the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence.
I was asked recently to outline my “philosophy of intelligence” briefly, conversationally. What a wonderful challenge. Below is my fifteen minute answer using an outline that has been on my mind for some time, augmented by some graphics and a few additional sentences completing some of the thoughts.
Each morning the commander should be asked:
What would you have liked to know yesterday that we failed to tell you?
What do you need to know about today that you have not mentioned before?
What do you need to know in the future that you have not already mentioned?
The Purpose of Intelligence
The purpose of intelligence is to provide a mix of encyclopedic information and warning including atmospherics, and decision-support — explicit answers to specific questions from the commander and their senior staff. Intelligence is a form of adult education on the fly, mission-centric decision-support, and acquisition-centric research.
Hence, the vast majority of what we do today — technical collection that is not processed, generic “intelligence” reports that do not address specific questions from specific customers — is not intelligence, merely classified information.
Worse, we are failing to provide intelligence with integrity relevant to grand strategy tailored to defeat all threats, harmonize all policies, guide acquisition and reduce all costs, and produce a safe and prosperous nation “with liberty and justice for all.” Intelligence should be but is not at this time “root.”
Holistic analytics and true cost economics are serious terms that are neither understood nor practiced within the current intelligence system. The new process does require respect for the old process that integrates requirements definition, collection management, all-source collection, processing, and analysis, extended to provide evaluated accurate analytics (not just information) helpful to all branches of government at all levels. Done right, intelligence should be the “driver” for an evidence-based economy and society, with education-intelligence-research as one seamless web of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom — this creates a Smart Nation.
The Nature of Intelligence
Intelligence — decision-support (inclusive of atmospherics and warning) — demands integrity in all respects, starting with respect for the Constitution and an absolute commitment to never lie to Congress, the Executive, or the public.
Roughly 80% of what we need to know can be acquired using open sources and methods that are both inexpensive and easily shareable with others.
Roughly 20% of what we need to know demands secret sources and methods because our most ruthless adversaries — including bankers and secret societies as well as hostile nations and criminal networks — are best stymied if we achieve advance understanding.
Covert Operations (regime change, drone assassinations, rendition & torture, media influence operations, agents of influence mis-leading their host organizations) are not part of 21st Century intelligence. Covert Operations are acts of war that demand both Congressional authority, and engagement of Special Operations Forces (SOF).
Counterintelligence has two sides: offensive counterintelligence carried out by world-class clandestine case officers, and defensive counterintelligence carried out by world-class security officers — two completely different cadres. Without best in class counterintelligence, all secret intelligence “successes” are suspect. As General William Odom has stated, counterintelligence should receive all-source intelligence support from local to global capabilities to which I would add, counterintelligence must precede intelligence — it is the foundation for all else.
There are four levels of intelligence support — strategic, operational, tactical, and technical — within each level we should be doing encyclopedic and warning intelligence as well as tailored decision support while ensuring that we reconcile analysis and true costs among the levels and across all mission areas. Warning intelligence is explicitly something that must be do-able at all four levels — technical, tactical, operational, strategic — with persistence and deep excellence. We do not do warning intelligence today with any degree of coherence, comprehensiveness, or reliability.
The threat changes depending on the level of analysis as well as the time and place where the threat is encountered. At the same time, strategic mis-steps can gut tactical campaigns, and vice versa (a classic example of this is the LBJ White House providing the aviation target list to NVN a day in advance, after picking the targets and before they were relayed to our own forces).
Commanders and their staffs must be able to think at all four levels simultaneously, and within each level, across all civil and geographic domains, not only the military domain.
It is essential that intelligence and leadership be holistic across the levels. The commander needs to have a G-2 that is able to support his strategic impact (understand when others are providing false information), operational cohesion (drawing in all necessary partners), tactical effectiveness (vastly improve drone-assisted real-time targeting for artillery as well as current 1:50 combat charts with all existing cultural features), and technical procurement (back away from expensive complexity and contractors in the field, figure out how to pull energy and water out of the air on the fly).
The Sources of Intelligence
We have gone nuts on technical collection (both signals and imagery), and refuse to be serious about indigenous minds and eyes and ears and the 90% of the information that is not online, not in English, and not known to Washington. Wrong turns include the neglect of operational and tactical wide area surveillance in favor of precision imaging against Soviet missile silos; the gutting of tactical aerial reconnaissance and the complete disregard for the human factor in intelligence; and the refusal to invest in tools for thinking, focusing instead on collection that is not processed. It is not helpful that we still do not have current 1:50,000 combat charts for most of the world, meaning that all cultural artifacts built (or destroyed) in the past several decades do not appear on the electronic charts we are given, and we do not have ready access to printed charts that can be shared with foreign partners.
All sources are human sources. Period. Technology as implemented by the US IC and distorted by the USAF love for all things tecnical, is an obstacle to thinking and not worth what we pay for it. At the same neither CIA nor the military are serious about HUMINT — clandestine HUMINT is in the toilet and all forms of overt HUMINT are haphazard at best. The atmospherics, the feeling in the fingertips, the early warning of plans & intentions are all done faster, better, and cheaper with HUMINT instead of TECHINT.
There is an opening for a “lifeboat” that explores a bottom-up reinvention of intelligence characterized by austere alternative C4I that enables rapid secure (but not necessarily secret) information-sharing and sense-making across Whole of Government (inter-agency) and across multinational coalitions inclusive of private sector elements — the “eight tribes” that include LOCAL academia, LOCAL civil society labor unions and religions, LOCAL commerce, LOCAL government, LOCAL law enforcement, LOCAL media and bloggers, LOCAL gendarme and military, and LOCAL non-government and non-profit organizations (and of course national, regional, and global as well). This is where the recent emergence of the 1st Special Operations Command may yield an innovation opportunity.
