Public Intelligence Blog – Page 3309 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Coughing is heckling

The other night I heard Keith Jarrett stop a concert mid-note. While the hall had been surprisingly silent during the performance, the song he was playing was quiet and downbeat and we (and especially he) could hear an increasing chorus of coughs.

“Coughs?,” you might wonder… “No one coughs on purpose. Anyway, there are thousands of people in the hall, of course there are going to be coughs.”

But how come no one was coughing during the introductions or the upbeat songs or during the awkward moments when Keith stopped playing?

No, a cough is not as overt or aggressive as shouting down the performer. Nevertheless, it's heckling.

Just like it's heckling when someone is tweeting during a meeting you're running, or refusing to make eye contact during a sales call. Your work is an act of co-creation, and if the other party isn't egging you on, engaging wth you and doing their part, then it's as if they're actively tearing you down.

Yes, you're a professional. So is Jarrett. A professional at Carnegie Hall has no business stopping a concert over some coughing. But in many ways, I'm glad he did. He made it clear that for him, it's personal. It's a useful message for all of us, a message about understanding that our responsibility goes beyond buying a ticket for the concert or warming a chair in the meeting. If we're going to demand that our partners push to new levels, we have to go for the ride, all the way, or not at all.

Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added. 80% of government is going through the motions and wasting money for lack of public intelligence and a universal commitment to co-creation in the public interest.

2011/03/18

Worth a Look: The Anti-Globalization Breakfast Club: Manifesto for a Peaceful Revolution

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Solutions), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

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Alternative models for grass roots economic development such as micro-financing are now being widely adopted in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and elsewhere. New views on measuring development such as GDH (gross domestic happiness) have been adopted by Bhutan rather than GDP, and China's own hybrid approach combining market and planned policy to achieve economic transformation offer new choices for developing countries. All of these are representative of a new wave of thinking that rejects the increasingly discredited policies of the IMF and World Bank.

It is easy to criticise the views of activists who take to the street every time the World Bank, IMF, WTO or World Economic Forum meet. However they are driven by hard concerns which are not calling for an end to globalization but a reorientation of what this means. They are challenging notions of accepted economic and business parlance, calling for fair trade rather than just free trade; balanced rather than fast growth; and protection of domestic cottage industries and with it ethnic diversification and social identity. In many respects the term is a misnomer. They are calling for fairer re-distribution of the fruits of globalization and a humane reduction of its side-effects through sensitivities to local conditional realities.

Continue reading “Worth a Look: The Anti-Globalization Breakfast Club: Manifesto for a Peaceful Revolution”

2011/03/182011/03/18

Globalization & Anti-Globalization: Information War

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence

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Listening to the Foes of Globalization

Laurence Brahm

South China Morning Post, 11/22/2005

EXTRACT: Ironically, those in the so –called anti- globalization movement are all for the globalization of information. Mobile phone and the Internet are most critical tools, forming an underground media that people globally must now turn to in order to understand what is really happening.

In the mainstream, multinational corporate media realm, actual events are edited, watered down a misconstrued. Newsreaders and commentators who sing the praises of globalization dismiss what is becoming a global, people’s free democratic movement with the crude label “anti-globalization”.

Continue reading “Globalization & Anti-Globalization: Information War”

2011/03/18

Who’s Who in Earth Intelligence: John Bunzi

Alpha A-D, Earth Intelligence

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John Bunzl is the Founder, Trustee and Coordinator of the International Simultaneous Policy Organisation (ISPO). John initiated the Simpol concept in 1998 and since founded the ISPO to campaign for the adoption of Simpol around the world. He is author of The Simultaneous Policy – An Insider's Guide to Saving Humanity and the Planet, has given lectures and workshops on Simpol to many conferences, including to the World Trade Organisation, the World Social Forum and the Schumacher Society. Apart from being an activist, he is also a company director of a business specialising in raw materials and speciality papers. He was born in 1957 in London.

The Simultaneous Policy (Simpol) campaign allows citizens around the world to use their votes in their national elections to solve global problems like global warming, financial market regulation, environmental destruction, war, and social injustice. Learn more….

2011/03/172011/03/17

Climate Change as a Culture-Information Challenge

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 07 Health, 11 Society, 12 Water, Earth Intelligence, IO Sense-Making, Key Players

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Study Says Climate Debate Is Largely Cultural

SustainableBusiness.com News, 03/17/2011

While debate on climate change often strikes a caustic tone, the real impediment to meaningful dialogue is that the two sides often talk past each other in what amounts to a “logic schism,” says a University of Michigan researcher.

America’s absurd stab at systematising sock puppetry

IO Impotency

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America's absurd stab at systematising sock puppetry

The US has a chance to move on from a history of clandestine foreign policy – instead it acts like a clumsy spammer

Jeff Jarvis

The Guardian, 17 March 2011

The US government's plan to use technology to create and manage fake identities for social interaction with terrorists is as appalling as it is amusing. It's appalling that in this era of greater transparency and accountability brought on by the internet, the US of all countries would try to systematise sock puppetry. It's appallingly stupid, for there's little doubt that the fakes will be unmasked. The net result of that will be the diminution, not the enhancement, of American credibility.

But the effort is amusing as well, for there is absolutely no need to spend millions of dollars to create fake identities online. Any child or troll can do it for free. Millions do. If the government insists on paying, it can use salesforce.com to monitor and join in chats. There is no shortage of social management tools marketers are using to find and mollify or drown out complainers. There's no shortage of social-media gurus, either.

Japan Nuclear Effect Felt in Louisiana USA

03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 10 Security, Advanced Cyber/IO, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, IO Mapping, Key Players

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GM Suspends Shreveport Truck Output on Japan Parts Shortage

Bloomberg March 17, 2011, 4:13 PM EDT

By Craig Trudell

March 17 (Bloomberg) — General Motors Co., the largest U.S. automaker, will suspend production at its Shreveport Assembly in Louisiana for the week of March 21 because of a parts shortage resulting from the crisis in Japan.