Swarm Management: The swarm must have mechanisms for conflict resolution, for decision making, and for reward culture. There are many ways to accomplish this. A traditional voting democracy is one of the worst.
I know of three ways to get from today to a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all — all three merit consideration as a whole.
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01. Open Source Everything (OSE). This is the technical solution. The US Government is ignorant and arrogant in part because the cult of secrecy and the ineptitude of chief technical officers, combined with the corruption of political figures that have no interest in knowing anything useful (they attend to those that pay to be heard), have resulted in Washington operating on less than 2% of the relevant information [a typical Country Team collects 20% at most and spills 80% of that in how it handles it] and in the case of the secret world, producing “at best” 4% of what the President or a major commander needs. The future of governance is to be found in bottom-up information sharing and sense-making across all boundaries. Only OSE is affordable, inter-operable, and scalable. This is where the BRICS, the EU, and NATO should be focusing as they create 21st Century Alternative C2 (collaboration and consensus have replaced command and control) — one must give up unilateral command and control in order to gain multilateral command and control.
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Robert Garigue (RIP) understood what none of the US cyber-chiefs understand: in a decentralized technical environment, human trust is the measure of merit, and security must be embedded such that it is NOT reliant on centralized points that are often asleep, ignorant, arrogant, under-funded, and generally useless. As Col Dr. Max Manwaring and his various contributing authors point out in The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century (Praeger, 2003), the primary foundation for both prosperity and peace is LEGITIMACY. A Nobel prize was awarded to the economist that demonstrated that trust lowers the cost of doing business. In brief, proprietary and predatory forms of capitalism have become one. The time has come to create Open Source Ecologies (a fine model is provided by Open Source Ecology, creating a toolkit for civilization), starting with an Autonomous Internet and Liberation Technologies that enable the five billion poor to create infinite wealth. If freedom is our objective, rather than fraud, it demands open source everything. My long-standing vision for an Open Source Agency (OSA) has morphed toward the nurturing of all of the opens as I have discovered that no one open alone will do — they form an unbeatable force for good when combined.
Rachel Naomi Remen offers a story about how wholeness became embedded in the world, waiting for us to call it forth. I explore different dynamics of wholeness and how it relates to being agents of healing and transformation – including the power of disturbance to evoke grace.
Rachel Naomi Remen offers a story about how wholeness became embedded in the world, waiting for us to call it forth. I explore different dynamics of wholeness and how it relates to being agents of healing and transformation – including the power of disturbance to evoke grace.
Healing is about restoring former wholeness. Health is about maintaining existing wholeness. Transformation and evolution are about generating or evoking new forms of wholeness from – as Rachel Naomi Remen puts it in the piece below – “the seed of a greater wholeness, a dream of possibility”.
To a certain extent new forms of wholeness can be created, as in art, innovative technologies, or the unique synergies and dynamic tensions of a groundbreaking work of architecture or engineering. Yet some of the most remarkable forms of wholeness are organic and self-organized, from new ecosystems and babies’ personalities to spontaneous realizations and cultural shifts. Although this kind of wholeness can’t be created in a linear sense and normally simply happens by itself, it can also be catalyzed, evoked, or nurtured by invitation, inspiration, opportunity, and – as Rachel Naomi Remen puts it – by “our listening, our belief, our encouragement and our love.”
“Emergent processes” like Open Space and World Cafe are, in essence, ways to enhance a group’s capacity for generating novel but self-organized wholeness from among its members. I like to think of these processes as thoughtfully designed channels for the Tao, the Way of Nature, whose power is not in what it does but in what it allows, evokes, and facilitates.
Noowit is a new curation and publishing platform that allows you to do on the web something very similar to what Flipboard allows you to do with your smartphone or tablet. You can curate a beautiful-looking web magazine, by selecting content from its internal news discovery engine or by clipping any content you find on the web with the dedicated NOOWIT bookmarklet.
