Stimulated by Occupy and an expanding inquiry into new forms of economics, combined with my ongoing interest in bringing wisdom to politics and governance, I've stumbled on a productive approach to pulling it all together: Start from an exploration of Power – particularly, but not only, social power. This brings both politics and economics under the same roof, and oddly integrates protest movements, alternative technologies and social forms, and the human potential movement. More on that later.
Right now, I want to share some notes on types of power. If you have thoughts about these lists, please share them on my blog so others can see them and all the comments will be gathered together in one place where it will be easier for me to review and learn from them all.
I hope you find these interesting and thought-provoking. I look forward to any comments you may have.
A collection of more than 1500 audiocassettes from Kandahar. The collection is central to understanding al-Qaida's emergence as an organisation before 9/11.
An analysis of Flag Miler can also be found in : J.Deol, Z. Kazmi (Eds) Contextualizing jihadi thought. New York: Horst & Company, Columbia University Press, 2012.
In summary: US took ten years to make an issue of two Pakistani fertilizer factories that are the primary source for all Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) killing and maiming in AF. Taliban gets what it wants in AF school programs, Iran makes progress in AF, SY and on the side with Saudi Arabia.
A former official from within the ranks of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is reporting that US and NATO forces have landed outside of Syria and are training militants to overthrow the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, formerly a translator with the FBI, wrote over the weekend that American soldiers are among the NATO troops that have mysteriously and suddenly, landed on the Jordanian-Syrian border.
According to her, several sources internationally have confirmed the news, although the US media has been instructed to temporarily censor itself from reporting the news.
Additionally, Edmonds says that American and NATO forces are training Turkish troops as well, to possibly launch a strike from the north of Syria.
With his own words, Leon Panetta has shown that he is little more than a mouthpiece for keeping the defense budget at historically high levels and is incapable of coping with the coming era of modest (yes, modest) Pentagon budget reductions. Using DOD's budget history and the ongoing decay (not a typo) of our military forces at ever increasing spending levels as my perspective, I seek to explain in an essay that is running this morning at Time Magazine's Battleland blog. My thanks to journalist Mark Thompson for running this piece.
This morning, three publications reported more (and important) information about a report submitted to Acting Acquisition Czar Robert Kendall in November about the F-35. This “Quick Look Report” was previously reported by Bloomberg News (Tony Capaccio). Today's articles expand the coverage of the contents of the report. These articles by Jason Sherman and colleagues at Inside Defense, Bill Sweetman of the Ares Defense Technology Blog, and Bob Cox at the Fort Worth Star Telegram are below.
Phi Beta Iota: A series of civilian and military leaders have willfully refused to be honest about the future of defense, to the point that we now have smaller older forces and we do not have what we need to implement anything even remotely like the 1998 “four forces after next.” DoD is in total amoral melt-down, where the 4% of the force that has integrity takes 80% of the casualties and receives 1% of the total budget–and still does not have a hand-held weapon able to out-gun the Taliban.
In the words of Nova Spivack, we are approaching The Sharepocalypse. The real-time Web sounded like a great idea, but it has become impossible to manage. The success of social media has proven, ironically, to be its biggest challenge. The services we already use are getting busier, and whole new networks are popping up all the time. Email used to be the only problem. Today, the info streams are legion.
It's hard enough being a normal user, but some have millions of people tweeting at them! How are they supposed to process all those messages? In the Information Age, you'd think more data would be a good thing, but on the social Web, the opposite is true. But the aforementioned Nova Spivack – along with co-founder Dominiek ter Heide – has just unveiled Bottlenose, and it could be the tool that helps us avert The Sharepocalypse in the nick of time.
Phi Beta Iota: We are less enthusiastic. As one commentator notes, “Bottlenose is completely useless to you until you have an account at facebook/twitter/both. ” Until we achieve the open source tri-fecta (at least) most of this is as dumb as Google — math hacks on digital garbage.
Phi Beta Iota: From out of the blue, a patriot appears to have created something that resonates with us more than MoveOn or MeetUp. It is an ugly baby, but there is something here. See for yourself.
