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Chuck Spinney: Israel Crosses Line Into Fascism

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Immigration, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency
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Chuck Spinney

Israel likes to pride itself by claiming it is the only democracy in the Middle East … Uri Avnery, a hero of the 1948 War, a former member of the Knesset, and a prominent peace activist, describes how that claim is becoming a hollow shell.

July 18, 2011

The Israeli Boycott Law

It [Fascism] Can Happen Here

By URI AVNERY, Tel Aviv

Counterpunch

Years ago I said that there are but two miracles in Israel: the Hebrew language and democracy.

Hebrew had been a dead language for many generations, more or less like Latin, when it was still used in the Catholic church. Then, suddenly, concurrent with the emergence of Zionism (but independently) it sprang back to life. This never happened to any other language.

Theodor Herzl laughed at the idea that Jews in Palestine would speak Hebrew. He wanted us to speak German. “Are they going to ask for a railway ticket in Hebrew?” he scoffed.

Well, we now buy airline tickets in Hebrew. We read the Bible in its Hebrew original and enjoy it tremendously. As Abba Eban once said, if King David were to come to life in Jerusalem today, he could understand the language spoken in the street. Though with some difficulty, because our language gets corrupted, like most other languages.

Anyhow, the position of Hebrew is secure. Babies and Nobel Prize laureates speak it.

The fate of the other miracle is far less assured.

* * *

THE FUTURE – indeed, the present – of Israeli democracy is shrouded in doubt.

Read rest of article…

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Graphic: Accessing Knowledge with Visualization

Analysis, ICT-IT, Innovation, Multinational Plus, Processing, Strategy-Holistic Coherence, Tribes, True Cost
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Click on Image to Enlarge

Source

Börner, K., Chen, C., & Boyack, K. W. (2003). Visualizing knowledge domains. Annual Review of
Information Science and Technology 37, 179-255.

Phi Beta Iota:  The sophistication of advanced analytics in selected sectors of the private world is at least an order of magnitude greater than that to be found within government.   The next level beyond this is the mapping of who knows who in the field–those who do not publish but have “ground truth” knowledge that is priceless.  In the above example, information retrieval yields far less than information visualization, and even less than the various methods combined.  All of the above is severely limited for being primarily in English.  China has created its own citation analysis index, and others such as Brazil surely have their own methods, but there is no global “all languages” knowledge visualization, retrieval, and integration schematic.  In the areas of indigenous knowledge, just now being appreciated by ethnocentric studies, the situation is even worse.

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Seth Godin: Asimov to the Edges–Perceiving Knowledge

Blog Wisdom, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence
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Seth Godin Home

From Asimov to Zelazny

When I was in high school, I read every single science fiction book in the Clearfield Public Library. Probably 250 books altogether.

I don't think I had a big plan, I was mostly looking for something to do. What I discovered, though, was that domain knowledge, edge to edge knowledge of a field, was incredibly valuable. It helped me understand where the edges were, and it gave me the confidence to be selective, to develop a taxonomy, to see what was going on.

As the deluge of information grows and choices continue to widen (there's no way I could even attempt to cover science fiction from scratch today, for example), it's easy to forget the benefits of acquiring this sort of (mostly) complete understanding in a field. I'm not even sure it matters which field you pick.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Expertise is a posture as much as it is a volume of knowledge.

Reading every single trade journal, for example, or understanding the marketing, engineering and sales of your field–there are countless ways to go deep instead of merely paying lip service to the current flavor of the moment.

Phi Beta Iota:  Dick Klavans (Maps of Science) has marked the fragmented edges as well as the fragmented Strengths of Nations.  Our task now is to recreate the whole–the unification of diversified knowledge in the public interest.  There are eight tribes of knowledge, not one, or two, or three.

