Here is another really excellent essay by SR reader and best selling author Larry Dossey. It provides a guide map to how in the domain of nonlocal consciousness we are all linked, all life is interdependent, and inter-connected.
“I felt there was no separation between anything. I felt as if I were united with everything, and it was wonderful!” This recent report from a reader is a universal experience of people who are concerned with psychological and spiritual growth. This sense of connectedness is not fantasy, but is being affirmed by recent advances in consciousness research.
It's the second time that I go back to this insightful article by Jonathan Stray, dating back to 2011, but which was visionary and rightful then as it is still now. The first time I did, right after it came out, I didn't actually realize in full how relevant and important was the idea being communicated through it. On the surface the article talks about an hypotethical Editorial Search Engine as a desirable news app. But if you look just beyond the surface, which is by itself fascinating, in essence, Mr. Stray indicates how useful and effective it would be if news publishers moved on from reporting and and into 100% curated coverage of a certain topic, issue or story, opening a fascinating discovery gateway around each story and allowing in time for these streams to intersect and interconnect with each other. By doing this, we can not only make the news much more interesting and relevant, but we can transform them into instruments for in-depth learning about anything we are interested in. In this light the future of news could be very much about Comprehensively Informing an Audience on a Specific Topic. And if you stop enough time to re-read it and think about it, this is a pretty powerful and revolutionary concept by itself. He specifically writes: “Rather than (always, only) writing stories, we should be trying to solve the problem of comprehensively informing the user on a particular topic.” “Choose a topic and start with traditional reporting, content creation, in-house explainers and multimedia stories. Then integrate a story-specific search engine that gathers together absolutely everything else that can be gathered on that topic, and applies whatever niche filtering, social curation, visualization, interaction and communication techniques are most appropriate.” Jonathan Stray makes also a very inspiring connection to Jay Rosen of NYU and his idea of covering 100% of a story which in my view correctly anticipated the niche content curation trend while going beyond it in its effort to explore gateways to innovation. . . . Insightful. Visionary. Inspiring. 9/10 . .Original article (2011): http://jonathanstray.com/the-editorial-search-engine ..(Image credit: Train tracks by Shutterstock)
1.Ā Ricks fails to understand that military strategy and policy do not exist in a vacuum.Ā The White House and Congress both have votes that can be decisive.Ā Shinseki and Franks were closer to right w/r/t force requirements for Iraq than was Rumsfeld.Ā Further, Jerry Bremer unbelievably complicated Iraq by de-Baathification and dissolutionn of the Iraqi army.
2.Ā The Edward Snowden problem is not a contractor/military/civil service issue.Ā It is an NSA personnel security clearance issue.Ā As it turns out, the largest theoretical risks in the NSA workforce comes from military personnel because their screening is less rigorous on the premise they are involuntarily assigned there.Ā Of course, NSA's personnel security screening model seems fatally flawed conceptually as does that of the USG more generally.
3.Ā General/Flag Officers have been going down like ten pins recently.Ā Many have simply screwed up in terms of basic integrity, morals, officership, leadership, commandership.Ā I have read a number of the DoDIG reports and they usually show clear failings.Ā There is traffic circulating this weekend positing an Obama Administration purge of senior military officers.Ā I can't prove or disprove that.Ā If I were advocate that theory, I'd point to the cases of GENs Ham and McChrystal.
4.Ā The documents at the links contained in article are worth looking at.)
Partnership Between Facebook and Police Could Make Planning Protests Impossible
A partnership between police departments and social media sites discussed at a convention in Philadelphia this week could allow law enforcement to keep anything deemed criminal off the Internetāand even stop people from organizing protests.
A high-ranking official from the Chicago Police Department told attendees at a law enforcement conference on Monday that his agency has been working with a security chief at Facebook to block certain users from the site āif it is determined they have posted what is deemed criminal content,āĀ reportsĀ Kenneth Lipp, an independent journalist who attended the lecture.