Missing from our futures planning is a concept for achieving three things: an alternative C4I system that is open to all eight of the information tribes while providing security (not necessarily secrecy); an open source analytic workstation that can be given away free on a flash drive; and a virtual “world brain” in the cloud, geospatially grounded enabling near real time information-sharing and sense-making across all cultures, histories, languages, and socio-economic boundaries while protecting anonymity, privacy, rights, and security parameters established by the owners of each bit of information.
Ultimately intelligence with integrity is multinational and multiagency in nature. A web of sources becomes indistinguishable from a web of consumers and producers of intelligence. Of course there must be unilateral secret intelligence and counterintelligence but the greatest value of intelligence with integrity is in the application, and only multinational multiagency applications stand the test of time.
Very specifically, intelligence with integrity can resolve all of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) within a fraction of the time at a fraction of the price of the dysfunctional system we have now that is easily 50% waste and incapable of creating a prosperous world at peace [which, by the by, stops all the illegal immigrants from flooding into AU, EU, and US].
In my view, the military is ideally suited to the establishment of this global network with national eight tribe centers operated by the military — by with and through is ultimately about shared situational awareness, shared information, shared combined action decision-making. The US IC as structured and managed today is of very limited utility — on the order of 4% according to one celebrated war commander — to military and civilian success at all levels.
The Cost of Intelligence
80% of what we need to know can be found (we already know it), gotten (we know who knows) or bought (commercial acquisition) at a cost of less than 5% of what we spend on secret collection today. Building on the Global Coverage estimate of Keith Hall as elicited by Boyd Sutton, I have twice obtained OMB approval for an Open Source Agency at IOC $125M toward FOC $2B — today because I have radically increased its scope to include an Open Source Technologies Bureau in addition to an Open Source Information Bureau, I propose $5B FOC as the objective. Add to that $5B for aNational Counterintelligence Organization (NCO) able to do undetectable persistent human surveillance all over the world, $10B earmarked for all forms of HUMINT other than offensive and defensive counterintelligence, $20B for precision TECHINT (more drones and cyber than satellites) inclusive of real-time geospatially-based processing, and $20B for at least seven multinational multiagency decision-support centres and networks worldwide, and you get $60B as the target. The greatest cost we pay is the opportunity cost of failing to treat intelligence — along with education and research — as the foundation for peace and prosperity for everyone at home and abroad.
Comments Off on Reflections on Philosophy of Intelligence
Had God planned for a trillion years, he (or she, give me a break) could not have created a more opportune moment for the Libertarian Party, a moment that is going up in smoke as the Libertarian candidates for President and Vice President fail to seize the day. Below is my friend Lee Camp’s indictment — utter crushing — of the Johnson-Weld ticket as it appeared on CNN (note how Johnson describes Hillary as an exemplary public servant — he lost me right there).
It has to be said, Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka (a name that will instantly appeal to all the pissed-off white guys Donald Trump has brought back into the rigged process), are no better. Both tickets offer very important substance, and both tickets are pathetically unable to rise beyond endnote status — both are a sideshow to the main event, the most criminally insane run-off in the modern history of the United STATES of America…
I have been a registered member of the Libertarian Party since 2009, and a member in spirit since a young lady persuaded me to take their brilliant outreach test in 1996, I think it was, at Hackers on Planet Earth in the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City.
What is a Libertarian?
Put most simply, a Libertarian believes that individuals, families, and communities should decide most if not all of the issues that arise from day to day and over time, not the federal government.
Libertarians have not reached the point I have, after a study of the Constitution and our history, which is this: we are the United STATES of America, therefore the federal government should be an administrative service to the STATES united, not an imperial power. If I were elected president, I would appoint a Governor-General and begin the process of terminating the illegal mandate that allows the federal government to tax individuals and organizations and to borrow money. States should collect such revenue as they see fit from their citizens — I recommend a single Automated Payment Transaction (APT) Taxadministered and collected by the states — and states should fund the federal government by agreed upon appropriations from each state. In passing, I would cancel all Executive Orders and refer them to the Speaker of the House for legislative consideration. All federal regulations — including the newest forbidding the public from swimming with dolphins (I don’t make this crap up) — would be suspended. The Center for Disease Control and the Federal Drug Administration would be suspended and investigated toward probable criminal indictments against all their “leaders” while the Department of Homeland Security, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Federal Reserve would be closed, plain and simple, with “soft landing” transition plans for all their employees. The Departments of Education and Energy, among others, would be subject to a zero-based review and at least cut in half if not eliminated entirely, subject always to Article 1 of the Constitution — it’s time we totally recast the government, to include harmonization of Congressional committee jurisdictions with the organization of the executive branch and vice versa.
Note 1: 10th Amendment plays here. The STATES are not exercising their power under the Constitution. Nullification and if necessary secession are vital parts of the Constitutional relationship between the STATES and the federal service that has become an imperial power owned by banks.
Note 2: As I said in my appearance in the Hollywood documentary, American Drug War: Last White Hope, marijuana is the seam between a public that thinks for itself and a government that lies for the banks and corporations that thrive on fencing the commons and making private behavior illegal so they can profit — make no mistake, the drug industry is about liquidity for the banks that launder the money, the criminal gangs are merely de facto agents of the banks. Cannabis in all its forms including oil cuts tumors in half or more and addresses cancer in a manner the government and the corporations actively cover up. The criminal insanity of a government that cares more about profits for the few at the expense of the many must be ended. The immediate legalization of marijuana (and hemp, which has many substantial industrial uses) is non-negotiable.
The Libertarian Platform
I have to say up front that I believe the Libertarians are still evolving – this is a conversation in mid-stream, not a finished program. Below are the highlights from the2016 Libertarian Platform, with my comments.
