The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Originally cited in 2008 Open Source Intelligence (Strategic).
Above slide in English and Spanish versions can be found within the M4IS2 Brief for South America.
See Also:
Tony Zinni: Background & Confirmation of the 4% “At Best” Quote on Secret versus Open Sources
Kevin Rollins is the founder and publisher of Free Liberal, executive vice president of InnoSci Technologies, Inc., managing editor of Econ Journal Watch, and an adjunct fellow with New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation. He holds a master’s in Economics from George Mason University.
See Especially:
Opening Your Philosophy: Transpartisan Thinking and Free Liberalism from Kevin Rollins on Vimeo.
See Also:
Sudan: Sudanese media broadcast the following decree on Monday.
Marshal Umer Hassan Al-Bashir the President of the Republic, the president of the National Congress Party has authorized the state governors to expel NGOs and persons that do not respect the country's sovereignty, work guidelines within 24 hours. He added we respect the NGOs that come to assist us and we reject whoever intends to control us. He indicated that some NGOs have spread rumors that they work in Sudan without the need of the government approvals. He directed the governors to expel the NGOs that do not adhere to their authorities on the same day.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: The government in Khartoum remains highly suspicious of western aid organizations that it suspects of encouraging separatism in Darfur and the South. This decree is a manifestation of that suspicion because it mentions rumor mongering. A government has a right to control foreigners without further justification. Odd behavior…
Phi Beta Iota: This is the beginning of the end for predatory NGO's including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and of course all the religious NGOs and the corporate pseudo-NGOs. They have lost all trust for a good reason. On the one hand, they have been spending less than 10% of what they have collected under the various guises (Katrina, Haiti, etcetera) and on the other they are now demonstrably untrustworthy and ineffective. The next big step forward will be hybrid arrangements in which public intelligence both validates every move, every expense, every bona fides, and harmonizes a diversity of efforts toward a common publicly-appraised and accepted purpose.
By: Anya Kamenetz, November 29, 2010
Fast Company article on citizens (and yes, politicians are citizens) engaging in basic community maintenance, and those working to make web and mobile technologies use city data and neighborhood requests for community care-taking.
Links mentioned:
+ SeeClickFix
+ OpenPlans
+ Code for America
Also see Do-It-Yourself-City (which Fast Company does not mention).
Phi Beta Iota: Robert Steele, our founder, has asked that we post the following as his testimonial.
If there were one person in America I would gladly sacrifice my life for, so as to give the larger group including my direct family the benefit of his continued wisdom, Tom Atlee is that person. He is without peer, and we are all blessed to have him in our lives and within our Commonwealth. PLEASE contribute to his endeavor–what he does creates real wealth for all of us, and that kind of wealth is the only riposte to the decades of unethical legalized looting that we have tolerated for too long. America the Beautiful is coming back–Tom is walking point and deserves our strongest possible support.
Dear friends,
As America's dysfunctional politics and governance swings wildly out of equilibrium, the Co-Intelligence Institute has increased its focus on the transformation of the way the U.S. does politics.
As we track the transpartisan movement, the Coffee Party, the Tea Party, the No Labels movement, the Palin pre-campaign, the strange shifting dance between the Administration and Congress, and other political currents, we sense an emerging and significant force demanding change in the power relationships between the vast majority of “we, the people” on the one hand, and corporate and government elites on the other.
It is very instructive to watch how this populist energy is being manipulated and co-opted. Many of the politicians positioning themselves as populists — “We're not going to take it any more!” — are themselves active members of the elite class they are supposedly battling, and totally beholden to the financial powers behind the political circus.
Continue reading “Co-Intelligence Transforming U.S. Politics”
Save Obama – by running against him
By Michael Lerner
The Washington Post Saturday, December 4, 2010
EXTRACT: The basic platform for such a candidate is clear: Unequivocally call for an immediate end to the presence of U.S. troops, advisers and private U.S.-based security firms in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and replace the “war on terror” with a Global Marshall Plan that roots homeland security in a strategy of generosity and concern for the well-being of everyone on the planet. Domestically, call for a massive jobs program; a freeze on mortgage foreclosures; a national bank that would offer interest-free loans to those seeking to create or expand small businesses; immediate implementation of the parts of the Obama health-care plan that would benefit ordinary citizens and build support for a health plan for all citizens; dramatically lower prices for drugs that treat critical diseases such as AIDS and cancer; a strong tax on carbon emissions; and immediate prosecution of those government employees involved in torture or coverups to justify the invasion of Iraq.
