Public Intelligence Blog – Page 3257 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons. He is on the board of Digital Garage, Culture Convenience Club (CCC), Tucows, Machinima.com, EPIC, Technorati, WITNESS and Global Voices Online. He is the founder and CEO of the venture capital firm Neoteny Co., Ltd. In October 2004, he was named to the board of ICANN for a three-year term starting December 2004. In August 2005, he joined the board of the Mozilla Foundation. He served on the board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) from March 2005 until April 2007. He currently serves as a Board Emeritus for OSI. He was a founding board member of Expression College for Digital Arts as well as the Zero One Art and Technology Network. In 1999, he served as the Associate to Mr. Mount (the executive producer) on the film The Indian Runner. Ito also served as a Board Member of Energy Conversion Devices from 1995 to 2000.

Structured Hits

Ito is a venture capitalist and angel investor and was an early stage investor in Kickstarter, Twitter, Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate, etology Inc, Fotopedia and other Internet companies. A vocal advocate of emergent democracy and the sharing economy, Ito is a doctoral candidate in Business Administration focusing on the sharing economy at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University. He is the author of Emergent Democracy. Ito is Senior Visiting Researcher of Keio Research Institute at SFC.” — Wikipedia:

Recent Headline:

Timothy Leary's godson Joi Ito to head MIT Media Lab, projo.com, 5:23 AM Tue, Apr 26, 2011

2011/04/272011/04/27

Chuck Spinney Inquires: Is Politics Bullshit?

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

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The US is fighting three wars (either losing them or stalemating at best), its economy teeters on the cusp of a double dip recession, the distribution of income is the most skewed of all the advanced countries, and this is what dominates politics — and to think, we were brought up to hold the decadence of the Roman circuses in contempt.

Obama releases birth certificate to ‘end silliness'

The Guardian World News 4/27/11 9:20 AM Richard Adams, Paul Owen

Phi Beta Iota: Brother Spinney's question is rhetorical. Politics died with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and has been a theatrical performance ever since–over-priced, we might add. Hybrid networks that harmonize on the basis of shared information are increasingly routing around “imitation” governments.

2011/04/27

Autonomous Internet Maxim: NEA

Autonomous Internet

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NEA, in the context of the Internet and computing, is an acronym which stands for the maxim:

No one owns it.

Everyone can use it.

Anyone can improve it.

The maxim originated with the authors Doc Searls and David Weinberger in an essay of 2003 entitled World of Ends. What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else

Source

See Also:

World of Ends. What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else Doc Searls and David Weinberger – 3 October 2003
Ten Ideas about Ideas Linux Journal Doc Searls blog on Sat, 2006-11-04

2011/04/272011/04/27

Right-Sizing the US Military–Doug Macgregor

10 Security, 11 Society, Intelligence (government), Key Players, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy, Threats

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WinslowWheeler Cropped — Winslow Wheeler

Although there are important elements I disagree with — in some cases strenuously — US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor (Ret.) has written an important piece on the fundamental changes and massive budget reductions that are needed to improve America's ability to survive into the future.

Macgregor gets the three essentials right, I believe:

1) the threat America faces is now massively reduced; its future character may very well not be what conventional wisdom expects, and Americans need to fundamentally change how we interact with the rest of the world,

2) before any changes are effected in the size, character and funding of our armed forces, a comprehensive audit must be successfully and immediately completed to understand how we spend our money, and funding should be withheld unless and until that is done, and

3) massive changes are needed in our armed forces and their leadership, organization, staffing, weapons, and more.

Macgregor's two part article, “Lean Mean Fighting Machine” and “A Radical Plan for Cutting the Defense Budget and Reconfiguring the Military.” Both are published by Foreign Policy; I believe they merit your thorough reading and consideration.

Phi Beta Iota: The US Marine Corps understood all this in 1989, and sought to change the defense paradigm from worst case to most likely in 1992; then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and his subordinates were not at all interested. Right-sizing defense–and the whole of government–is not that difficult, provided that one has absolute integrity rooted in real-world truthful intelligence. That cannot be said of the US Government today.