Bottom Line: Governments serve the people, not the other way around. Governments should not, in principle, encroach on the rights of life, liberty, and property. The marketplace should decide everything.
COMMENT: The greatest flaw in the Libertarian platform as it exists to day is that it has been bought and paid for by the Koch Brothers, who epitomize the predatory capitalist ethic that treats the Earth, communities, and individuals as “spoils” to be looted with impunity. The other great flaw is that the Libertarian platform, which I support on the whole, does not see that in the absence of an educated citizenry armed with complete information including True Cost Economics information — the true cost, for example, of the Koch Brothers dumping murderous toxins into every river they touch — individuals become expendable dupes for the likes of the Koch Brothers. My version of Libertarianism demands that every individual have the expectation that no other individual will shit in the community water well without paying severe consequences — deportation, for example. I am huge on Truth & Reconciliation — everyone gets the truth, no one goes to jail — and I am huge on using informed citizen decision-making at the point of sale, not government regulation, to achieve sound economic growth for all. The below slide depicts my alternative to all government regulation,
Click on Image to Enlarge
Specifics of the Libertarian Platform
1.0 Personal Liberty. This includes self-ownership, expression and communication, privacy, personal relationships, abortion, parental rights, crime and justice, the death penalty, self-defense.
COMMENT: This is the strongest part of the Libertarian manifesto, and I buy into all of it. I am particularly interested in nullifying all executive regulations and everything the Clinton Co-Presidency did including the Crime Act that put more blacks into jail than there were slaves at the beginning of the Civil War (actually a War of Secession), NAFTA, and the re-regulation of Wall Street (which will be decimated by an end to fiat currency — no more creating money out of thin air). We need to close most of our prisons, make restitution to all those abused by the federal government in the past quarter century, and slam the federal government back into a very small box where funding is controlled by the STATES, not the banks. I am all in on the 1st and 2nd Amendments, to including the restoration of voting rights as well as the right to bear arms to all felons who have served their sentences and been restored to full status.
2.0 Economic Liberty. This includes property & contract, environment, energy & resources, government finance & spending, government employees, money and financial markets, marketplace freedom, labor markets, education, health care, and retirement & income security.
COMMENT: The Libertarian platform is the best possible starting point for a national conversation that will never be led by the two-party tyranny, both parties being firmly in the hands of Wall Street interests in turn beholden to the Rothschilds and the Khazarian mafia that treats all of us as commodities and many of us as “useless eaters” who should be exterminated with geoengineering, poisoning of the air and earth and water, sterilization via government-mandated vaccines known to be toxic, and so on. I particularly embrace the call for the end of federal taxation and the end of federal subsidies for all industries — not just Big Oil but Big Pharma and Big Agriculture. The federal government has become a front for legalized crime at scale — the vast majority of government employees are good people trapped in a bad system, but they are too meek and too compliant with political decisions (Pay to Play) that should be grounds for impeachment. I particularly believe that all banking should be local and that absentee landlords and land owners should be disenfranchised; I also believe that we need a national debt jubilee, and would call on all those with student, medical, housing, and other forms of debt to sign a debt renunciation pledge that would allow a new Administration to either sharply reduce that debt through negotiation, or announce a national debt jubilee overnight, with an automatic Presidential pardon for every debtor.
3.0 Securing Liberty. This includes national defense, internal security and individual rights, international affairs, free trade and migration, rights & determination, representative government, and self-determination.
COMMENT: The platform is a helpful starting point for a national conversation, but immature and lacking in specifics. It should for example call for the closure of all US bases overseas and an end for all taxpayer subsidies to foreign powers — not only dictators, but Israel, where we pay $30,000 a year in borrowed money for every man, woman, and child in Israel — the atrocities that we condone by Saudi Arabia against Yemen and its own women and by Israel against Palestine — along with the regime change operations led by the Clinton Foundation and John Brennan, a converted Muslim who is very probably an undeclared agent of influence for Saudi Arabia (and the man who approved the visa applications for all of the 9/11 patsies traveling on Saudi passports) should not be funded by nor tolerated by the US Government in our name and at our expense. The military should be home-based and STATE based, radically reduced in cost but not in manpower (50% of the military budget is waste at the same time that the military consumes 60% of the disposable federal budget and 16% of the total budget). Ron Paul has nailed it in his many speeches calling for a foreign policy of freedom focused on peace, commerce, and honest friendship. Wars are sponsored by bankers who fund and profit from both sides — everyone else loses. This illuminates my concern about an ignorant public including ignorant Libertarians — to fully evolve and mature the Libertarian platform, the best starting point going forward, we need a national conversation that includes a virtual Constitutional Convention along with the creation of an honest informed alternative to the Mainstream Media and the progressive as well as the conservative media, both of which are controlled by very wealthy individuals who do not want their farm animals thinking for themselves.
The two-party tyranny works for Wall Street and Wall Street works for the Khazarian mafia owned and operated by the Rothchilds. Hillary Clinton is controlled by Lynn Rothschild on behalf of Evelyn Rothschild, and Hillary Clinton is owned by everyone that ever donated millions to the Clinton Foundation, particularly the royal family of Saudi Arabia, despots (and in many cases pedophiles as well) that is destroying Syria and Yemen for the sake of two pipelines — Hillary Clinton has put the full force and budget as well as blood of the USA behind the Saudi dynasty because she has been paid to do so and has no shame at all. Donald Trump is no better — he is a fraud whose advisors are indistinguishable from those aiding Hillary Clinton, and there is credible analysis to the effect that he has sold out and is taking a dive in order to make the impossible possible: the election of Hillary Clinton.
