The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Transpartisan dialog on corporate power: Americans as citizens, consumers and employees
I hosted a transpartsian dialog with Lisa Graves, Tim Carney, Arnold Kling and Dean Baker at the “Movement for the People.” conference in Washington DC on January 21st, 2011. It was quite enjoyable.
Letter to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI
Resume Robert David STEELE Vivas M4IS2
See Also:
28 Jan Seven Answers–Robert Steele in Rome
27 Jan Assisi-Rome 2nd Meeting
27 Jan Reference: Correspondence on Assisi Intelligence
Posted with permission. Provided by Dr. James Spohrer in response to a request from Phi Beta Iota for a “snap-shot” overview of the “soul” of IBM going into the 21st Century.
1. Cities: here is a short IBM video (YouTube 4:15) on cities as the nodes in the planetary system of systems
Features Mike Wing, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Julia Grace. Cities as planetary accupunture points of intervention. Cities are HUMAN–computers cannot handle the unpredictable. Dominos analogy–everything is interconnected and knowledge or information are the “energy” being exchanged among individual people, the HUMAN element. It is the mixture of people and hardware, and software that is so elegant and exciting.
2. Universities in Cities: My current job at IBM builds from the notion that universities are the knowledge batteries of city/regions… see slide #34 in this presentation on Service Science: Progress and Directions (64 Slides), connected with Handbook of Service Science (Springer, 2010). NOTE: Downloading presentation enables viewing of Notes for each slide.
Overview of IBM University Programs focusing on 5 R's (Research, Readiness, Recruiting, Revenue, Responsibilities); Quality of Life balance between local and global optimization; Ecology–study of all things in relation to all life forms; and Holistic Service Systems with cities and within cities, universities, and the fundamental “intelligent” building blocks. Emphasis on information information exchanges and life-long learning. Slide #34:
3. Connecting Universities and Cities Locally and Globally: My global team at IBM University Programs is funding connecting the universities locally with their cities, and globally with each other – networked improvement communities in Doug's language… Really connecting service systems, see Slide #16 in this presentation.
Continue reading “REFERENCE: IBM Advanced Information Operations”
People power goes techie, ousts Tunisian dictator
Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 01:25:00 01/16/2011
Seeds of protest
The antigovernment protests began a month ago when a college-educated street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi in the small town of Sidi Bouzid burned himself to death in despair at the frustration and joblessness confronting many educated young people here. But the protests he inspired quickly evolved from bread-and-butter issues to demands for an assault on the perceived corruption and self-enrichment of the ruling family.
The protesters, led at first by unemployed college graduates like Bouazizi and later joined by workers and young professionals, found grist for the complaints in leaked cables from the US Embassy in Tunisia, released by WikiLeaks, which detailed the self-dealing and excess of the president’s family. And the protesters relied heavily on social media websites like Facebook and Twitter to circulate videos of each demonstration and issue calls for the next one.
TUNISIA: The First WikiLeaks Revolution?
Review: SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa
23 Worst Tyrants/Dictators (Yes, there’s more than 23) and Oops, there’s Saudi Arabia..
Review: Breaking the Real Axis of Evil–How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025
Posted By Elizabeth Dickinson 
Thursday, January 13, 2011 – 6:17 PM
Foreign Policy
EXTRACT: As in the recent so-called “Twitter Revolutions” in Moldova and Iran, there was clearly lots wrong with Tunisia before Julian Assange ever got hold of the diplomatic cables. Rather, WikiLeaks acted as a catalyst: both a trigger and a tool for political outcry. Which is probably the best compliment one could give the whistle-blower site.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a good time to bring up the Davies J-Curve again. Wikileaks is a precipitant of revolution; the preconditions exist in most places outside the Nordic region and a few other special countries. The preconditions assuredly exist in the USA but in our view, the precipitant is most likely to be some really outrageous US Government action, such as federalizing all state and local police forces and then start trying to confiscate personal weapons. However, if the two party system continues to think that changing its “tone” matters, while it does nothing about the substance of poverty, economy, education, health and so on, then we will see a mix of widespread poverty and apathy with pockets of extreme violence and random attacks on elected officials and perhaps uniformed law enforcement professionals. America is, in our view, very volatile right now. 2011-2012 are not going to be subject to the usual pre-election “damping down.” The situation is now “out of control.” Nothing less than a comprehensive approach to meeting the needs of the larger public will do, if we are to avoid a cascade of socio-economic and ideo-cultural uprisings and individual “random” acts of violence in the next two years.
A film by Helena Norberg-Hodge, Steven Gorelick & John Page
‘Going local' is a powerful strategy to help repair our fractured world – our ecosystems, our societies and our selves. Far from the old institutions of power, people are starting to forge a very different future…
FeaturingVandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Michael Shuman, Juliet Schor, Richard Heinberg, Rob Hopkins, Andrew Simms, Zac Goldsmith, Samdhong Rinpoche
See Also:
Votetocracy is a place where every citizen can see every bill currently in congress, vote on those bills and send those votes to thier representatives. The site has been created by three regular citizens that felt it was time to get engaged with American politics. During our efforts to become more educated about our government we discovered that it was not all that easy. We found plenty of information. But it is written in difficult to understand political speak. We also found that it was not particularly easy to act on this information. When we found bills on government websites we had no measurable way to act on it. Sure, you could write a letter or contact our representatives, but had no real way of knowing that it would actually accomplish anything. These things felt like barriers. It was then that we dicided that there had to be a better way and Votetocracy is the the result of our efforts.
The site has the features neccesary for any citizen to find out what congress is working on. More importantly however is the ability to act on that information. We have created the site so that citizens can vote on the same bills as congress, send their vote to thier representatives with the click of the button.
We felt that there are three major areas that we could help citizens.
Related:
+ Public Markup
+ Whitehouse 2 (ended Dec. 2010)
+ Open Congress
+ Open Secrets
+ Sunlight Foundation
+ Sunlight Labs