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Koko: Microsoft Fifth Largest Linux Company

03 Economy, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Impotency
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Koko the Reflexive

Top Five Linux Contributor: Microsoft

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | July 17, 2011

Linux and Open Source

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols & Paula Rooney
EXTRACT

In a Linux Weekly News story, currently only available to subscribers, an analysis of Linux 3.0 contributors reveals that Microsoft was the fifth largest corporate contributer to Linux 3.0. While only 15h overall, that still puts Microsoft behind only Red Hat, Intel, Novell, and IBM in contributing new code to this version of Linux.

To be exact, Microsoft developer K. Y Srinivasan gets the credit for helping to improve Linux. Of course, as you might guess, neither Srinivasan nor Microsoft are doing this due to any particular love tor Linux per se.

The vast bulk of Microsoft’s contributions has been to its own Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor drivers. Hyper-V is Microsoft’s 64-bit hypervisor-based virtualization system. It’s Microsoft’s answer to VMware and Linux’s own native Kernel-based Virtualization Manager (KVM).

Read full story….

Phi Beta Iota:  This is interesting–and disappointing.  Microsoft could be doing so much more.   OpenBTS, Open Data Access, Open Spectrum, and Open Source Intelligence (now M4IS2) are rapidly approaching take-off points that will see them join Free/Open Source Software and Open Hardware.  Microsoft could be central to all of this, but it evidently chooses not to.  It recent waste of Sir Richard Branson in delivering platitudes to their huge event is a real let-down.

See Also:

Graphic: Open Everything

Graphic: One Vision for the Future of Microsoft

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Event: 9-15 Aug Richmond, Indiana “Listening” American Society of Cybernetics

Cultural Intelligence
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The annual meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics for 2011 will consist of the following components:

  • Pre- Conference with the ASC General Business Meeting, the Annual ASC Event and Tutorials on (2nd order) Cybernetics
  • The 2011 ASC CONFERENCE ON LISTENING
  • Post-Conference Study

The ASC Listening Conference 2011 is the central three day event of our conference suite, an examination of “Listening” (understood metaphorically), explored conversationally, with evening presentations and performances.

The central conference is framed by a pre- conference meeting including tutorials of an introductory and exploratory nature, introducing and working with cybernetic concepts, and a post-conference workshop celebrating the centenary of Heinz von Foerster (who founded the society) and Ernst von Glasersfeld (who died just before Christmas 2010) where we will study selected papers with others who share curiosity about their work.

The central conference is scheduled 11 to 13 August, inclusive, The pre- conference will be 9 to 10 August, and the post-conference will be 14 to 15 August. The registration fee is for the central conference. The pre- and post-conference events are free to those attending the central conference.

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DefDog: Dysfunction in US political system exposed

Corruption, Government
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DefDog Recommends....

Debt ceiling struggle exposing dysfunction in the U.S. political system

John Farmer on July 17, 2011

EXTRACT:

How’d we get in this fix? It wasn’t easy and it involved many things — congressional redistricting, polarization of both GOP and Democratic Party “bases” and their media sycophants, the increasing influence of lobbying money, and the political myopia of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota:  The article is superb in its overall summary of how we got into the fix, naive in its term limits solution.  No has done more than Ralph Nader in identifying specific fixes to this loss of integrity, Electoral Reform (1 Page 9 Points) itemizes those fixes.

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Koko: Aqua-Culture is Rocking….

01 Agriculture, Earth Intelligence, YouTube
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Koko the Reflexive

1 MILLION pounds of Food on 3 acres. 10,000 fish 500 yards compost

Growing power seem to have a winning combo going. I underestimated what they are doing. If the information in these videos is true then on 3 acres they are producing 1,000,000 pounds of food each year! How are they doing this?

10,000 fish
300-500 yards worm compost
3 acres of land in green houses
Grow all year using heat from compost piles.
Using vertical space
Simple 1 pump aquaponics

A packed greenhouse produces a crop value of $5 Square Foot! ($200,000/acre). That is if the whole acre was under greenhouse.

Phi Beta Iota:  Just under six minutes of REALITY that industrialized mega-agriculture has sought to bury.

See Also:

John Robb: Signals for the Future (Urban Farmer's Box)

All Agriculture Entries