What the Libertarian Party lacks is the combination of a kick-ass ticket that can storm the airwaves from 6 September 2016, and a commitment to an Electoral Reform Act of 2016 as the non-negotiable demand for peace in the land following what will otherwise be an entirely illegitimate election. The system is rigged — I said it first in a video to Occupy that went viral in 2011, just before I ran briefly as one of three accepted candidates for the Reform Party nomination for the presidency.
Donald Trump is part of the rigged system, he has been told for a year that he needs to champion a virtual Constitution Convention as well as the Electoral Reform Act of 2016, and for over a year he has with malice aforethought done everything possible to destroy the Grand Old Party (GOP) while doing everything possible to lose to a candidate that is best described as a criminal bitch, nothing more or less. The failure of the Obama Administration to indict Bill and Hillary Clinton for wire and solicitation fraud, and in Hillary Clinton’s case, for treason and quid pro quo influence peddling while Secretary of State (forget the personal meetings — the big dog here is that she sold out Libya, Syria, and Yemen to Saudi Arabia for tens of millions in donations, 90% of which have been mis-appropriated) is in my view grounds for impeaching the President, the Attorney General, and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They are complicit in the high crimes and misdemeanors of Hillary and Bill Clinton.
I registered to run but then chose not to seek the Libertarian nomination for the presidency because it became quickly obvious to me that the system was rigged in favor of Gary Johnson, and the Libertarian selection process was not amenable to thoughtful provocation. It is not too late for the Libertarian Party to make a difference. Speaker Paul Ryan in the House, and Senator Rand Paul in the Senate, should be approached and asked to introduce the Electoral Reform Act of 2016. This offers the following immediate benefits:
01 It frees all incumbents from dependency on campaign contributions going forward.
02 It opens the immediate prospect of ten or more Libertarians (and some Greens and Independents) being elected to the 20-30 seats being vacated in this cycle, i.e. without a defending incumbent — THAT is the key to Libertarian power going forward, NOT a placebo presidential ticket.
03 With Instant Run-Off, it opens the real possibility of a dynamic Libertarian ticket with a transpartisan Cabinet and a balanced budget declared in advance, actually winning (as a second choice to all those that vote for Trump or Clinton, and a first choice for everyone else).
04 It ends the electronic fraud means Hillary Clinton used to steal multiple primaries from Bernie Sanders and would otherwise use against Trump.
I like Gary Johnson, when he is not running on about his fitness program and climbing Mount Everest and other stuff having nothing to do with Liberty and the restoration of the Constitutional values we all cherish. I would certainly support Gary Johnson with my vote if — but only if — he began to represent Libertarian principles in a vocal and dynamic way, and if he made an Electoral Reform Act of 2016 the central value proposition from the Libertarian Party to the public, in alliance with the Tea Party and the sane honest members of the Republic and Democratic parties.
It is not the role of the President to be a “decider” and it is not the role of the president to pick a winner take all Libertarian Cabinet or to strive to force through Libertarian-oriented legislation. In the past presidents have sought to use their office to enrich themselves and their friends and to pursue ideological agendas that enrich the financial, military, industrial, and agricultural complexes, but that is an unethical and unsophisticated view of the role of a president in a democracy.
The true role of a President going forward is to assure the integrity of the electoral and governance system such that the Libertarians, among others, have full voice and are not repressed by a two-party tyranny or abused by false prophets including the Koch Brothers who are no different from George Soros or the Rothschild family and the Khazarian mafia. My direct immediate objective, regardless of who wins the White House, is to put ten Libertarian Members into Congress — that is the center of gravity.
The true role of a President is to assure full public access to all information in a manner that promotes transparency, truth, and trust. A nation’s best defense (and best prospects for prosperity) lie in an educated public. Thomas Jefferson put forward that proposition, as did James Madison and George Mason.
The Libertarian ethic is best introduced and sustained by dumping the two-party tyranny and their Wall Street masters on their ass; by slamming the federal government back into a very small box in which STATE rights are restored (including the reclaiming of all lands and property from the federal government which should not be allowed to interfere with land management or own physical land or buildings) and the federal government exists on a stipend allocated from the states. Only the states should be allowed to collect revenue from citizens and organizations, as they see fit, with the APT Tax being the recommended common solution.
Right now I do not plan to vote because without an Electoral Reform Act of 2016 the small party tickets are spoilers, nothing more. We have become an insane asylum with criminals in charge of the electoral process. That could change overnight — we have the power, if Speaker Ryan and Senator Paul will listen to us — to change the dynamic from 6 September to elect at least ten Libertarian members to Congress (who should pledge not to caucus with either of the two-party tyranny wings), and perhaps — a long shot but worth trying — a Libertarian president. Below is the landscape for a victory:
Click on Image to Enlarge
I recommend that Governor William Weld shift over to being the Governor-General candidate (a new position) and that the below “Order of Battle” be considered going forward.
Click on Image to Enlarge
I believe I could win with this proposition, if Speaker Ryan and Senator Paul agree to introduce the Act. If Gary Johnson cannot see the immediate need to better represent the Libertarian value proposition to the public, while leading a dynamic challenge to the two-party tyranny, one that condemns both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as they each richly merit condemnation, then he should step aside and give the party an opportunity to list someone else on the ballot in all 50 states — bear in mind that the Electoral Reform Act of 2016, if enacted in September, would demand new paper ballots for all federal elections (and pay for them), this affords the party an opportunity to change the name on each of those ballots, if Gary Johnson cannot rise to the occasion and a substitute must be identified at this late but not too late date.
I totally embrace the idea that Bill Weld should be Governor General, and that the Council of Governors should be co-equal to the US Congress in the President’s eye until such time as a Constitutional Convention can be held to ratify the 1st and 2nd amendments, overturn the 17th and 22nd amendments (Senators are supposed to represent the STATES, only the public should determine how many terms a President can serve), and examine everything else.
