From BRIC to BRICS–Sanya Declaration

01 Brazil, 02 China, 03 Economy, 03 India, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 07 Venezuela, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Earth Intelligence, Government, IO Multinational, Reform, Strategy
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Full text of Sanya Declaration of the BRICS Leaders Meeting

Xinhuanet.com English.news.cn 2011-04-14 21:58:57

SANYA, Hainan, April 14 (Xinhua) — Leaders of five BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, released on Thursday a joint document, Sanya Declaration, at the BRICS Leaders Meeting in south China's resort city of Sanya.

The following is the full text of the document.

Sanya Declaration

(BRICS Leaders Meeting, Sanya, Hainan, China, 14 April 2011)

Read full text (nine screens)–videos and photos in sidebar.

Continue reading “From BRIC to BRICS–Sanya Declaration”

Matt Taibbi: The Real Housewives Of Wall Street–How Morgan Stanley Wives Christy Mack & Susan Karches Ripped Off Taxpayers In Geithner-Bernanke Bailout Scheme

Corruption, Government
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Illustration by Victor Juhasz

In another era, we would see Congressional hearings on this matter within days.

Darrell Issa and Spencer Bachus are now on the clock.

We have but one comment – Audit the Fed – Sign the Petition Immediately!

By Matt Taibbi

For Rolling Stone

Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?

Continue reading “Matt Taibbi: The Real Housewives Of Wall Street–How Morgan Stanley Wives Christy Mack & Susan Karches Ripped Off Taxpayers In Geithner-Bernanke Bailout Scheme”

US Intelligence: Militarized to Lowest Common Denominator

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call
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Phi Beta Iota: Posted with permission.Ā  We strongly recommend the Intelligence Online offerings.Ā  We have received a number of commentaries around this topic, and they boil down to the situation being much, much worse than depicted here:

1.Ā  Budget weenies without substantive experience running entire agencies (e.g. NRO)

2.Ā  Nose-dive to the lowest common denominator, completely destroying regional and country expertise and having no linguistic capabilities or grasp of history and culture (CIA, DIA)

3.Ā  Completely out of control procurement, rotten requirements definition, no full life-cycle planning (e.g. buy collection, do not buy processing), and generally disconnected from reality (NSA/Cyber-Command)

4.Ā  We are reminded that there are 1,200 distinct “organizations” wasting money and going through the motions on counter-terrorism–meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security gropes little girls, confiscates aftershave, and is generally on the underside of institutionalized tyrannical idiocy.

Reference: Emergent Democracy

11 Society, About the Idea, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process
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Jon Lebkowsky Bio

EXTRACT from Google Group Next Net:

That made me think of the Emergent Democracy paper that Joi Ito authored collaboratively (2001-2003) with several other folks (including Ross Mayfield and I) a few years ago. Digging into my files I found the attached marked up version…Ā  it aligns pretty well with some of the discussions here.

There's been a lot of interesting thought about the Internet and the web as platform for enhanced social activity. That idea of “finding our tribes and ourselves” was a core aspect of FringeWare, the company/community that Paco Nathan and I started in 1991. We realized that like-minded fringe thinkers and doers were scattered everywhere, and the Internet gave us a platform where they could find each other and form community.Ā  All it took was an email list and a compelling concept (“fringeware”) to catalyze that community.

“Declaration of Interdependence” sounded familiar… I did some searching…

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html – Barlow wrote this, and I think he referred to it (earlier or later, not sure which) as a declaration of interdependence).

http://notanmba.com/blog/2008/03/a-declaration-of-interdependence – This notes that the Whole Foods mission statement is called “declaration of interdependence” – http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/company/declaration.php. This also refers to the Barlow document and our 2008 EFF-Austin party.

Interestingly, Will Durant made a “declaration of interdependence” in 1945. http://www.willdurant.com/interdependence.htm

See Also:

Journal: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both

Review: Evolutionary Activism by Tom Atlee

Review: Philosophy and the Social Problem–The Annotated Edition

Next Net, Transitional Net, Autonomous Net

11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
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Jon Lebkowsky Bio

Transitional Internet

by jonl on April 13, 2011

I continue to be focused on the future of the Internet and aware of divergent paths. In the later 2000s, following a period of digital and media convergence and given broad adoption of evolving high speed (broadband) network connectivity, the Internet has become an environment for mixed media and marketing. The Internet is increasingly centralized as a platform that serves a global business engine. It’s a mashup of business to business services and business to consumer connections, a mashup of all the forms of audio, text, and video communication and media in a new, more social/participatory context: the faceless consumer now has an avatar, an email address, and a feedback loop.

The sense of the Internet as a decentralized free and open space has changed, but there are still many advocates and strong arguments for approaches that are bottom-up, network-centric, free as in freedom (and sometimes as in beer), open, collaborative, decentralized. It’s tempting to see top-down corporate approaches vs bottom-up ā€œfree cultureā€ approaches as mutually exclusive, but I think they can and will coexist. Rather than make value judgements about the different approaches, I want to support education and thinking about ethics, something I should discuss later.

Right now I want to point to a collaboration forming around the work of Venessa Miemis, who’s been curating trends, models, and projects associated with the decentralized Internet model. Venessa and her colleagues (including myself) have been discussing how to build a decentralized network that is broadly and cheaply accessible and that is more of a cooperative, serving the public interest rather than a narrower set of economic interests.

I’ll be focusing on these sorts of projects here and in my talks on the future of the Internet. Meanwhile, here are pointers to a couple of Venessa’s posts that are good overviews for what I’m talking about. I appreciate her clarity and focus.

There’s also the work of Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation, which I’ve followed for several years. The P2P Wiki has relevant pages:

Phi Beta Iota: A great deal of the credit goes to Doug Rushkoff, the originator of ContactCon, for whom Venessa Miemis (also a contributing editor here at Phi Beta Iota) works.Ā  Using Doug Rushkoff's social capital, and Venessa Miemi's inspired scouting on emergence, they have quickly become a hub for innovation and information sharing about the needed Autonomous Internet.

See Also:

Reference: Cook Report Network Rennaissance

Reference: Emergent Democracy

Reference: Internet Censorship Circumvention

Peter Thiel (PayPal) on Education Bubble