Threats – Page 593 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/04/242011/04/24

Call for Criminal Investigation of Bush-Cheney

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement, Military, Peace Intelligence

ElBaradei suggests war crimes probe of Bush team

(AP) – 22 April 2011

NEW YORK (AP) — Former chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei suggests in a new memoir that Bush administration officials should face international criminal investigation for the “shame of a needless war” in Iraq.

Freer to speak now than he was as an international civil servant, the Nobel-winning Egyptian accuses U.S. leaders of “grotesque distortion” in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, when then-President George W. Bush and his lieutenants claimed Iraq possessed doomsday weapons despite contrary evidence collected by ElBaradei's and other arms inspectors inside the country.

The Iraq war taught him that “deliberate deception was not limited to small countries ruled by ruthless dictators,” ElBaradei writes in “The Age of Deception,” being published Tuesday by Henry Holt and Company.

The 68-year-old legal scholar, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1997 to 2009 and recently a rallying figure in Egypt's revolution, concludes his 321-page account of two decades of “tedious, wrenching” nuclear diplomacy with a plea for more of it, particularly in the efforts to rein in North Korean and Iranian nuclear ambitions.

Read full article…

Phi Beta Iota: We endorse the truth & reconciliation process and believe that if the USA is to restore its promise as a contributor to the international community of nations, it must first disclose the truth. In our view, the investigation should begin three months prior to 9-11, when Dick Cheney first mandated a nation-wide counter-terrorism exercise that assured his complete control over the entire US Government on 9-11….an assurance he and his planners needed to not just let it happen, but to execute all the trimmings and then carry on with the Weapons of Mass Deception that committed America to an elective multi-trillion dollar war against multiple countries. Dick Cheney hijacked the Presidency. We all need the truth on the table.

Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York): When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit

Worth a Look: Impeachable Offenses, Modern & Historic

2011/04/242011/04/24

Call for mandatory sustainable reporting

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Open Government, Policies, Reform, Standards, Strategy, Threats

Call for mandatory sustainable reporting

By Ruth Sullivan

Financial Times, April 24 2011

Sustainability experts have called on global regulators to ask companies to report on their sustainable policy and performance, disclosing results in a similar way to financial reporting.

“A ‘report or explain’ approach could persuade more companies to report rather than explain why they don’t,” said Teresa Fogelberg, deputy chief executive of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).

. . . . . .

About 4,000 global companies report their sustainability performance, using reporting guidelines recently updated by the GRI.

These focus on 79 issues including consulting stakeholders on important topics, human rights, the impact on local communities and gender matters.

Rest of article….

2011/04/242011/04/24

Reference: APJ Abdul Kalam–Pure Wisdom

01 Poverty, 03 Environmental Degradation, 03 India, 04 Education, 05 Energy, 08 Proliferation, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Articles & Chapters, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics

‘To create better world, it is necessary to alleviate poverty’

Chicago, Apr 24:

Former President, Mr A P J Abdul Kalam today said that to create a better world, it is necessary to alleviate poverty, safeguard drinking water, use clean energy and ensure quality education and values for all.

Mr Kalam, who was honoured at a public reception by the Indo-American Centre (IAC) here, said: “The world is integrally connected through the environment, economy, people and ideas.”

He said that we need an educational value system, and ideas and innovations should not be politically inclined.

On political unrest in the Middle East, Mr Kalam explained how the Egyptian revolution for a change to democracy has spread to the Arab world.

“We need to stop corruption,” he said.

Continue reading “Reference: APJ Abdul Kalam–Pure Wisdom”

2011/04/232011/04/23

Participatory (Crowd-Sourced) Futures Planning

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Open Government, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Serious Games, Strategy, Threats, Tools

whether talking about a intelligent knowledge infrastructure, robert's global brain, or suresh's project matching for climate change initiatives, this article seemed useful.

Noah Raford
Large-scale participatory futures systems

Futurescaper is an online tool for making sense of the drivers, trends and forces that will shape the future. As a user interface system, it is horrible. As a tool for analyzing and understanding complex systems, it works pretty well. Several people asked me about this after my last post, so here is some more detail.

Following the logic of collective intelligence (as part of my my PhD), I broke up the the scenario thinking process into discrete chunks, came up with a system for analyzing and relating them together, and then distilled them into key outputs for helping the scenario development process: 1) Emergent Thematic Maps 2) Revealing Hidden Connections 3) Drilling Down

Read full post.

