I will not replicate all that is at www.oss.net and to a much lesser extent, www.earth-intelligence.net, but do want to recognize a handful of extraordinary individuals by isolating their especially meritorious contributiions to the long-running debate about national intelligence reform and re-invention.
A good rule of thumb for life is that if the Chinese government is against it, you're probably doing something right. The latest evidence to support this axiom is the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has spread from lower Manhattan to cities around the globe, including London, Auckland, Toronto, and Rome, among many others. Terrified by OWS' viral growth, the oppressive regime controlling China is taking measures to ensure the protests don't happen there. And it's starting with the internet.
We’ve been hearing for two decades now about television/computer/Internet convergence. Televisions sets today are advanced digital products, and we connect computers and specialized set-top boxes to ‘em, but they’re still primarily display devices.
In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes that Jobs ““very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant.”
Jobs told Isaacson that “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”
More on the Jobs/Apple vision of convergence here.
I’m imagining a media device that, like the Internet, swallows all other forms: television set, movie theatre, stereo, juke box, etc. But it would also be interactive, a window on the rest of the world. This isn’t exactly cutting edge – those who think about such things expected it before now.
Phi Beta Iota: Our own collective epiphany (translation for Democrats: “aha”) came in connection with the Contact endeavors of Doug Rushkoff, where we realized that connectivity comes first, and that public intelligence will evolve from that, not the other way around. HOWEVER, apart from Range Networks, we see no one seriously pursuing the OpenBTS “dumb” cell phone for free or $2 a month maximum (subsidized in the Third World), nor have we been successful at breaking through to the Vatican (read letter) or Sir Richard Branson (read one-pager), both of whom could have come together in Assisi to converge connectivity with the eradication of secular corruption.
Full Text: Note on financial reform from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace
2011-10-24 Vatican Radio
Please find, below, an unofficial translation of the Note on the reform of the international financial and monetary systems in the context of global public authority, released Monday by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.
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Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace
TOWARDS REFORMING THE INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL AND MONETARY SYSTEMS IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL PUBLIC AUTHORITY
In a widely-expected note on the financial crisis and economic justice, Vatican officials accidently call for the establishment of a One World Global “Authority” to regulate financial markets and national governments.
After gently noting that such a project is “a complex and delicate process,” the document begins to capitalize the word, “Authority” in the most unsettling, conspiracy-launching way possible:
Phi Beta Iota: With the exception of the call for an “Authority” and complete ignorance of the alternatives to a new hierarchy, the Vatican document does not read as badly as the above critique suggests. It ends with a call for “unity in truth.” It does not address secular corruption as it should have.
FAIRFAX, Virginia (AP) — Maybe you've got a hunch Kim Jong Il's regime in North Korea has seen its final days, or that the Ebola virus will re-emerge somewhere in the world in the next year.
Your educated guess may be just as good as an expert's opinion. Statistics have long shown that large crowds of average people frequently make better predictions about unknown events, when their disparate guesses are averaged out, than any individual scholar — a phenomenon known as the wisdom of crowds.
Now the U.S. intelligence community, with the help of university researchers and regular folks around the country, is studying ways to harness and improve the wisdom of crowds. The research could one day arm policymakers with information gathered by some of the same methods that power Wikipedia and social media.
Phi Beta Iota: The idea is actually from George Mason University. IARPA is a mess, as is DARPA. If the DNI were serious about growing up, he would have distributed national intelligence councils for each of the ten high-level threats to humanity, each of the core policy domains, and state and local sub-councils, as well as a means of integrating humans, data, and assumptions in an EarthGame such as Medard Gabel is ready to build at a cost of no more than $3 million a year. US Intelligence lacks intelligence and integrity, and is not going to grow up under its current “leadership.”
The triumphalism in the US surrounding the liquidation of Qadaffi may be short lived. That is because most Americans do not appreciate how the legacy of anti-colonialism shapes the contemporary cultural DNA in North Africa or how influential that legacy has been in shaping the revolts of what is now called the Arab Spring. There is more going on in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya than Jefferson's vision of revolution fertilizing the natural rights of man.
The coming elections in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya may well result in victories or strong showings for the Islamic parties in each nation’s politics. The U.S., U.K., France, and Italy will not like such results, should they occur, and may will be tempted to intervene to contain or reverse them by influencing the elections either before the fact or overturning them after the fact. Further intervention would be certain to produce yet more unpleasant blowback.
As Peter Osborne argues below, before doing anything, we would do well to remember what happened to Algeria after the 1991-2 election and leave well enough alone. In what is widely regarded to have been a free and fair election, the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut or FIS) won a stunning victory in Dec 1991 on the first ballot, just short of an outright majority. It was clear that the FIS would win a majority on the second ballot scheduled for Jan 1992, and perhaps even enough votes to amend the Algerian constitution. The Algerian army, aided (incited?) by France and the CIA, intervened to cancel the second ballot. The cancellation triggered a chain of events leading to a nightmarish civil war that ultimately killed over 100,000 people and left a state that is still ripe for revolution.
We may not like the consequences of elections in North Africa – but we must not repeat the mistakes of the past.
By Peter Oborne, Telegraph, 22 Oct 2011
The extra-judicial execution of Colonel Gaddafi has been greeted with international elation, and understandably so. There was very little to be said in favour of that gnarled torturer and war criminal. Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron, who masterminded the campaign against him, have some excuse to take the view that with the killing of Gaddafi, and today’s elections in Tunisia, the Arab Spring appears to be entering a hopeful stage.
