on the planning side of the scale.  Like the Chinese or the Finns!

The victims of of the rich getting richer are the underclass who now want a Tea Party to help them commit suicide. Because they know nothing of what Adam Smith preached centuries ago—they have no idea they are a mob of crypto-Smiths.

Karl Marx (most readers will stop reading here) saw how capitalism would destroy itself (or at least 80% of the population)—it has already decimated our living in community with humanistic values. Materialsm has trumped nature and man.

I told my daughter back when Obama (a very smart man) was elected, to make sure she enjoyed her life and didn’t make plans too far in the future, because things will change, not necessarily for the better.

I told her the house was on fire, we need three buckets of water and this new handsome President is trying to compromise between the mercantile republicans who said we need one quarter of one pail (for the banks) and the “liberal” democrats who said we need half a pail (for the banks )–forget Robert Reich and Tom Friedman (“’We need a bigger boat!’ cried Roy Schieder to Richard Dreyfuss when he saw how big the shark was,” said Freidman way back, two years ago).

Top down, not bottom up, say Geitner, Summers and Associates.  Where is our political Martin Luther!  Post the 95 new rules on the doors of the government-military-industrial complex!  The Government of the United States of America is a sales organization that sells indulgences. If not a revolution, we need a Reformation.  A new game.  Ten strikes and you’re out; two balls and you go to first.

We needed three pails to water the grass roots, not a big splash on the tree tops. And Obama was doomed.  A brilliant man but ignorant of the variety of games that can be constructed—couldn’t someone point out that when basketball was getting boring, they added a three-point line!

Obama, like me in the fields of the spirits, is an ignoramus.  I pouted on a website called beyondgreedandego.com back then. I also sent out an email to friends, explaining how this will happen, and explaining the way is being paved for a fascist craziness masking as populism.

Reference: Book By and Books on George W. Bush

Book Lists
Amazon Page

UPDATE OF 14 Nov 2010

George Bush Book ‘Decision Points' Lifted From Advisers' Books (Huffington Post)

Bush and his supporting authorized plagarized freely.  Huffington Post has both a serious article and a sixteen photo slide show with side by side text showing the plagarism found so far.

UPDATE OF 12 Nov 2010

Stewart Tackles George W. Bush's Contradictions In Recent Interviews (VIDEO)

A Careless Man: What the Bush Memoir Reveals (TIME, Joe Klein)

Bush breezes through fundamental and earth-shattering decisions without slowing down to acknowledge their moral complexity. At the most important moments of his presidency — most notably, the decision to go to war in Iraq — he refuses to honestly consider opposing points of view or see the long-term, ancillary effects of what he is deciding.

As I read on, trapped in the sketchy carelessness of this presidency, I was surprised by how angry I didn't become. For me, at least, weariness has replaced anger. Bush's was an exhausting presidency that will, I suspect, be remembered more for its waste — of time, lives, money, moral standing and economic strength — than for anything else.

Continue reading “Reference: Book By and Books on George W. Bush”

Reference: How Voters Can UNRIG the Two-Party Shell Game

11 Society, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Mobile, Open Government, Real Time, Reform, Strategy
Nancy Bordier

How Voters Can Unrig the 2012 Elections with Transpartisan Voting Blocs and Electoral Coalitions

Voters did not get what they said they wanted from the 2010 elections. In fact, they got the opposite because the two major parties rigged the elections.

The parties have been rigging elections for decades by gerrymandering election districts and passing campaign financing and election laws that prevent third party candidates from beating major party candidates.

These rigged elections give voters no choice but to vote for one of the two major parties. So voters do the only thing they can do, which is to routinely kick out the major party incumbents in the futile hope that the new major party candidates they elect will not flout their will to the same degree. But regardless of which party candidates they vote for, they get roughly the same policies. These typically sacrifice voters' interests to the special interests that fund lawmakers' electoral campaigns.

Unless voters are empowered to put an end to rigged elections before the 2012 elections, using mechanisms like the one proposed below, the middle class and working Americans will be ruined financially by the lawmakers and special interests that are enabling the business and financial sector to take more than their fair share of national income.

Continue reading “Reference: How Voters Can UNRIG the Two-Party Shell Game”

Reference: How to Achieve Wise Democracy

Blog Wisdom, Fact Sheets, Methods & Process
Wise Democracy Hand-Out (2 Pages)

Phi Beta Iota: We are in the process of identifying at least eight “modalities” that stand in sharp contrast to “rule by secrecy” as is characteristic of the axis of crime running from Wall Street to the Democratic-Republican “two-party tyranny.”  We anticipate their all participating in a nation-wide series of citizen encounters on policy and budget, culminating in the Sense-Making Summit in October 2011.  While the first summit is focused on Health in the larger context of the ten high-level threats to humanity and the twelve core policies, our intent from Summit '12 onwards, is to engage all citizens in addressing all ten threats across all twelve policies in the context of  balanced budget, first in the USA, then in such other countries as might have a citizenry interested in Wise Democracy and Participatory Budgeting.

Reference: Al-Qaeda Statements Index

09 Terrorism, Analysis, Methods & Process, White Papers
Berto Jongman Recommends...

This paper is written in correlation with a project that aims to provide a distinctly new perspective to current trends in terrorism research by allowing for a new and more nuanced study of statements made by al-Qaeda. This project, the Al-Qaeda Statements Index (AQSI) database project at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, is one example of how new innovations can continue to provide new insight.

2010 Thesis Online

Unlike previous projects, the Al-Qaeda Statements Index project, when complete, will aid researches in developing a more thorough understanding of al- Qaeda's rhetoric by creating a searchable network to show complex connections among the web of various statements, keywords and ideas professed by al-Qaeda, spanning a period from the 1990s up to the present day. The AQSI will serve as both an advanced annotated bibliography for scholars seeking a starting point to study specific statements more in depth, while at the same time allowing for a quantitative analysis of the intricate connections and relationships among statements which would otherwise not be readily quantifiable or apparent.

Phi Beta Iota: A senior thesis within one of the more intelligent schools in America.  Something to be proud of, and good indicator that the emerging generation can think.

Reference: Internet Governance

Monographs
Berto Jongman Recommends...

In this Council Special Report, Robert K. Knake briefly examines the technological decisions that have enabled both the Internet's spectacular success and its troubling vulnerability to attack. Arguing that the United States can no longer cede the initiative on cyber issues to countries that do not share its interests, he outlines an agenda that the United States can pursue in concert with its allies on the international stage. This agenda, addressing cyber warfare, cyber crime, and state-sponsored espionage, should, he writes, be pursued through both technological and legal means. He urges first that the United States empower experts to confront the fundamental security issues at the heart of the Internet's design. Then he sketches the legal tools necessary to address both cyber crime and state-sponsored activities, including national prohibitions of cyber crime, multilateral mechanisms to prevent and prosecute cyberattacks, and peacetime norms protecting critical civilian systems, before describing the bureaucratic reforms the United States should make to implement effectively these changes.

Report Online

Phi Beta Iota: This is an Epoch A report that is state-centric, does not demonstrate knowledge of the code-level and open-source challenges and opportunities, and lacks any sense of how a strategic analytic model with burden sharing among the varied stakeholders (e.g. eight clouds, twelve modalities) could resolve the problem at a fraction of the cost of the “traditionalist” “solutions” proposed here.  This report is about doing the wrong things righter, not about doing the right things in the first place.