2009 Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A Twenty-Year Restrospective

2008 Rebalancing the Instruments of National Power–Army Strategy Conference of 2008 Notes, Summary, & Article

2008 U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century

2001 Threats, Strategy, and Force Structure: An Alternative Paradigm for National Security

2000 Presidential Leadership and National Security Policy Making

1998 JFQ The Asymmetric Threat: Listening to the Debate

1995 GIQ 13/2 Creating a Smart Nation: Strategy, Policy, Intelligence, and Information

1993 On Defense & Intelligence–The Grand Vision

1992 MCU Thinking About Revolution

1992 E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & intelligence (An Alternative Paradigm)

Reference: 1992 USMC C4I Campaign Plan

1991 MCG Intelligence Support for Expeditionary Planners

2011/04/27

Contributing Editor: Winslow Wheeler

Authors & Editors

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Winslow Wheeler is the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, DC. He has authored two books: The Wastrels of Defense (US Naval Institute Press) about Congress and national security, and Military Reform (Greenwood Publishers) on the serious, fundamental problems that currently face America’s defenses. He released a new anthology (America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress) after the presidential elections to help guide the new president out of the national security mess that Republicans and Democrats have jointly created in Washington.

From 1971 to 2002, Wheeler worked on national security issues for members of the U.S. Senate and for the US Government Accountability Office (GAO). In the Senate, Wheeler advised Jacob K. Javits (R. NY), Nancy L. Kassebaum (R, KS), David Pryor (D, AR), and Pete V. Domenici (R, NM). He was the first, and according to Senate records the last, Senate staffer to work simultaneously on the personal staffs of a Republican and a Democrat (Pryor and Kassebaum).

In the Senate staff, Wheeler was heavily involved in legislating the War Powers Act, Pentagon reform legislation, arms control and foreign policy, and oversight of the defense budget and weapons programs.

At GAO, he directed comprehensive studies on the 1991 Gulf War air campaign, the US strategic nuclear triad, and Pentagon weapons testing. Each of these studies found prevailing conventional wisdom about weapons to be badly misinformed.

In 2002 when he worked on the Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee, Wheeler authored an essay, under the pseudonym “Spartacus,” addressing Congress' reaction to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (“Mr. Smith Is Dead: No One Stands in the Way as Congress Lards Post-September 11 Defense Bills with Pork”). When senators criticized in the essay attempted to have Wheeler fired, he resigned his position.

Wheeler joined the Center for Defense Information immediately after leaving Capitol Hill.

2011/04/27

Bolivia: Drilling Down on Nature, Evo, Truth

03 Environmental Degradation, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government

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Round I: UK Guardian on Bolivia–and Rights for Nature

Round II: Bolivia: Switch and Bait on Protecting Nature

Round III: Jim Hickman lives in Bolivia…

John

Most of your articles and information are very reliable and appreciated for what they are. This time, however, it is a mix of good research (Chellis's article) and a bit of exaggeration (your friend of a friend memo.) Chellis's article was published several months ago after she did a very thorough job of discovering the facts and assembling the story in an
engaging way. She definitely understands the political dynamics here in Bolivia, especially the role of racial identity in the process. I am glad you have circulated it. It is important that the Evo fans around the world
understand that, like Obama, his promises and his actions are far removed from each other.

Continue reading “Bolivia: Drilling Down on Nature, Evo, Truth”

2011/04/272011/04/27

CIA Given To Petraeus, DoD Given to Panetta

Corruption, Government, Military

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CIA director Leon Panetta is to take over at the Pentagon and Gen. David Petraeus is to be nominated to head the CIA, NBC News confirmed Wednesday.

Sources: Petraeus to be nominated to head CIA

Agency director Panetta expected to become Defense Secretary, replacing Robert Gates

Phi Beta Iota: This is worse than business as usual, this is a dramatic step backwards. CIA is clearly irrelevant, an off-stage holding area for a failed General. In today's context, the best candidate for Defense, Senator Chuck Hagel, has evidently had second thoughts about the viability of the Obama Administration. Defense is about to be raped by the clerks as a bill-payer, rather than right-sized by serious people mindful of Senator Sam Nunn's wisdom:

I am constantly being asked for a bottom-line defense number. I don't know of any logicial way to arrive at such a figure without analyzing the threat; without determining what changes in our strategy should be made in light of the changes in the threat; and then determining what force structure and weapons programs we need to carry out this revised strategy.

This Administration–like others before it–lacks intelligence; lacks a holistic global and domestic strategy; and lacks the integrity necessary to fulfill its Constitutional responsibilities to the public.