On the backend you can select individual topics, authors and specific sources you want to subscribe to, to keep yourself informed. You can provide specific RSS feeds or import your collection of RSS subscriptions. You can create multiple content sections inside a magazine and when you add new content you can easily decide in which section it is going to end up. A swift navigation scheme provides almost seamless integration between the excerpted content that appears in the magazine and the full, original resource that you can navigate to without losing touch with the rest of the magazine. NOOWIT magazines can be set to be public or private and they can be viewed across devices and screen of all sizes. Like on Flipboard it is now possible to edit, modify or add to content that you pick and select to be added to your magazines.
My comment: NOOWIT easily creates great-looking digital magazines of your selected articles and resources. It is a great tool for anyone wanting to create easily a “splashy” curated digital magazine that looks great across devices with the minimum effort possible.
Two articles follow: one posits a seemingly global anti-US opposition, an Anti-American Network (AAN), and the other posits that political warfare is the answer to the Middle East portion of the problem. IMHO, both are worth considering. Further believe that, with respect to Boot & Doran's approach, (a) coverage needs expansion to cover all the opponents Hirsch posits and (b) political warfare is a necessary but not sufficient component of our response and an NCTC-centric structure is probably not the way to go. We already have policy in place to deal with these kinds of things but it probably needs revision in light of international and domestic politics. In my view, what we need is national leadership (read: POTUS and Congress) with the guts and principles of Britain's WWII leader Winston Churchill supported by an Executive Branch organizational structure combining the best features of their Special Operations Executive (SOE) and Political Warfare Executive (PWE), one authorized, directed, and capable of covertly, surgically and virtually “setting our adversaries ablaze.” Neither the currently tasked organization nor U.S Special Operations Command, or even the two together, is presently that structure.)
Attached is another excellent report by Patrick Cockburn on the disorientating nature of contemporary yellow journalism in the Syrian Civil War.
Of course, disorientation is not a new problem in war: Sun Tzu said, “All war is based on deception.”
But the ability to manipulate data and images with high-tech computing technology and then distribute that manufactured ‘reality' nearly instantaneously, and at very low cost, has increased and decentralized the power to deceive. This decentralization of the power to disorient has made everyone from Barack Obama to John Q. Average American more vulnerable to the self deception of an incestuously amplifying OODA loop*, and in so doing, it has spread confusion, disorder … and culpability throughout the political decision-making system.
This ambiguity goes beyond centrally orchestrated propaganda and raises what may the central question of contemporary governance in a system based on the assumptions of a representative democracy : Who are the real decision makers in an evolving decision making system (or OODA loop) that is pulled and twisted by a plethora of ephemeral shadows in a cave?
World View: It is naive not to accept that both sides are capable of manipulating the facts to serve their own interests
Patrick Cockburn
Independent, 30 June 2013
Every time I come to Syria I am struck by how different the situation is on the ground from the way it is pictured in the outside world. The foreign media reporting of the Syrian conflict is surely as inaccurate and misleading as anything we have seen since the start of the First World War. I can't think of any other war or crisis I have covered in which propagandistic, biased or second-hand sources have been so readily accepted by journalists as providers of objective facts.
Obama is Sending Arms to These Utterly Vicious Thugs and Murderers: Your Tax Dollars at Work
“Two Christians, one of them a priest, have been beheaded by militants because they were suspected of cooperating with the Syrian military, according to an Al-Alam report. A video uploaded to the internet yesterday shows two men with their hands bound, surrounded by dozens of people, many of them armed and cheering in celebration. The two are brutally executed – beheaded with a small combat knife. Echoing previous beheading recorded by insurgents, the head is held up to the cheers of onlookers and then placed on the body.”
I forced myself to watch the video of this atrocity done by these cruel bastards. In the second instance, the killer had to be handed a second knife to finish the job. These idiots appear unable to keep the knives sharp, much prolonging the pain and misery of their victims.
Article and Link to Video of Beheadings – CAUTION – Very Disturbing Imagery:
