Public Intelligence Blog – Page 3461 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

2010/11/08

Review: The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown–Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Public), Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Secession & Nullification, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

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Charles R. Morris

Forward to Future of Capitalism and GRIFTOPIA

November 8, 2010

This book was flagged to my attention in the Comments section of my own review of Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, where my review includes the following quote that I share here:

QUOTE (32): What has taken place over the last generation is a highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government. Far from taking care of the rest of us, the financial leaders of America and their political servants have seemingly reached the cynical conclusion that our society is not work saving and have taken on a new mission that involved not creating wealth for us all, but simply absconding with whatever wealth remains in our hollowed out economy. They don't feed us, we feed them.

I defer to the other reviewers on the substance of the book, but want to provide links here to several books that address the larger context of the soul of capitalism and the corruption of the two political parties that have undermined the US Government and US economy with malice aforethought.

Capitalism:
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
The Betrayal of American Prosperity: Free Market Delusions, America's Decline, and How We Must Compete in the Post-Dollar Era
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism

Corrupt Two-Party Tyranny
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography)
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders

I am blogging twice a week at Huffington Post on what a Virtual Cabinet doing sane evidence-driven policies in the context of a balanced responsible budget might look like, and would welcome visits there by those interested in getting back to honest government and responsible capitalism.

2010/11/08

Reference: RockMelt Browser

Analysis, Articles & Chapters, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Tools, White Papers

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RockMelt Browser Comes Out from Behind Its Rock

PCMagazine

11.08.2010

PCMag.com met with RockMelt's founders Eric Vishria and Tim Howes last week for an early look at the new browser software. Entering a competitor into a full field that includes Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera, not to mention an even more direct socially enhanced-browser competitor, Flock, may seem questionable, but Visheria and Howes made a fairly compelling case for it. Their point was that the current all-purpose browsers don't reflect most people's actual usage patterns.

Reinventing the Browser
“At RockMelt we are reinventing the browser for the way people use the Web today,” said Howes. “We think this has changed dramatically from the way people used it just a few short years ago. But all the browsers available today, although they've gotten a lot faster, are still just about navigating web pages. We built features into the browser to address people's three top browsing behaviors: interacting with friends, consume news and information, and searching.”

Entire article well worth reading….

Get beta access and watch cool video…

2010/11/08

Journal: Afghanistan Withdrawal Timetable

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security

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Interesting insight…..

Petraeus drafts map of US withdrawal from Afghanistan

The US commander in Afghanistan, David Petraeus, has drafted a timetable for the handing over of control of its provinces to local security forces. The news emerged as officials recovered the bodies of five of 16 policemen who vanished a week ago after an apparent Taliban attack on their remote base.

General Petraeus's colour-coded map includes a small number of ”green” areas, designated for handover within six months, the London newspaper The Times reported.

The plan, which will be presented to NATO leaders at a summit in Lisbon on November 19, indicates that the western province of Herat will be handed over early, while NATO forces are expected to remain in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand for at least two more years.

Balance of article….

2010/11/08

Journal: Taliban Letter to Congress, Lobbying Starts Now

08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, Government, Military

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Taliban Seek to Sway U.S. Congress With ‘Open Letter'

Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2010

Matthew Rosenberg

KABUL—Add another group to the list of people with a message for the newly elected U.S. Congress: the Taliban.

In a rambling “open letter” to Congress, the Taliban's spokesman said he wanted to present American lawmakers with “a true picture of the ground realities” of the war in Afghanistan, which he insisted the U.S. can't win.

The spokesman, Qari Mohammad Yousaf Ahmadi, called on Congress to send a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan, apparently ignorant of the fact that representatives and senators visit Afghanistan all the time. But American lawmakers rarely leave heavily guarded U.S. facilities, moving only in armored convoys,…

Balance of story demands log-in or subscription….

Phi Beta Iota: While this initiative demonstrates the Taliban's understanding of history–Viet-Nam redux, it also shows their lack of understanding of Washington. We have absolutely no doubt that at least three lobbying firms have a team enroute to Pakistan to make contact and offer their services. They will accept bricks of #4 heroin, no extra charge for laundering currency. We are really surprised Halliburton did not think of this, Brown & Root seems to already have the smuggling channel for the drugs and money in place. Next up: a slick video and some YouTube snippets that go viral, under the broad campaign slogan of “Ground Truth from Afghanistan.”

2010/11/08

Journal: Can US kill American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki? Judge to hear case

09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society

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Christian Science Monitor, 7 November 2010

A federal judge is set to hear arguments on Monday in a lawsuit
challenging an alleged secret Obama administration plan to use lethal
force against an American-born Islamic cleric hiding in Yemen.

In July, US authorities listed al-Awlaki as a “specially designated global terrorist.” According to press reports, he is on a US government “kill list.”

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of al-Awlaki’s father by the American Civil Liberties Union, challenges the government’s authority to carry out the
intentional killing.

Read full article….

2010/11/07

Journal: Rebellion 2.0–Smart & Funny

Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence

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Nick Shore

SVP of Strategic Consumer Insights and Research, MTV

Posted: November 7, 2010 03:05 PM

Wit was the weapon of choice for millennials at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

Millennials are often compared to their boomer parents in terms of their penchant for social activism and positive change. Cynically minded social commentators have also characterized the millennials' flavor of activism as “slacktivism” or, more recently, as a “diffuse, click-and-go” activism (see Malcolm Gladwell's article).

On Oct. 30, however, we saw a very different side of this generation.

Millennials gathered in the tens of thousands to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, D.C., to speak out against fear-mongering in politics.

With an economy that's no laughing matter, one might have expected to see a generational temper tantrum, but instead we bore witness to the dynamic that we at MTV have lovingly dubbed “smart ‘n' funny as the new rock ‘n' roll.”

Read rest of this inspiring post….

2010/11/072010/11/07

Reference: Saniteer

Blog Wisdom

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T-shirt at the Restore Sanity rally…

“Saniteer: One who advocates for, practices and defends rational discourse and civility towards all people, regardless of political views. Collectively, our nation’s best hope for restoring honor, respect and functionality. D.C. 10.30.10″

Tip of the Hat to Sandy Heierbacher at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: Sanity and civility are nice, intelligence (individual, collective, and as decision-support also known as evidence-based planning, programming, and budgeting) is better. We achieve that with Electoral Reform.