None of the candidates have a coherent national policy matrix in part because they don’t want one — their staffs are not designed to actually create coherent national policy that addresses all threats and needs in the context of a grand strategy on one side and a balanced budget on the other.
What we have now is platitudes and theater — no one, least of all the media and particularly singling out the progressive and conservative media, is holding the candidates accountable for being serious.
Below the fold are snap-shots of what an honest evidence-based policy conversation should consider, for each of the following:
Economic Issues: Budget & Economy, Government Reform, Social Security, Tax Reform, Technology & Infrastructure, Welfare & Poverty
Social Issues: Abortion, Corporations, Education, Families & Children, Health Care, Principles &Values.
Domestic Issues: Civil Rights, Crime, Drugs, Environment, Gun Control, Jobs
International Issues: Eneregy & Oil, Foreign Policy, Free Trade, Homeland Security, Immigration, War & Peace
(1)
Budget & EconomyProposed: Balance Budget, End Debt, Close Federal Reserve, Gold.
Key Terms: Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA); Budget deficit; Consumption taxes; Corporate income taxes; Corruption; Death tax; Debt; Defense spending; Discretionary spending; Duties; Entitlements; Federal Reserve; Federal revenue sources; Fiscal policy; Gold Standard; Ignorance; Income taxes; Individual income taxes; Interest; Monetary policy; Mortgage crisis; Non-discretionary spending; Off-budget; Other taxes; Oversight; Progressive tax; Regressive tax; Regulation; Sales taxes; Social insurance (FICA); Social Security Trust Fund; Supplemental spending; Usury; Wall Street greed
Government ReformProposed: Balanced budget, line item veto, office of strategy, two deputy vice presidents (one for national security, one for commonwealth), end winner take all in Cabinet and in Congress (proportional leadership assignments, no party line voting)
Key terms: Amendment X to the US Constitution; Balanced Budget Amendment; Block Grants; Campaign Finance; Reform; Devolution; Devolution to States; Election Reform; federal matching funds; Hard money; PAC money; Reinventing Government; Soft money; Term Limits (including judges); Unfunded Mandates
Social SecurityThis is the greatest single reason to keep federal government. Proposed: Restore and protect while increasing retirement age to 75, adding 3 month sabbaticals every six years, and incentivizing multi-generational families and neighborhoods including mobile assisted care and rapid response non-emergency assistance for the elderly.
Key Terms: Account Separately (de-politicize); Earnings Test (remove); IRAs; Lockbox; Medicare and Medicaid; Off-Budget; Privatization; Retirement Accounts; Social Security Investment; Social Security Trust Fund
Tax ReformProposed: end individual income taxes, tax financial transactions, have high-end consumer taxes; reduce estate tax; tax currency transactions heavily; end corporate fraud (different books for IRS and stockholders, income-export tax fraud).
Key Terms: Amendment XVI to the US Constitution; Capital Gains Tax; charitable deduction; Death Tax; estate tax; Faith-based organization; Flat Tax; Flat Tax & Sales Tax; Inheritance Tax; Marginal Tax Rates; Marriage Penalty; Married Filing Jointly; mortgage interest deduction; National Sales Tax; Tax Rates; Tax Surplus; Value-Added Tax; VAT
Technology & InfrastructureProposed: Internet neutrality, Open Spectrum, Free/Open Source Software, regulate Google, provide end-user control of their own content, anonymous banking; recapitalize all forms of infrastructure but wind down communities in flood plains and cities in desert, capitalize growth in The Empty Quarter.[3]
Key Terms: Bridges, Dams, & Tunnels (collapsing infrastructure); Computer and Internet Usage; Digital E-Government; Electrical grid (collapsing); E-rate; High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP); Human Genome Project; Intel vs. FTC; Internet access in classrooms; Internet access in schools; Internet Issues; Internet Sales Tax; iPatriot Act; Microsoft vs Java; Microsoft vs Netscape; Millennium Bug; Napster; Triana Satellite; V-Chip; Weather manipulation; Y2K Bug; warrantless wiretapping
Welfare & PovertyProposed: Stabilize dollar, limit interest rates, end individual taxation, strive for 100% union membership (60% in four years), learnfare & workfare, control borders and stop giving expert worker visas to foreigners taking high-tech jobs away from citizens.
AbortionProposed: Strongly support pro-life choices, but woman ultimately decides. Praise Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for his Stare Decisis judgment on Roe v. Wade. Life does begin at conception; mother’s rights end with start of second tri-mester.
Key Terms: Clinic Access; Cloning; health issue (pro-choice); Human Life Amendment; Human Life Bills; informed consent; Judicial Activism; moral issue (pro-life); Parental Consent; Partial-Birth Abortion; Right to Choose; Right to Life; rights of the mother; rights of the unborn; Roe v. Wade; RU-486; Stare Decisis; States’ Rights; Stem Cells; Strict Constructionism; viability’ of the fetus
CorporationsProposed: home rule, boycott, eat local, fair trade, end personality fraud
Key Terms: Export volumes; Farming Issues; Globalization; Government payments; Inflation; Labor Issues; Minimum wage; Union membership
EducationProposed: Redirect $20 billion a year from secret intelligence to free online & fully-funded Head Start, K-12, and college on a competitive basis. Apprenticeship & civics every year. No bi-lingual education—three months intensive English free for all immigrants, English language competency required for both access to education and to government employment at all levels.
Key Terms: Bilingual Education; Goals 2000; Phonics; School Prayer; School Vouchers; Smaller Class Size; Social Promotion; Straight A Act; Student Testing; Teacher Pay; Teacher Testing
Families & ChildrenProposed: Support families, design neighborhoods, one good job per family, with no taxation of family or on healthy food and beverages, get TV out of kid’s lives
Key Terms: After-school; Anti-male bias; Child Deductions; Child Support; Day care; Deadbeat Dads; Deductions; Family Leave; Fatherhood rights; Internet Smut; Pre-school; Social effects; Tax Credits; TV Ratings; V-Chip
Health Care Proposed: Tax unhealthy good and services, eliminate toxins, provide all necessary information on lifestyle, environment, natural cures; fund evidence-based medicine.