See Also by Noah Radford:

The Three Systems, an Overview

The first system is called “Futurescaper” and was developed in partnership with the International Futures Forum (IFF), Tony Hodgson and my friend Nathan Koren. This was piloted on a project for the UK Government, exploring secondary and tertiary impacts of climate change.

The second system is called “SenseMaker Scenarios.” This uses a customized version of Cognitive Edge’s SenseMaker Suite to aggregate micro-stories about the future into themes and patterns for scenario generation. This was done with Dave Snowden and Wendy Schultz, and was unveiled at the 2010 RAHS conference in Singapore.

The third system is called “FogCatcher”, and was developed with Anab Jain and Jon Ardern from Superflux. This was based on a modified version of Jerome C. Glenn’s futures wheel, combined with a “hot or not” style cross-impact analysis engine. As before, this approach benefited greatly from previous conversations with my colleagues above, but also from others such as Andrew Curry of the Futures Company, Emile Hooge of Nova7, Indy Johar of 00:/research, Vinay Gupta and others.

All three projects are still in continuous development and available for experimental project use.

Reference: Dr. Joseph Tainter, Seven YouTube Segments on “Why Societies Collapse and What It Means to Us”

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, InfoOps (IO), IO Impotency, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Policies, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Real Time, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Serious Games, Strategy, Threats, YouTube

Utah State University. Professor in the Department of Environment & Society, (Social conflict in environmental issues, human responses to climate change and environmental degradation, human uses of energy and resources).

“We Need An Adult Conversation–Our Political System is Dysfunctional”

Complexity & Catastrophe (103)
Complexity & Resilience (119)

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)

Wikipedia Joseph Tainter

FEATURED (2010):

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (1 of 7)

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (2 of 7)

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (3 of 7)

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (4 of 7)

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (5 of 7) (Conclusions)

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (6 of 7) (Q&A)

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (7 of 7) (Q&A)

Tip of the Hat to newculture at YouTube for gifted uploads.

Found and recommended by Contributing Editor Lucius.

Phi Beta Iota: There are no challenges that cannot be addressed with a combination of collective intelligence and individual integrity. Infinite free energy, and the eradication of waste across all industries, are immediately achievable if (big if) the public will reengage in its own governance.

See Also:

M4IS2

2011/04/23

Government 2.0 Melds with Crowd-Sourcing

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Open Government, Policies, Reform, Serious Games, Strategy, Threats, Waste (materials, food, etc)

In Oakland, A Creative Strategy for Financing the City's Solar Roofs

Using a new “crowdfunding” program called Solar Mosaic, the city is selling solar tiles to locals for $100 a pop and installing them on public buildings

By Maria Gallucci, SolveClimate News

Apr 22, 2011

The city of Oakland, Calif., is getting its residents to help build out a clean energy economy, one solar tile at a time.

By selling 5,000 tiles at $100 each to locals, the city is aiming to piece together entire rooftop solar arrays at seven budget-strapped schools, youth centers and houses of worship. A team of Oaklanders will be trained and hired to install the panels by as early as July.

The city's efforts are part of a pilot program called Solar Mosaic, a web-based marketplace for community solar initiatives that launched on April 15.

Using the “crowdfunding” model, residents can help generate energy savings and scale back greenhouse gas emissions without having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a solar installation at home.

Read rest of article….

Phi Beta Iota: The existing tax system in the USA is so corrupt it must be abolished. The public is now ready for line-item crowd-sourcing and the fully-transparent Automated Payments/Transaction Tax.

Serious (Honest) Thinking About US Budget

2011/04/222011/04/22

UK Guardian on Bolivia–and Rights for Nature

03 Environmental Degradation, Advanced Cyber/IO, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, IO Multinational, Key Players, Policies, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Standards, Strategy, Waste (materials, food, etc)

Bolivia enshrines natural world's rights with equal status for Mother Earth

10 April 2011: John Vidal: Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as “blessings” and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry

We should look to Bolivia for inspiration

19 Apr 2011: Jonathan Glennie: Bolivia under President Evo Morales is seeking a radical development model based on equality and environmental sustainability – and there are lessons we can all learn.

‘Indigenous thinking can solve climate crises,' says Bolivia's foreign minister

13 Apr 2011: John Vidal: Development, by the west, creates considerable imbalances and a million problems. Indigenous people can solve these, says David Choquehuanca, Bolivia's foreign minister