This candidate should push for the media to provide free and equal time to all major candidates for national office as well as for constitutional amendments requiring only public financing in elections and, separately, for corporations to prove every five years to a jury of ordinary citizens that they have a satisfactory history of environmental responsibility (as is sought by the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment, or ESRA, advocated by the Network of Spiritual Progressives).
This policy platform must be matched with a willingness to talk clearly about the spiritual and ethical need for a new bottom line – one of love, kindness and generosity. We need a progressive push for a new New Deal, which in the 21st century could be the Caring Society: “Caring for Each Other and the Earth.”
Read complete article calling for a progressive challenger.
President Obama is neither weak nor stupid… nor a progressive
Daily Kos Sun Dec 05, 2010
EXTRACT: It's time to consider that the president accepts centrist and conservative policies because he himself is a centrist or conservative. This does not mean that President Obama is a Republican, or anything close to a Republican. The Republican Party is not conservative, it is extremist. But as the Republican Party has drifted farther and farther to the fringe, much of the establishment Democratic Party has intrepidly moved into the ideological space the Republican Party abandoned. The Republicans lead this movement to the right, and the Democrats follow, taking the political center with them and leaving the traditional left ever more disenfranchised, disenchanted, and politically alienated. The problem with Barack Obama isn't that he is worse than establishment Village Democrats, the problem is that he is one of them.
EXTRACT: Last February, writing about the health care reform meltdown, Glenn Greenwald offered a theory:
The primary tactic in this game is Villain Rotation. They always have a handful of Democratic Senators announce that they will be the ones to deviate this time from the ostensible party position and impede success, but the designated Villain constantly shifts, so the Party itself can claim it supports these measures while an always-changing handful of their members invariably prevent it.
Read the rest of this article calling out the Democrats as frauds.
Phi Beta Iota: The first article, written by the author of The Left Hand of God–Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right, misses the key point: Barack Obama is a bought and paid for member of the club who takes his guidance from Vernon Jordan, Colin Powell, and a handful of other members of the club. He did not spend $750 million ($300 million still unaccounted for) to become our President, he took it to solidify his status and earn his retirement as their representative…four more years. The second piece gets closer to the truth–inter-changeable villains, all a charade–musical chairs, lights, camara, and no action in the public interest. What interests us is that Barack Obama has a choice, such as we have written about at the Huffington Post, and he can Change the Game, such as Tom Atlee has written about. He probably will not, and already we see fraudulent organizations with hidden agendas and secret sources of funding (No Labels, America Elects, IndependentVoting.org) all intent of protecting the status quo by putting forward yet another candidate who is Of Wall Street but just different enough to fool enough of the people enough of the time to buy Wall Street four more years. ENOUGH! There is one litmus test, and what Barack Obama has going for him is that he has right of first refusal: Electoral Reform. Electoral Reform introduced upon the inauguration of the new Congress, with a roll call vote demanded and televised, would end these decades of carpet-bagging and war-profiteering, and give us a government BETTER than any wwe have had since Jack Kennedy–a government Of, By, and For We the People, in which all voters are connected with all relevant information and policies are evidence-based and in the context of a balanced budget. Show us that, and we will show you the first great President of the 21st Century.
Building on last week's REVIEW: Buckminster Fuller's 1928 Ideas & Integrities this week I want to honor one new book and reinforce that book with mention and links to several others, all of which make the same point in different ways: we have the power to design a world that works for all.
Designing a World That Works for All: How the Youth of the World are Creating Real-World Solutions for the UN Millenium Development Goals and Beyond (Volume 1) by Medard Gabel and his many international students is in my view revolutionary — a milestone in human applied thought. Having attended two of his design sessions with some of the students he has mentored in this long-running endeavor, it has been my privilege to share in the “aha” experience when half-way through the session all of the smaller teams working on disparate things like agriculture, energy, transportation, water, etcetera suddenly realize that everything is connected and nothing can be designed properly unless it is understood in relation to everything else.
