1) Chuck Spinney on how our partisan “leaders” are disconnected from reality and leading us over a cliff, with reference to John Boyd.
2. An extract and link to the always brilliant CounterPunch where David Michael Green discusses the core issue: Can America be salvaged?
3. A Phi Beta Iota editorial commentary on Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), Robert Steele (Paradigms of Failure, Data Pathologies), and Howard Zinn (A Power Governments Cannot Repress).
CHUCK SPINNEY: The article in Counterpunch by David Michael Green, “Can America be Salvaged?” is an brilliant expository argument describing what are in effect the destructive outcomes of self-referencing/incestuously amplifying OODA loops that are becoming ever more disconnected from reality.
The Obama Administration means well, no question about it. They simply do not know what they do not know, and no one within the US Intelligence Community appears capable of speaking truth to power.
The truth that needs to be spoken is that Washington lacks both integrity and intelligence (as in thoughtful holistic decision-making). Washington lacks a strategic analytic model, it lacks a commitment to eradicating the ten high-level threats to humanity (terrorism is ninth, a traffic accident, nothing more), and it lacks a process for harmonizing budgets and behavior across twelve core policy domains as illustrated below.
Medard Gabel was for many years #2 to Buckminister Fuller, and a co-creator of the analog World Game. As a founding director of Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 Public Charity, he created–and retains ownership of–the EarthGame.
Earth Tools = Serious Structured Games
Below are four specific modules that can be used NOW to excite both students and executives about the importance of sustainable design, strategic analysis, and the unity of knowledge–what E. O. Wilson calls Consilience.
Advise the President of the United States in the Presidential Advisor Game learn more …
Save the World
from climate disaster in the
Climate Change Game learn more …
Green Your Campus
in the
Campus GreenGame learn more …
Bring Peace to the World
in the
World PeaceGame learn more …
Phi Beta Iota strongly recommends anything and everything that Medard Gabel has created and offers.Give him a call to see how one of his programs will fit into your program today at 610.566.0156!
NOTE: We *will* create the World Brain and the EarthGame, it is only a matter of when, not if. Get started now by engaging Medard Gabel to show you how you can make sense, make strategy, and advance the common good while achieving your own worthy goals.
WASHINGTON – Melting ice caps. Drought. Spreading disease. US defense planners view global climate change as a national security threat because it could create millions of new refugees and intensify conflicts over resources.
. . . . . . .
A new debate is unfolding over whether linking climate change too closely with security planning will create a self-fulfilling prophecy, running the risk that the United States will rely too heavily on its armed forces to deal with global problems.
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.
The pure integral consciiousness of Buckminster Fuller is finally coming into its own as sustainable design, natural capitalism, zero waste, and many other ideas that reflect INTEGRITY as the essence of life, all converge. Buckminster Fuller is to re-engineering the earth as Will Durant is to re-thinking philosophy.
Although I heard Fuller speak at Muhlenberg College in 1973 or so, I had not read his books and for me Critical Path was a very healthy reminder that long before many of the current authors, Buckminster Fuller had a grip on the basics:
1) Economic theory of scarcity and secrecy is evil, benefitting the few at the expense of the many
2) Earth is NOT a zero sum Darwinian game for humans, in fact it is the human role–the human mind's role–to “synergize” Earth into a win-win for all.
3) Money is not wealth only an artifact that is representative of empty bank vaults and gross misrepresentation by the alleged wealthy. Only time-energy accounting and “true cost” of goods and services should be used.
4) Obstacles to displacing rule by scarcity and secrecy are the public ignorance of natural science and the collaboration among governments, corporations and large organizations such as religions and labor unions that “divide and keep conquered.”
5) Computers–and Fuller was clearly envisioning today's computers, not those of his time–if properly fed all of the relevant data can alter perceptions on a just enough, just in time basis. This coincides with my own view that we can and must educate the five billion poor one cell call at a time, but it also favors the ideas gaining currency of connecting the one billion rich (80% of whom do not give to charity) directly with the needs of the five billion poor at the household level of need.
