WMR has learned from knowledgeable sources within the US financial community that an alarming confidential and limited distribution document is circulating among senior members of Congress and their senior staff members that is warning of a bleak future for the United States if it does not quickly get its financial house in order. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is among those who have reportedly read the document.
The document is being called the “C & R” document because it reportedly states that if the United States defaults on loans and debt underwriting from China, Japan, and Russia, all of which are propping up the United States government financially, and the United States unilaterally cancels the debts, America can expect a war that will have disastrous results for the United States and the world. “Conflict” is the “C word” in the document.
The other scenario is that the federal government will be forced to drastically raise taxes in order to pay off debts to foreign countries to the point that the American people will react with a popular revolution against the government. “Revolution” is the document's “R word.”
Click on the title to read the rest of the Madsen report. Commentary below the fold.
The states of the Union are supposed to be laboratories of democracy, but this summer they have been looking more like toxic-waste dumps of futility. From coast to coast, from tundra to coral reef, state governments are in an awful fix. Their budget gaps are on track to add up to at least a third of a trillion dollars. In half the states, education funding is being cut, which means bigger classes, shoddier facilities, and fewer frills like music, art, languages, and library
books. States are closing parks, draining rainy-day funds, and shrinking services for children, the elderly, and the disabled. . . . . . . .
California, it turns out, is ungovernable. Its public schools, once the nation’s best, are now among the worst. Its transportation and water systems are deteriorating. Its prisons are so overcrowded that it has to turn tens of thousands of felons loose. And its legislature has spent most of the year in a farcical effort to pass the annual
budget, leaving little or no time for other matters, such as—well, schools, transportation, water, and prisons. This is “normal”: the same thing has happened in eighteen of the past twenty-two years. But the addition of economic disaster to legislative paralysis may have brought California to a tipping point.
In 1988 a global campaign started at the Marine Corps Intelligence Center (MCIC) with the discovery that 80% or more of what the Marine Corps needed to do policy, acquisition, and operations support for this unique expeditionary and constabulary force, was not secret, not expensive, but also not known to anyone in Washington, D.C. Thus was the modern discipline of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) inspired.
This is year 21 in a 25 year fight for the public interest, and although the USA remains “severely deficient” (as stated by the Aspin-Brown Commission in 1996), the US secret world refuses to act on the findings that also called for OSINT to be a “top priority” for both funding and for DCI/DNA attention. Neither of the last have been forthcoming, and it can be fairly said that until an Open Source Agency is established, as called for on pages 23 and 423 of the 9-11 Commission Report, the USA will continue to spend $75 billion a year on the 20% it can capture with secret sources and methods (less than 5% of which is actually processed, i.e. 1% of the totality), all to produce, “at best” 4% of what the President and many others now not served “need to know.”
The Nordic nations, and Sweden in particular through the Folke Bernadotte Academy, have led the way in conceptualizing M4IS operational and intelligence networks:
When you are standing on the edge of a cliff a step forward is not progress. — Anonymous
Our separation from nature — or should I say, our separation from reality as it really is, in all its fullness that is so hard for us to grasp — has now reached global proportions. Reality's feedback is now coming in the form of increasingly extreme weather, emptying oceans and aquifers, cancers arising from an environmental chemical soup so complex we can no longer track the causal links any more, new diseases that won't respond to antibiotics and can span continents and seas in hours on jets, and small groups and networks with increasingly powerful destructive technologies at their disposal.
We are rapidly moving into a realm where problem-solving becomes obsolete, if not downright dangerous — especially at the global level, especially when we are trying to preserve our systems, our habits, our identities, our protections and privileges. Because these challenges are not primarily problems to be solved. They are realities to engage with, to come to terms with, to learn something from about who we are in the world, to be humbled by and creatively joined. Yes, joined. Because inside the realities of today are profound lessons about who we need to be next, individually and collectively — about the cultures, technologies, stories, and social systems we need to create and move into.
Tom Atlee is the single most important person responsible for introducing Robert Steele to the emerging concepts of Public Intelligence and Collective Intelligence. Apart from all the books (Smart Mobs, Here Comes Everybody, Groundswell, Army of Davids , Here Comes Everybody, etcetera), it is Tom Atlee who has been the catalyst for convergence across all the issue areas. He is to People what Paul Ray is to polling. Tom is the god-father of the American Public Renaissance, and if we do ultimately take back the power and restore sanity to the Republic and the federal government that is a SERVICE, nothing more, it will be because Tom Atlee was himself. Please support him. Below are a number of headlines from his latest effort to raise funds for the Co-Intelligence Institute. Tom Atlee personifies the center of gravity for America the Good. Please donate as little or as much as you are inspired to give to this national hero.
Robert David STEELE Vivas has committed himself to being intelligence officer to the public, and to the five billion poor in particular, for the balance of his life.