Key Terms: Active Euthanasia; Alternative Medicine; Asbestos; Chinese Medicine; Consumer Choice; Death with Dignity; Elective Surgery; Euthanasia; Evidence-Based Medicine; External Appeal; Indian Medicine; Generally accepted practices; Healing; Health insurance; Health reform; HMO; Involuntary Euthanasia; Legal Liability; Managed Care; Marijuana; Medical Necessity; Natural Cures; Passive Euthanasia; Patient’s Bill of Rights; Physical Assisted Suicide; Prevention; Public health; Right to Die; Safe Air; Safe Food; Safe Water; Scope of Coverage; State Regulation; Tobacco Settlement; Toxins in Products
Principles & Values Proposed: Restore Constitution, eliminate individual income taxes, transparent budgets and all legislation and budgets online one week in advance of voting; character through school, apprenticeships, and mandatory national service twice: after high-school and at mid-career (each time a shared boot camp, then three tracks: Armed, Peace, and America Corps).
Key Terms: Centralizing power; Centrist; Conservative; Conservative; Constitution’ Decentralizing power; Economic views; Fiscal frugality; Government intervention; Green; Leftist; Liberal; Libertarian; Local not federal; Natural Law; Political philosophy; Populist; Reform; Reforming existing institutions; Religious rights; Rightist; Social views; Socialist; Strength abroad
Domestic Issues
(3)
Civil RightsProposed: Quality education is the right; civil unions, churches decide marriage.
Key Terms: Affirmative Action; Amendment I to the US Constitution; Article 9 Clause 2 of the US Constitution; Bilingual education; Civil Union; Confederate Flag in Public Places; Disabilities Act (ADA) & Handicapped Access (Health Care); Disabled Rights; Domestic Violence; Driving While Black; Equal Pay for Equal Work; FISA; Flag-Burning Amendment; Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA); Funding for NEA; Gambling, Prostitution, Pornography; Glass Ceiling; Guantanamo: Habeas corpus; Hate Crimes; iPATRIOT ACT; Kidnapping for Rendition; Mental Illness Discrimination (Health Care); Minority Rights; PATRIOT Act; Racial Profiling; Redlining; Religious Rights; Rendition for Torture; Reverse Discrimination; Right to Privacy (see Technology); Same-sex marriage; School Prayer (see Education); Secret Renditions; Secret wiretapping: Ten Commandments in Public Places (see Principles & Values); Texas v. Johnson (flag burning); Torture; victimless crimes; Waterboarding; Women’s Rights
CrimeProposed: End death & three strikes; legalize marijuana & hemp, full employment.
Key Terms: 114; 119; Amendments V and VIII to the US Constitution; Broken Windows’ Laws; Capital Punishment; Community intelligence networks; Community Policing; Hate Crimes; Intelligence-led policing; National Guard role as community intelligence center watchstanders; Three Strikes’ Laws; Tort Reform
DrugsProposed: get CIA and DEA out of drug business; burn banks for laundering, invest in free education and full provision of clean water and clean energy in Afghanistan, Mexico, and the Andean countries where all the drugs are produced and are—for now—vital to those economies.
Key Terms: Alcoholism; Amendment XVIII and XXI to the US Constitution; Death penalty; Demand; Drug war; Effects; Legalization; Medical marijuana; Needle Exchanges; Prohibition; Self-harm; Supply; Treatment; War on drugs
EnvironmentProposed: Zero Waste, Natural Capitalism, Green to Gold, Biomimicry, expose true costs of all products and services via bar codes and online free data, mandate clean air and disease-free air in all buildings and public transportation including airlines and trains.
Key Terms: Acts of God or Man; Alternative Energy; Amendment V to the US Constitution; ANWR: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; BLM: The Bureau of Land Management; Brownfields; BTU Tax; Clean Air Act: (CAA); Clean Water Act: (CWA); Climate Change Treaty; coastal wetlands; Command-and-control; Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standard; Cost Control; Deregulation Crisis; Devolution; drop in Great Lakes water levels; drought in the Midwest; Effects on the US; eminent domain; Endangered Species; Endangered Species Act (ESA); Energy; Energy Conservation; Environmental degradation; extreme storms; Federal Lands; FWS: The Fish & Wildlife Service; Global Warming; Greenfields; Greenhouse Gas Treaty; Greenhouse gases; Kyoto Protocol; Land Trusts; NPS: The National Park Service; Pollution Control; Rio Treaty; States; Suburban Sprawl; Superfund; Takings; temperature rise; toxic waste sites; Urban Redevelopment; USFS: The US Forest Service; winter rain; Wise Use
Gun ControlProposed: Right to bear arms is non-negotiable less felons still on probation. Concealed permits not required—felons who have paid their debt to society need only carry a card certifying their restoration to full citizenship status—states may not abridge felon rights once court’s sentence has been completed. Achieve accountability with barrel printing and cartridge signatures—anyone can kill, be identified, and if wrong, held accountable.
Key Terms: Amendment II to the US Constitution; Background Checks; Brady Bill; Child-Safety Locks; concealed carry; gun lobby; Gun Ownership; Gun-Show Loophole; instant background checks; juvenile access to guns; licensing; Militia definition; National Rifle Association (NRA); open carry; registration; right of self-protection; Right to Bear Arms; Second Amendment rights; sportsmen’s rights; Trigger Locks; US v. Miller; waiting periods
JobsProposed: end absentee ownership of farms; 60% union membership; limit interest to 10%; make full employment the law and the outcome; raise minimum wage to achieve quality of life at last highest point. Limit CEOs to 100X wages of lowest worker they employ; mandate same books for IRS as for stockholders; impose severe penalties on short-term investments.