I am hugely impressed with both specific actionable visions and specific actionable facts:
1) Now possible to create a global electrical grid that runs across Alaska into Canada and China, and eliminate the electrical shortfalls in both those countries and in Canada and the US West Coast.
2) In time-energy “true cost” accounting, every gallon of oil that we use cost $1 million (in 1981 dollars, which is to say, around $10 after the current Administration finished with its massive devaluation plans).
3) There are two critical paths that are not understood by the public or those who profess to represent the public: path one is those natural trends that proceed with or without human errors, omissions, and interventions; path two is the human path both local and as a global aggregate.
4) Considered in time-energy terms, both our industrial-era schools and our industrial-era office buildings are lunacy. He provides a fascinating discussion of inland versus island dwellers, concludes that most urban office buildings should be converted into mixed dwelling-telecommuting centers and is generally brutal about our national policies being 50 years out of date (in 1981–that would make them 80 years out of date today, and I agree).
5) He provides a BRUTAL discussion of banking and government bail-outs of banking as well as mortgage fraud that led to the Great Depression, how banks dispossessed the farmers not realizing that the land was over-valued AND that no one else wanted to do the hard work of farming, and I am generally thunder-struck by how history has repeated itself.
I am especially impressed by his “cosmic costing” which does not allow for hoarding (he joins others in cursing money as both a hoardable good and one that can draw interest beyond reason).
A goodly portion of the book covers the art of doing more with less; doing it faster; and ultimately benefitting increasing numbers of humans with the same technologies.
His discussion of “precession” revolves around not competing with anyone else, instead attending to the unattended. He has a gift for “comprehensive consideration” that we could all draw upon for inspiration.
I am completely absorbed by this book, which includes in the final third:
1) The challenge is to educate all humans, and to teach humans to learn in the shortest possible time–my kids have two answers: cell phones and video games. This is a no-brainer.
2) I offer some quotes below but am totally engaged with his discussion of the Geoscope, what some today might call an Earth Monitoring System, and his view that we can create a 200 foot version of the Earth where one inch equals three miles, and using computers, be able to illuminate for any human–however poorly educated or ideologically stunted–what actually IS the reality.
3) He spends time describing the World Game and cites two books by Medard Gabel that are no longer available via Amazon (but see the EarthGame(TM) technical description offered by Earth Intelligence Network), and describes it as a problem-solving choice-making educational game.
On page 287 I am stunned by his anticipation of the “de-sovereignization” of the United States of America, coincident with the bankruptcy of the US Nation at the hands of its out of control federal government.
On the architectural side I am fascinated by his discussion of flat slab building as the worst possible time-energy construction, and his discussion of the alternatives that he created, including floating cities that I now regard as inevitable.
The book contains an unexpected gem, a compendium created by Fuller based on US contractor experiences in Russia that was delivered to Brazil. It is still valid and it is a model for the kind of clear thinking that government engineers should be able to, but cannot do. [With credit to Chuck Spinney, I have learned that “government specification cost plus engineering” has fried the brains of multiple generations of engineers who are unable to computer biomimicry, cradle to cradle, green to gold, etc. We must wait for our children to rule the world, they are the “digital natives” who will not tolerate rankism, secrecy, scarcity, or lies.
A few quotes are in the comment as I must respect Amazon's 1000 word limit.
xxv: “It is sa matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry.”
xxxvi: “The race is between a better-informed, hopefully inspired young world versus a running-scared, misinformed brain-conditioned, older world.”
xxxviii: “The political and economic systems and the political and economic leaders of humanity are not in the final examination; it is the integrity of each individual human that is in the final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate.”
118-119 “The USA is not run by its would-be “democratic” governance…..Nothing could be more pathetic than the role thats has to be played by the President of the United States, whose power is approximately zero.”
169 “The objective of the game would be to explore ways to make it possible for anybody and everybody in the human family to enjoy the total Earth without any human interfering with any other human and without any human gaining advantage at the expense of another.”
See also page 199, page 202, 208, 221, 225, 287, 346
Simple awesome. If you want your children and grand-children to have an intellectual advantage, nurture their thinking on sustainable development and read in yourself on Buckminster Fuller.