Below are some definitions that matter, as of 1 August 2009 [this is a work in progress, will try to complete it soon, and then future definitions will be separate postings]
BRAIN: Only a living creature can have a brain, an organic or biological device that has over billions of years evolved to its present state. The following quotation from James Bamford is instructive; it is the final sentence of his book, BODY OF SECRETS: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Intelligence Agency (page 613)
Human Brain vs. NSA
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE (CI): Collective Intelligence overcomes groupthink and individual cognitive biases by leveraging a process of consensus decision-making that respects–even demands–diversity of inputs and perspetives. At its best it can be a society of the human mind, achieving conscious evolution as a species. CI is a return to the precepts ofthe Founding Fathers, and in particular Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The industrial era, characterized by Lionel Tiger as “The Manufacture of Evil,” separated the public from both information and elite decision-making, while still taking public money. Bureaucracy fostered secrecy, and secrecy fostered pathology. Collective intelligence restores the power of the people over their commonwealth, and neutralizes the power of vested interests that manipulate information to concentrate wealth. NOTE: a fuller definition that draws on Robert Steele's many publications can be found at WordIQ, which tends to be more balanced than Wikipedia. Colloquial terms, each a book title, include Smart Mobs, Groundswell, Here Comes Everybody, Army of Davids, Wikinomics, and Wealth of Networks.
Definition of Collective Intelligence
DATA: The raw direct human observation or articulation, raw image, raw signal, raw signature, or in machine terms, the lowest possible element of information that can be isolated in and of itself with its own provenance.
DATA MINING: The direct exploitation of information already in-hand, or procured for a specific investigation i.e. generally internally-generated and oriented. Often mis-represented as Business Intelligence. See also Knowledge Management. At its best, Data Mining is a huge fraud buster, detecting patterns of import-export tax avoidance, money laundering, and insurance fraud.
DECISION-SUPPORT: The conversion of information, which costs money, into intelligence, which makes money–or achieves other goals, public, and private, of specific interest to a specific individual or body making a decision of import. See also Intelligence. An alternative for those organizations such as the United Nations that have long been abused by the confusion of secret sources & methods with the world “Intelligence.”
EARTH INTELLIGENCE (EARTHINT): Earth Intelligence, the subject of a new book (the second book to be published by the Earth Intelligence Network, the first was on Collective Intelligence) is defined by its outcome, the creation of a prosperous world at peace. We have adopted Buckminster Fuller's objectives as our own.
PHI BETA IOTA NOTE: The Co-Intelligence Insittute is one of the Righteous Sites, but it is the ONLY Righteous Site whose gentle fund-raising we specifically endorse. There is no better investment for a given dollar than in supporting Tom Atlee's inspirational work. PLEASE consider a donation of any amount, $40 is suggested. Robert Steele just gave $250 and usually gives around $1000 a year. Tom Atlee the people's secretary of collective beneficial intelligence.
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Tom Atlee
Dear friends,
Paul Hawken is author of a number of remarkable books whose titles alone contribute to our thinking — titles like SEVEN TOMORROWS, THE ECOLOGY OF COMMERCE, NATURAL CAPITALISM and BLESSED UNREST. Several
years ago he founded a vast, remarkable, interactive database of, by, and for change agents — WISER Earth http://wiserearth.org. He has a uniquely potent clarity about what is happening in the world, what is
needed, and who can do the job (surprise: It's us!). His passionate clarity was called forth recently in a commencement address he gave in Portland, Oregon (see below).
I sometimes suggest that things are getting better and better and worse and worse faster and faster. Paul mirrors these thoughts: “When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.”
He identifies a biological fact that provides perhaps the most important guidance for our individual lives and the conscious evolution of civilization: “Life creates the conditions that are conducive to life.”
Wait a minute… “Life creates the conditions that are conducive to life.” That's a Really Big Idea. It goes by really fast, but it covers a LOT of ground.
Someday take this idea for a walk and see how many ways you can think of that we do (or don't) “create conditions that are conducive to life”. Then ponder all the ways we COULD create such conditions more wisely, for more of life. Then perhaps reflect on what this biological reality tells us about who and how we are in the world:
To the extent we “create conditions that are conducive to life”, we are alive, we are serving life, we are part of Life and the way Life is unfolding on this planet — a newly conscious part of the way Life has been evolving here for four billion years…
That takes me to the importance of system-level change — initiatives that seek to transform our cultural stories, institutions and practices… that create wiser measures of success, health and value… that develop forms of power, organization, and decision- making that tap into the best of who we are when we are most alive and connected, individually and collectively. Think about how profoundly such changes impact the conditions that are conducive to life — in our own lives and in the natural world. System conditions are the cultural equivalent of climate: They influence everything at once.
Hawken goes on to say that “Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.” He wonders, “What we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years.” And imagines that “No one would sleep that night.” Then he suggests we are living in the midst of such a miraculous moment: “This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years.”
And he suggests that we — embodied in the hundreds of new college graduates sitting before him — wake up to “the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation.” He invites all of us to grab this most amazing opportunity and run with it.
He invites a new “generation” to generate what's needed to create the world anew.
Blessings on the Journey.
Coheartedly,
Tom
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Paul Hawken
Click on the photograph to go to the commencement address.