Energy & OilProposed: Tax externalized costs ($12 per gallon); two-way grid, do it all.
Key Terms: Acts of God or Man; Alternative Energy; Amendment V to the US Constitution; ANWR: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; BLM: The Bureau of Land Management; Brownfields; BTU Tax; Clean Air Act: (CAA); Clean Water Act: (CWA); Climate Change Treaty; coastal wetlands; Command-and-control; Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standard; Cost Control; Deregulation Crisis; Devolution; drop in Great Lakes water levels; drought in the Midwest; Effects on the US; eminent domain; Endangered Species; Endangered Species Act (ESA); Energy; Energy Conservation; Environmental degradation; extreme storms; Federal Lands; FWS: The Fish & Wildlife Service; Global Warming; Greenfields; Greenhouse Gas Treaty; Greenhouse gases; Kyoto Protocol; Land Trusts; NPS: The National Park Service; Pollution Control; Rio Treaty; States; Suburban Sprawl; Superfund; Takings; temperature rise; toxic waste sites; Urban Redevelopment; USFS: The US Forest Service; winter rain; Wise Use
Foreign PolicyProposed: Shift $200 billion from waging war to waging peace; multilateralism; provide all dictators with a five-year exit strategy; make human rights and fair trade the foundation for all commercial relations; stop exporting military weapons.
Key Terms: Afghanistan; Africa; ASEAN; Asian Economic Crisis; Asian Miracle’ countries; Asian Tigers; bioterrorism weapons; Brazil; Chechnya; Children’s Fund; China; Development Programme (UNDP); East Timor; Economic and Social Council; European Union; General Assembly; Human Rights Commission; India; Indonesia; International Civil Aviation Organization; International Monetary Fund; Iran; Iraq; Israel & Palestine; Japan; Kosovo; Lebanon; North Korea; peacekeeping operations; Refugees (UNHCR)[ Russia; Security Council; South American Union; Syria’s Golan Heights; The International Court of Justice; treaty-based organizations; UN dues; UN System; United Nations; Universal Postal Union; Venezuela; War on Terror; Wild Cards; World Bank; World Court; World Health Organization
Free TradeProposed: Fair trade not free trade. Reveal “true costs” of all goods and services. End slavery in America first, then in the rest of the world.
Key Terms: Americas; Anti-Dumping Laws; anti-globalization; Canada; Chile to join NAFTA; Countervailing Duties; Dumping; East Asia combined for about 15%; Europe combined for about 20%; Fast-Track; Free Trade; free trade zone; General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs; Globalization; human trafficking; Mexico & Japan; MFN; Most Favored Nation; NAFTA; North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994; open borders; override national law; protests; secrecy of WTO proceedings; Side Agreements; slavery; standards; Trade Deficits; trade in women & children; Uruguay; World Trade Organization
Homeland Security Proposed: Make Stephen Flynn the Secretary with mandate to close it down in four years; restore FEMA; redirect $20 billion from spies to water and food infrastructure and safety; fund Citizen Intelligence Networks ($30M per state per year).
Key Terms: Aegis defense system; Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM); Bio-chemical; Hollow Military; intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM); Loose Nukes; Mutually Assured; National Missile Defense (NMD)’; uclear Test Ban Treaty; Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty; Star Wars; Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START); Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI); submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM); Terrorists; Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)
ImmigrationProposed: increase Border Patrol to 30,000; state & local crack-down on visa violators; withdraw all forces from overseas; create four forces after next including $200 billion peace force; fully fund global free education online in 183 languages, work with Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela to give free cell phones to poor and educate them, world-wide, one cell call at a time. Peace comes from prosperity, and prosperity comes from education one question at a time—the 5 billion poor don’t have eighteen years to waste.
Key Terms: Bilingual Education; Border Patrol; California 40% of all illegals; Canada as transit zone for terrorists; clemency; Foreign born 8% in 1990; census; Hispanic; Illegal; Immigration; Immigration Act of 1990; Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS); Immigration Advocacy; Latin America 20% after Mexico; Legal; Mexico 55% of illegals; Official English status; promote diversity; racism; restricting immigration; wall across the border
War & PeaceProposed: Stay the course in Iraq, create fifty-year peacekeeping force with open checkbook for restoring Lebanon as Paris of Middle East and raising two generations of Palestinians and Israelis within mandated co-existence, Jerusalem as an international open city. Redirect $100 billion a year from war to peace, create multinational decision support center and Global Range of Gifts Table to orchestrate $1 trillion a year in individual giving.
Key Terms: Afghanistan; Balkan; Central Asia; Colombia; Cuba; Iran; Iraq; Israel; North Korea; Palestine; Persian Gulf; Somalia; War on Terrorism
FALSE. Thom Hartmann, a Democratic author, is on record with his book, The Crash of 2016, and recent commentary, to the effect that all of the good economic news is a fraud. The Administration is lying heavily, holding on by its fingernails, wrapping the economy in bailing wire, in a desperate attempt to achieve the appearance of “good enough” until Election Day. Then we collapse. The actual unemployment rate is 23% (40% among people of color, single moms, and older folk, and somewhere between 23% and 40% for new college graduates). The participation rate in the economy of adults is between 60% and 65%. Those are FACTS. It was the Clinton Co-Presidency that gave us the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and made it clear to all CEOs there were no consequences for exporting jobs to China as well. The destruction of generally white blue collar and middle management jobs was begun under the Clinton Co-Presidency. The Internet wiped out most generally black clerical jobs. No president has taken the concept of full employment seriously — high unemployment means low wages, billionaires love and pay for that situation to persist.
