Category: Knowledge

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Chuck Spinney – Cogent Analysis pf Arab Spring Seven Key Challenges Not Available from CIA or Department of State – Plus Personal Appeal for Contributions to Keep CounterPunch Going

05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, IO Deeds of Peace, Knowledge, Military, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney

Jeffrey St Claire, the editor at Counterpunch has given me permission to distribute the attached essay, “The Arab Spring at the Crossroads,” by  Esam Al-Amin.  It was published in the subscription edition of Counterpunch and is not available at the CP website.  Al-Amin, who I do not know, has written a very informative summary of the crosscurrents now shaping the Arab world.  This is a subject of very great importance to the welfare of all Americans.  I urge you to read it carefully.

In addition to being informative, Al-Amin's essay is a prime example of the quality of the information now available in what the mainstream media likes to call the alternative press.  This brings me to my second reason for writing this blaster.  Counterpunch is having a rare fundraising drive and I am taking what for me is an unprecedented action of urging you to contribute.  I think it is important to support alternative news/opinion outlets like Antiwar.com, Truthout, Alternet, and especially, since I am biased, Counterpunch. (Truth in advertising: I counted the late editor Alex Cockburn and still count his co-editor Jeffrey St Claire as friends.)

So, I urge you read the essay below — you can determine whether or not you think it stands on its own merits.  If you feel this is the kind of info worth paying a little for, I encourage you to think about purchasing a subscription or a gift sub for a friend or relative or sending a small tax-deductible donation to  CP's secure sever.  The Counterpunchers promise they won’t contact you to shake you down for more money or sell your name to any lists–not Karl Rove’s and especially not MoveOn’s. To contribute by phone you can call Becky or Deva toll free at: 1-800-840-3683

Chuck Spinney

Please Contribute to CounterPunch.  Printable Document:  Esam Al-Amin on Arab Spring Seven Challenges (9 Page Doc)

The Arab Spring at the Crossroads

Seven Key Challenges

By Esam Al-Amin

CounterPunch Volume 19 Number 17, >October 1-15, 2012, published October 2, 2012

Ever since Napoléon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, the relationship between the West and the Arab-Muslim East has been contentious and convoluted. Although this military leader of the first French Republic conquered Egypt for strategic reasons in his rivalry with the British and the Ottomans, the Muslim Arabs of the region – later dubbed “the Middle East” by an American naval officer – felt vulnerable, exposed, and weak.

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Jim Spoher: Harvard Discovers the Skills Gap

Knowledge
Jim Spoher

Mind the (Skills) Gap

by William D. Eggers, John Hagel and Owen Sanderson

Harvard Business Review | 9:00 AM September 21, 2012

A bachelor's degree used to provide enough basic training to last a career. Yet today, the skills college graduates acquire during college have an expected shelf life of only five years according to extensive work we've done in conjunction with Deloitte's Shift Index. The key takeaway? The lessons learned in school can become outdated long before student loans are paid off.

And it's not only white-collar, college-driven careers that will suffer rapid skills obsolescence. Think of how new metering systems and motion sensors suddenly require highly technical skills from contractors, plumbers and electricians. Or how welders working on wind turbines now need specialized degrees and the ability to read CAD blueprints or LEED certification requirements.

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Tim O’Reilly: Towards a Global Brain (YouTube 20:20)

Culture, Knowledge
Tim O'Reilly

[SDF2012] Coexistence 2.0: Towards a Global Brain – Tim O'Reilly

Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media Tim O'Reilly, who has been a key influencer of web 2.0 movements, sketches what ‘coexistence 2.0' would entail.

웹2.0 운동의 선봉장이자 오라일리 미디어의 창립자 겸 CEO인 팀 오라일리가 ‘공존 2.0' 이란 과연 무엇이며, 기술, 인간, 기업, 자연이 조화롭게 함께하는 미래의 모습을 이야기한다.

Phi Beta Iota:  For the details Earth Intelligence Network has been developing over the past decade, see 21st Century Intelligence Core References 2007-2013.

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Yoda: Google Evil – Threat to National & Individual Security

Knowledge
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Google's data mining raises questions of national security

The ability of any company to ‘mine the mosaic' of personal data has consequences far beyond individuals' privacy

guardian.co.uk,

An imminent report on an emerging threat to individual privacy to be issued by the European data protection authorities raises even more serious issues than those it is likely to address. The report will consider Google's asserted right to expand its data mining to combine users' personal data across all their accounts and services, including Gmail, internet searching, map and location information and photo sharing, with no way for individuals to opt out. At least one technology blogger has accused Microsoft of planning similar changes, while two new Facebook programmes to aggregate user data with other advertising and loyalty card data have also drawn concern. Whatever the merits of each case, the larger issue deserves greater public attention.

There is a powerful reason why cloud services and other data-mining companies aggregate data across multiple accounts and services: the results are extremely valuable. Just as tiny bits of coloured tile can be combined and transformed into a coherent piece of art, tiny bits of seemingly unrelated personal data, when aggregated and mined at huge scale, can provide immense value to advertisers, marketers, corporate sales forces and others. The revenue generated by combining and monetising such data – by mining the mosaic – is the reason “free” cloud services can afford to be free.

Read full article.

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Greg Palast: Nine Ways the GOP Will Steal the 2012 Elections

Communities of Practice, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Knowledge
Greg Palast

Greg Palast on How the GOP Is Planning to Steal the 2012 Election

EXTRACT:

In all, 5,901,814 legitimate votes and voters were tossed out of the count in 2008. In '12 it will be worse. Way worse.

THE BOOK:  Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps

The ‘9 Easy Steps'

1 Purging is the use by partisan election officials of computer databases that identify voter characteristics (race, ethnicity, residence location, etc) to remove from registration rolls names of persons likely to be sympathetic to the “wrong” political party. Plausible pretexts for the removals are sometimes offered, but often not. Purging is what Katherine Harris did to tens of thousands of Florida voters in 2000, claiming the mostly black voters were felons when they were not.

Amazon Page

2 Caging is the mailing of do-not-forward, first-class letters to selected groups and using letters returned as ‘evidence' that voters' listed addresses are fraudulent. Partisan election officials can then strike the voters' names from registration rolls and/or throw out their mail-in ballots. This can happen en masse to military people serving overseas and voting absentee from their home addresses. Likewise to students away at school, and even to voters whose addresses on registration rolls contain fatal typos made, accidentally of course, by election data entry workers.

3 Spoiling is accomplished in a variety of ways. A famous one is to put punched-card voting setups in districts tending to the “wrong” party. Then disqualify all votes where the voter did not manage to punch the hole all the way through, as in the infamous “hanging chads” in Florida in 2000.

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Yoda: Best 10 Countries for the Internet – None in Africa

BTS (Base Transciever Station), Economics/True Cost, IO Impotency, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

A start, this is.

Phi Beta Iota:  Open Everything (especially OpenBTS, Open Cloud, Open Data, Open Hardware, Open Software, and Open Standards) are the next big leap, or the Internet of Things will be in the service of the elite rather than the 5 billion poor whose entrepreneurial energy can only be harnessed when ALL of them have a free cell phone with Internet access and can receive a free education one cell call at a time.

Also vital in the development of Internet IMPACT as opposed to ACCESS, is the emergence of whole system analytics and true cost economics.  Only when ALL have access to true cost information can corruption begin to be detected and eradicated supply chain by supply chain.  The nuclear and tobacco and seed industries are three examples of how government corruption and media lies have created massive profit for the few with massive externalized costs to the many.

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