Privacy:ā This week, the European Parliament voted to immediately suspend the sharing of European financial tracking data with the United States in a 280-254 decision, as well as calling for criminal investigations of the NSA. This follows in the footsteps of mass surveillance revelations that the NSA has illegally hacked into the SWIFT financial data. This appears to be yet another public wake-up and backlash against the secretive wiretapping industry.
Attached is a thoughtful essay in which Israeli war hero (1948), ex-Knesset member, and peace activist Uri Avnery examines the likenesses and differences between Israel and Apartheid South Africa.
Chuck Spinney
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WEEKEND EDITION OCTOBER 25-27, 2013
South African Apartheid was Brought Down by the Blacks Themselves
Is Israel an apartheid state? This question is not going away. It raises its head every few months.
The term āapartheidā is often used purely for propaganda purposes. Apartheid, like racism and fascism, is a rhetorical term one uses to denigrate oneās opponent.
But apartheid is also a term with a precise content. It applies to a specific regime. Equating another regime to it may be accurate, partly correct or just wrong. So, necessarily, will be the conclusions drawn from the comparison.
RECENTLY I had the opportunity to discuss this subject with an expert, who had lived in South Africa throughout the apartheid era. I learned a lot from this.
Is Israel an apartheid state? Well, first one must settle the question: which Israel? Israel proper, within the Green Line, or the Israeli occupation regime in the occupied Palestinian territories, or both together?
It is easy to look at the shutdown and the concomitant chaos in federal government as the product of incompetence and corruption. Ā But it was a deliberate effort by a vocal congressional minority from safe, cynically gerrymandered, congressional districts to sabotage the functioning of the entire federal government.
One would think that a deliberate effort to turn the entire US government into an incompetent global laughing stock would be seen as an act of treason (and it certainly would have been if the effort was focused on the Pentagon), but to date, this has not been the case. Ā Yet as Bruce BarlettĀ observes in the attached essay, there was indeed a systematic method to the destructive objectives of the government shutdown. Ā His critique is important, because Bartlett is no weepy effete liberal from the salons of the upper west side. cHe is a long time card-carrying conservative Republican, having worked for Congressmen Ron Paul and Jack Kemp in Congress, before serving in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
Bartlett argues the goals of the Republican radicals in Congress are (1) to wreck the domestic functions of the Federal Government as we know it and (2) mutate the feds into some idealized vision of limited government front for the ubiquitous tentacles of untouchable authoritarian national security state. Ā Borrowing from the work of my good friend Mike Lofgren (another lifelong Republican), Bartlett names this method the Lofgren Corollary to the definition of the Republican chutzpah: which is shorthand for the premeditated self-reinforcing strategy to intentionally sabotage government programs (except defense) by denying them the resources and stability to function efficiently, then attacking those programs when they do not work as advertised, thus justifying further strangulation, which creates more problems and confusion … Ā and adds ammunition for further attacks. Ā In short the goal is to put the Federal Government (defense excepted) into a dead man's spiral.
If Bartlett is correct, and I think he is, he ends by showing why those wishful thinking lefties who think Obama won the shut down debate should think again. Ā To borrow from Winston Churchill (with a twist): the end of the shutdown is not the end, nor is it the beginning of the end … and, given the destabilizing nature of continuing resolutions and public confusion over very basic bytes of information (for example 59% of the people think the deficit is increasing when it is decreasing), Ā it is perhaps not even the end of the beginning.
Last week I explained that Congress has become an incompetent institution, unable to do its most basic work of passing annual appropriations bills to keep the government running. We usually think of incompetence as being the result of ineptness, stupidity or ignorance. But in the case of Congress, it is often intentional and deliberate, part of a long-term strategy by some Republicans to undermine government itself.
Here is another really excellent essay by SR reader and best selling author Larry Dossey. It provides a guide map to how in the domain of nonlocal consciousness we are all linked, all life is interdependent, and inter-connected.