Medard was the co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, and has recently drawn up the preliminary cost and process estimates for creating the digital EarthGame in which we all play ourselves at every level, with transparent access to “true cost” and all other relevant information.
Separately, in support of a forthcoming book, Medard has documented the reality that we can create a prosperous world at peace for one third the price of what the USA alone spends on elective wars and a global armed secretive presence (over 750 military bases world-wide, all at taxpayer expense). The rigorously researched graphic of relative costs is his, used with permission, all rights reserved to him. Together we all seek to create a Big Bat 21 for the public that funds a World Brain and Global Game such that every public everywhere has better information and more aggregate insight than any government or corporation or international organization.
Medard, who founded and manages BigPictureSmallWorld, has influenced me greatly, as have many others, but few in such sustained depth. Kirkpatrick Sale and his book Human Scale, Paul Goodman and his 1960's bookCommunitas, are among the critical voices that led me to publish Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (edited by Mark Tovey with 55 contributors), and to write and publish Intelligence for Earth: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability; as with all my books, the latter two are free online. It was with all these minds in mind that I recently created a new graphic to depict how ignorant and ill-suited to our needs are the secret intelligence communities of the world (the US is spending $75 billion a year for what one general says is “at best” 4% of what we need while another says it is all completely “irrelevant” to our forces engaged in combat as well as stabilization & reconstruction).
I agree with Gregory Unruh, who has written that transparency is the Internet's killer app, and also with Jeff Jarvis, who writes of the shift in power from secrecy to transparency. Still, I credit Alvin and Heidi Toffler with the earliest and most developed recognition (in PowerShift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century) that information is a substitute for violence, wealth, time, space, and labor.
However, having access to information is not enough. There needs to be a change in mindset and a change of the game such as Gandhi accomplished in India and Tom Atlee has suggested for us in both Tao of Democracy and the more recent Reflections on Evolutionary Activism. As Russell Ackoff urged in his paper “Transforming the Systems Movement,” we have to stop doing the wrong things righter and focus instead on doing the right things. In my view, the two-party tyranny and its shadow substitutes No Labels and Americans Elect as well as IndependentVoting.org, are all efforts to mislead the public into thinking that we can stick with the status quo electoral system that has been thoroughly corrupted, we just need to elect the “right” kind of people. Not so.
Below I list tiny handful of especially insightful books on changing the game, and my two lists of lists that sort all my recent reading in easy to access categories. Designing A World That Works For All boils down to clarity (not the theater we get now from politics and the media); diversity (all of us — every single one of us, as informed participants in our self-governance); integrity (not something visible in any organization with shadowy financial backers and hidden agendas); and finally, a commitment to sustainability (playing for the long term, for our children and their children).
Put simply, and now that the Internet and GroupOn and Twitter and other emergent capabilities make this possible, the time has come to end Rule by Secrecy and top-down decision-making that is not in the public interest. We now have the power–both technologically and financially–to create a Big Bat 21 for We the People (imagine 100 million citizens paying an average of $10 each) to fund a public intelligence network, a public policy network, and a public budget oversight network, all three working at all levels from municipality to county to state to nation to world. Joe Trippi and Zephyr Teachout proved that We the People can–in the aggregate–outspend Wall Street….but we have to want to!
In my view, and I wrote about this as Obama's Choice, we have in the next 30-90 days a transformational opportunity in America. We can demand Electoral Reform (1 Page, 9 Points) of every single one of our Senators and Representatives, and of our President, and we can demand a roll call vote on this simple restoration of public sovereignty — those who vote against it can be recalled by their constituencies and replaced by the 4th of July 2011. Restoring the clarity, diversity, and integrity of our electoral system in time for 2012 is what Buckminster Fuller would call “Prime Design.” It is fundamental. Absent that reform, everything proposed by the government, the corporations, the two-party tyranny, No Labels, Americans Elect, IndependentVoting.org, the churches, the unions — none of it is relevant to getting America back on track. Electoral Reform. Now. “Yes, We Can” Change the Game.
See Also:
Review: The Great Turning-From Empire to Earth Community
Review: Holistic Darwinism: Synergy, Cybernetics, and the Bioeconomics of Evolution
Review: Reflexive Practice-Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World
Review: Society's Breakthrough!-Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
Review: Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)
The author is unemployed and seeking righteous work. Have brain, will travel.
