Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2049 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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*It’s hard to believe they could be more sclerotic than what we’ve got.

*On the other hand, given the historical behavior of Italian city-states, man, I have to wonder. All I need is some Milanese Sforzas with catapults at the gates of Torino. It took the ultra-wealthy some real effort to completely subvert and own governments, but in Medici Florence that was what it was about from the get-go. Hello, Mayor Bloomberg! Thanks for the public-art!

Stewart Brand

From: Stewart Brand
Subject: [SALT] City-based global governance (Benjamin Barber talk)

“Sovereign nation states have conspicuously failed to cooperate well enough to deal with increasingly global problems such as climate change, environmental degradation, and organized crime, Barber said. Nations focus on their borders, which are seen as competitive zero-sum games.

Continue reading “Bruce Sterling: Stewart Brand on a global parliament of cities”

2014/01/012014/01/01

Graphic: Majority Now See US Government as Intrusive

Citizen-Centered, Threats

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Source

Marcus Aurelius

2014/01/012014/01/01

Marcus Aurelius: George Friedman on the Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

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The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power

Geopolitical Weekly

Stratfor

Editor's Note: The following Geopolitical Weekly originally ran in January 2013.

By George Friedman

When I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe, I received a great deal of feedback. Europeans agreed that this is the core problem while Americans argued that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might.

At the same time, I would agree that the United States faces a potentially significant but longer-term geopolitical problem deriving from economic trends. The threat to the United States is the persistent decline in the middle class' standard of living, a problem that is reshaping the social order that has been in place since World War II and that, if it continues, poses a threat to American power.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: George Friedman on the Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power”

2014/01/012014/01/01

Neal Rauhauser: Foreign Policy’s Global Conversation Infographic

Cultural Intelligence

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Foreign Policy’s Global Conversation Infographic

The images and following text were taken from The Global Conversation on Foreign Policy’s site. The site’s graph is user zoomable and the second image shows President Obama, Secretary of State Kerry, and Edward Snowden. I may have to hunt up a print copy and read the full article on this.

Click on Image to Enlarge

What happens when you take six months of news coverage from around the world and compile a list of every person mentioned and the people they were mentioned alongside? You get a network of 3 million nodes connected by 42 million links. Based on the GDELT Global Knowledge Graph — a massive compilation of the world’s people, organizations, locations, themes, emotions, and events — this visualization highlights the 25,000 newsmakers mentioned most frequently from April to October 2013 and the 100,000 connections among them.

Continue reading “Neal Rauhauser: Foreign Policy’s Global Conversation Infographic”

2014/01/01

Stephen E. Arnold: Relational Big Data Stores Versus Hierarchical Databases

Advanced Cyber/IO

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Relational Data Stores Versus Hierarchical Databases

The article titled Codd’s Relational Vision – Has NoSQL Come Full Circle on opensource connections relates the history of relational databases and applies their lessons to the NoSQL databases so popular today. The article walks through the simplest databases that followed the hierarchical model and then into generalized databases. The article then delves into the work of Edgar F. Codd himself:

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Relational Big Data Stores Versus Hierarchical Databases”

2014/01/012014/01/01

Stephen E. Arnold: Library Intelligence – Another Reason for the Open Source Agency (OSA)

Cultural Intelligence

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Libraries: A Good Thing

When you cannot locate information on Google, what does one do? Some people just guess? Others use spreadsheets and make up data? Quite a few people go to the library. Well, “quite a few” may be one of those unsupported factoids about modern life.

Navigate to Pew Research and check out the outfit’s most recent report How Americans Value Public Libraries in Their Communities. You can find it at http://bit.ly/1bLMEOt for now.

The report contains good news and bad news. Here’s a positive finding:

91% of Americans who have ever used a public library say it is not difficult to find what they’re looking for, including 35% who say it is “very easy.”

On the other hand, the Pew Report says:

“54% of Americans have used a public library in the past 12 months, and 72% live in a “library house hold.”

If accurate, this statement identifies a Pew sampling issue and underscores the need to reach the 46 percent of folks who don’t use the library more than once in a blue moon.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Library Intelligence – Another Reason for the Open Source Agency (OSA)”

2014/01/01

SchwartzReport: Truths That Matter

Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

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The unholy combination of an ethically challenged pharmaceutical industry, and an inhumane greedy industrial agriculture industry may have reached its apotheosis in Walla Walla, Washington, as this report recounts.

Lost Hooves, Dead Cattle, Drug Halted
P.J. HUFFSTUTTER and TOM POLANSEK – MSN News

In those states where the Theocratic Right reigns, making life miserable for the poor is more important than good sense or economic sanity. Here is an excellent example of what I mean.

Minnesota Officials Complain That Drug Testing Welfare Recipients Is A Waste Of Time And Money
TARA CULP-RESSLER – Think Progress

An aging population and an economy that is destroying the middle class quite naturally leads people to question whether they want to have children. Just another unintended consequence of the country's poor social policies that place profit for the few above the well-being of the many. It is a trend with profound long range consequences.

U.S. Population Grows At Slowest Rate Since The Great Depression
JILLIAN BERMAN – The Huffington Post