Category: Methods & Process

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Robert Steele: NO LABELS & Americans Elect Fraudulent

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, InfoOps (IO), IO Impotency, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda
Robert David STEELE Vivas

Our various editors have been receiving emails from people we all deeply respect.  Below is my response on behalf of the community we represent, but strictly my personal interpretation and cautionary note.  Below was provided in email form to NO LABELS and to the circle being Moon-eized by NO LABELS.

NO LABELS and Americans Elect are both fraudulent

Folks, I have no doubt about the generally good intentions of Schultz and others, but NO LABELS is a fraud, as is Americans Elect.

Below provide some background.  Those of us who have been attentive have exposed the manipulative nature of these two entities, as well as their complete lack of transparency.  The staffers fronting for these two organizations are well-intentioned but witless of their being used, just as the Tea Party rank and file are witless of the Koch brothers financial campaign that puts the booboise in front.

NO LABELS Rolling Update CLOSED

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Seth Godin: Back to (the wrong) school — inspires a plan to retrain 44% of the US workforce in one year

03 Economy, 04 Education, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), IO Deeds of Peace, Methods & Process, Open Government, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Serious Games, Standards, Strategy, Technologies, Threats
Seth Godin

Back to (the wrong) school

A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults.

Sure, there was some moral outrage at seven-year olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work–they said they couldn't afford to hire adults. It wasn't until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place.

Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence–it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told.

Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.

Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?

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Chuck Spinney: Hill Staffer Expose of the GOP

11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), IO Deeds of Peace, IO Impotency, Methods & Process, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Threats
Chuck Spinney

My very close friend Mike Lofgren, and Republican of the Old School, one of the smartest people I have ever met, backs out of the Capital Hill Saloon with both guns blazing.  Knowing the truly dedicated people like Mike in government over the years is one of the things that made my 33 years in government service both a privilege and honor for which I will remain ever thankful.

Chuck Spinney
Ste Maxime, France

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

by: Mike Lofgren,

Truthout, 3 September 2011

Barbara Stanwyck: “We're both rotten!”
Fred MacMurray: “Yeah – only you're a little more rotten.”
– Double Indemnity (1944)

Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten – how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests – no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

Full safety copy with added emphasis below the line.

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Steven Aftergood: Top Secret America–Totally Dysfunctional

Analysis, Commerce, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Policies, Threats
Steven Aftergood

A SPOTLIGHT ON “TOP SECRET AMERICA”

Most people can vaguely recall that there was once no U.S. Department of Homeland Security and that there was a time when you didn't have to take your shoes off before boarding an airplane or submit to other dubious security practices.

But hardly anyone truly comprehends the enormous expansion of the military, intelligence and homeland security bureaucracy that has occurred over the past decade, and the often irrational transformation of American life that has accompanied it.

The great virtue of the new book Top Secret America by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin (Little Brown, September 2011) is that it illuminates various facets of our secret government, lifting them from the periphery of awareness to full, sustained attention.

Top Secret America, which builds on the series of stories the authors produced for the Washington Post in July 2010, delineates the contours of “the  new American security state.”  Since 9/11, for example, some 33 large office complexes for top secret intelligence work have been completed in the Washington DC area, the equivalent in size of nearly three Pentagons.  More than 250,000 contractors are working on top secret programs.  A bewildering number of agencies – more than a thousand — have been created to execute security policy, including at least 24 new organizations last year alone.  And so on.

But the vast scale of this activity says nothing about its quality or utility.  The authors, who are scrupulous in their presentation of the facts, are critical in their evaluation:

“One of the greatest secrets of Top Secret America is its disturbing dysfunction.”

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Harrison Owen: August Morning Reflection & Invitation…

11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process
Harrison Owen

This [ten-page] paper started as a note to myself as I sought to explore the disparity between my home here in Maine, the forest, lake, and loons…and the rushing maelstrom of the world about me that showed up in the instant on my computer screen.

Call it anxiety adjustment, therapy, or just an attempt to make some sense out of thing.

Perhaps it should have remained in that personal, private compartment, but I also felt the need to share, and so I have.  You have to decide the wisdom of that decision.

Ho.

Harrison

 

August Morning: A time for Reflection and an Invitation…

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John Robb: Free Online Open Source Education + RECAP

04 Education, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Book Lists, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Gift Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process
John Robb

JOURNAL: Open Source Education

A couple of years back I asked (in the article “Industrial Education” which is worth a read):

“An Ivy League Education for less than $20 a month.  Why not?”

At the time there were only a smattering of course materials online.  That's changing.  It's coming.  Here's an example of a class that signed up 56,000 people in two weeks.

Free Online Class on Artificial Intelligence

Another example of a highly scalable education product: Codecademy

The way to repair and revitalize modern civilization is on the horizon.  It follows a simple dictum:

Localize production.  Virtualize everything else. 

With the above, we see the virtualization of formal education (books were the first wave).

Some other thoughts on this:

  • It can drop costs by 3 orders of magnitude.  $20 a year instead of $20,000.
  • It means that the best instructors teach almost everyone.  Why not the best?

Phi Beta Iota:  There is actually a much larger variant of free online education, and that it the YouTube 2-5 minute micro-class revolution, in which citizen experts create concise lectures on single specific micro-knowledge, for example, a type of algebra problem, or mixing hydoponic solutions, etcetera.

Free Online & RECAP Links Below the Line

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Steven Howard Johnson: Reflections on OSINT

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Hacking, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Open Government, Policies, Resilience, Strategy, Threats
Steven Howard Johnson

Phi Beta Iota:  Mr. Johnson is the author of Integrity at Scale, free online, whose many ideas are being integrated into the vision for a Smart Nation Act and the hub of the Smart Nation, an Open Source Agency and global Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) network of networks.  He is a party to the on-going push to establish the Open Source Agency and create a more competent and ethical America.

– – – – – – -BEGIN REFLECTIONS- – – – – – –

As I look at the Open Source idea, I find myself experiencing a fair amount of dissonance between a methodological vision of open source intelligence, at one level, and at a very different level, an aspirational vision that sees it as a way of disinfecting a misguided and corrupt set of bureaucracies.

One mission is potentially endorsable by the powers-that-be.  The second mission is not.  Ask people to endorse both and it isn’t likely that either will move forward. If corruption prevention is to be the mission, the open source agency will have to find a home outside of government.  If transparency of intelligence is the mission, then perhaps it can find a home inside government.

My second source of dissonance has to do with design and scale.  Open source intelligence is potentially as vast as all the server farms Google will ever own.  How does a relatively modest site, squeezed in between State and Watergate, ever acquire the heft to handle the challenge?  The scope of the mission and the scope of the agency seem out of sync with the scope of the real estate footprint.

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