Category: Worth A Look

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Worth a Look: Open Farm Technology

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, Worth A Look

Open Source Ecology

Building tools for replicable, open source, post-scarcity resilient communities

We are farmer scientists – working to develop a world class research center for decentralization technologies using open source permaculture and technology to work together for providing basic needs and self replicating the entire operation at the cost of scrap metal. We seek societal transformation through interconnected self-sufficient villages and homes. This is a stepping stone to transcending survival and evolving to freedom. Factor e Farm is the land-based facility where we put this theory, Open Source Ecology, into practice.

See below as a scalable PowerPoint 97-2003

The Master Plan

Tip of the Hatto Brandin Watson via email.

See Also:

Graphic: Open Everything

2009 Briefing: Open Everything at UNICEF in NYC

2007 Open Everything: We Won, Let’s Self-Govern

Review: The World Is Open–How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education

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Worth a Look: You Tube & Linked In

IO Sense-Making, Worth A Look, YouTube

The Shocking Video Hillary Does NOT Want You To See! (1 of 2 with Click to 2 of 2)

9/11: Blueprint for Truth – WTC Building, 10 Minute Edition

Louis Armstrong – Hello Dolly Live

Ray Charles – Georgia On My Mind (From “Live At Montreux 1997”)

Phi Beta Iota: Both YouTube and LinkedIn appear to have hit critical mass this year.  YouTube is now breaking up both documentaries and films of the past into bite-size pieces that can be crowd-ranked for relevance.  LinkedIn, which has been mostly a job-hunt site, is now achieving huge efficiencies as a means of leveraging networks as scouts for interesting things (most of our posts here, for example, now come from what we see others highlighting at LinkedIn–connect with either JZ or Robert if you want to be “visible” to us there).  Our general sense is that 2012 is going to be a year of convergence, in which past data pathologies and information asymmetries collide with current truths and crowd-level information awareness, and out of it, emerges the Second American Republic and a world that is much more accountable through transparency that eradicates corruption.  What is happening is that the “cognitive surplus” of America and the rest of the world is connecting with the “information overload” of the past, and sense is being made in the public interest.  We will say that again: sense is being made in the public interest. That's a good thing.

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Worth a Look: Competing Views on 9/11, Afghanistan

Worth A Look

On the one hand:

Nine Years After 9/11: Assessing the War on Terror

Joseph J. Collins, Small Wars Journal, 7 September 2010

Tip of the Hat to  Small Wars Journal at FaceBook.

NATO eyes 2,000 extra troops for Afghanistan: official

Tip of the Hat to Berto Jongman at FaceBook.

And on the other hand:

Al Qaeda Doesn't Exist (Documentary)

Corbett Report at YouTube, 30 December 2008

Tip of the Hat to Mario Profaca at FaceBook.

Review: Surrender to Kindness (One Man’s Epic Journey for Love and Peace)

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Worth a Look: NATO on FaceBook & YouTube

Worth A Look, YouTube

Today, with a Tip of the Hat to Roxana Stefanescu at Facebook, we point to the NATO page on Facebook, and the NATO page on YouTube.

Context: Long, long, ago in a land far far away, Frank Carlucci spoke to a group of CIA analysts at a hotel near the White House, and his observation has stayed with us to this date.  Paraphrasing from memory, he said that in the Reagan Administration, the perfect intelligence briefing would be a five minute video tailored to the President's next hour, that could be viewed five minutes before the hour began.  We have never forgotten that, it is probably influenced our own concept of just enough, just in time intelligence, and our diamond paradigm, where the acme of skill of an analyst is not in developing an answer, but as Stevan Dedijer said at OSS '92, “knowing who knows” and connecting the customer with exactly the right person who can create tailored intelligence on the spot through interaction with the customer (recorded and retained for the intelligence archives).

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Event: 14-21 Sep 2010 Global Peace Week

Worth A Look
Peace Week 2010

Peace One Day, a DVD we reviewed when it came out, has now graduated to Peace Week, but not really.

Click on the logo (from 2003, still the best we have seen) to see the “personalities” that are being offered free in a global summit.

See also a collage of Peace Week images.

The good of this is that the circle is gradually widening.

The bad is that this is still kum-ba-ya on steroids, all about hand-holding and soul searching with little attention to multinational information-sharing and sense-making, or to creating actionable public intelligence.

Too many of these people are merely on the talk circuit, while others are doing righteous work at the micro-level that is not scalable or migratable without a global concept of operations and doctrine for transforming from the culture of war to the culture of peace through Information Operations (IO).

Ohmmmmm.

See Also:

Worth a Look: Book (and DVD) Reviews on Peace

Who's Who in Peace Intelligence (34)

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Worth a Look: Crane on Islam–Concise & Coherent

Worth A Look

Human Responsibilities and Rights in the Shari’ah: An Advanced Primer

Dr. Robert D. Crane

Ibn Qayyim wrote:  “The Islamic law is all about wisdom and achieving people’s welfare in this life and the afterlife.  It is all about justice, mercy, wisdom, and good.  Thus any ruling that replaces justice with injustice, mercy with its opposite, common good with mischief, or wisdom with nonsense, is a ruling that does not belong to the Islamic law.”

This introductory essay defines the highest level framework, akin to constitutional principles, and introduces various schools of fiqh or schools of thought (madhahib) that have been established by leading Islamic scholars or Imams, namely, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali, Ja’fari, and Zaidi.  Regardless of the school(s) of thought one may follow, the discussion of the universal human responsibilities and rights culminates in what is the essence of Islam, i.e., truth, love, and justice.

EXTRACT:

The classical five maqasid (al dururiyat al khamsah) or huquq (sing. haqq) of Al Ghazali in the 4th Islamic century were the protection of din (faith and religion), haya (life), mal (private property), karama (dignity and honor), and ‘ilm (mind and knowledge).  Later scholars, especially Al Shatibi, added nasl or nasab (family and community) and hurriyah (self-determination or political freedom).  Some twenty-first century scholars have added an eighth maqsad, known as haqq al mahid or respect for the physical environment.