2. Donald Trump is so reckless and scary on economic issues that he scares even Republicans. He bizarrely suggested he would negotiate the sovereign debt of the United States.
FALSE. The brand of conservativism that Ms. Peters — a former lawyer — represents is what some of us call “crooked conservativism.” These are the conservatives that have sold their souls to the banks or to Israel — including of course many of the neo-cons. It is to Dick Cheney’s credit that he sees the value of supporting Donald Trump,* so some of this opposition may be early posturing. What is really scaring the US banks is that any questioning of debt orthodoxy is a stake in the heart of their long-standing crooked practices documented by William Greider, John Bogle, Matt Taibbi, and so many others. Banks are loan sharks with Congressional protection. They have systematically cheated the public for centuries, and it was the Clinton Co-Presidency that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act leading to the economic havoc we suffer now both at home and abroad. Debt jubilees have a deep Biblical and historical pedigree, and unjust debts such as are owed now at the national as well as state and local levels, are all easily subject to scrutiny and re-negotiation if not outright dismissal.
* I (and my contributing editors) have been tough on Dick Cheney, for 9/11, 935 lies on Iraq, and generally hijacking the White House. The whole idea of Truth & Reconciliation as I have recommended it to one and all is to put the past in the past and begin a new future together. If Dick Cheney is a party to restoring integrity to the U.S. Government, restoring state and individual rights, and slamming the federal government back into a very small box, then I for one will be first in line to say “all is forgiven, let us move forward together.”
3. The GOP is badly divided, if not on the verge of a split.
HALF-TRUE, HALF-FALSE. The GOP has been badly divided since Newt Gingrich destroyed Speaker Jim Wright and turned all Members into foot-soldiers for the party. The loss of integrity and the loss of faith with constituents is what gave rise to the Tea Party Movement. Before that and growing stronger today, you have the Constitution Party and the Libertarian Party, both indictments of the GOP’s loss of integrity across the board. Donald Trump has not split the party, he’s simply made it obvious that all of us who hold the GOP’s lack of integrity in disdain must now be heard. The GOP right now is in turmoil, like the naked drunk that sobers up on a stage and suddenly realizes millions of people are watching his every move….and seeing the smallest organ on the planet — there is no there, there, in the GOP. An Electoral Reform Act of 2016, particularly if it is applied only to states and districts where a seat is being vacated for this go-around in 2016, will leave the Republican majorities intact and bring in Constitution and Libertarian Members on the right, Green and Working Families Members on the left, and Independents in the long-lost middle. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) can introduce the Act tomorrow since we have established that neither Bernie Sanders nor any other Senator have the balls necessary to do the right thing by America. The “new” GOP must be a value-centered coalition that agrees on individual rights, state rights, restoration of the Constitution as the fundamental law of the land, and slamming the federal government back into a very small box — to include an end of direct federal taxation of individuals. Adopting the Automated Payment Transaction (APT) Tax, to be collected by the states that then provide quarterly stipends to the administrative federal service of common concern, is in my view the fastest path toward restoring America the Beautiful.
4. Trump’s crew is so tone-deaf to the split that it is likely to make it worse.
TRUE. This is partly explained by Donald Trump being so tone-deaf himself that he drove Roger Stone away, and partly by Donald Trump never expecting to get this far (he was “doing a Forbes”), settling for the B Team since the big money and big talent went with Jeb Bush and others who were favored in the early days. Now Trump is rushing to make up for a very shallow tone-deaf staff, and may hurt himself if he does not slow down and think more broadly. Below are the seven things I think Trump needs to do in the next 90 days to win big. There is absolutely no evidence that these ideas, channeled via various parties, have reached Trump, which in my view represents a continued indictment of his whole operation — they cannot ingest all the information that is flooding into them, and hence are missing key signals.
01 Virtual Constitutional Convention with Governor Abbott and Mark Levin in Texas. Focus on state rights, slamming the federal government back into a very small box.
02 Unemployment Workshop in NYC shaming all the banks and corporations, announcing a commitment to full employment and zero inflation – the real unemployment rate is 23%.
03 Electoral Reform Summitin California with Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, Jesse Ventura, Cynthia McKinney, many others, perhaps repeated in Ohio — “make the deal” with incumbents (only the 20-30 seats being vacated will be covered in year one – incumbents are protected for one term to give them an opportunity to reconnect to their integrity and their constituents).
05 Fantasy Cabinet Game. Sponsor a national conversation and online “name your cabinet” or fantasy cabinet game for real – Joan Blades and Living Room Conversations could be asked to help here. This should include a national conversation about a Vice Presidential choice that is not a member today of the Republican Party. I will say up front that I believe the solution is to be found in Cynthia McKinney as VP, John Kasich as Deputy VP and Director of OMB, and Mike Huckabee as Deputy VP and first Governor-General. Roles should be found for Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Jill Stein, and many others. My own notional cabinet from my 2012 candidacy is still online — we need a Cabinet appointed on the basis of merit, without regard to ideological affiliation, not a Cabinet representing the banks that continue to loot the treasury. Such a cabinet should be charged with creating a balanced budget using evidence-based decision-support (what intelligence is supposed to be but is not — in the USA today intelligence is a massive secret technical cesspool of waste).
06 Balanced Budget Game. Sponsor a national conversation and online “balance the budget” game for real – “make the deal” with Ben & Jerry, ask them to lead this national conversation. This is how we create an informed engaged public going toward Election Day.
07 Automated Payment Transaction Tax – a tiny fractional tax on all transactions including currency and stock transactions not taxed now — radically expands the tax base to include making Wall Street pay for the government it has broken, while allowing the elimination of all other taxes and the elimination of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
5. Trump lacks a money operation to match Hillary Clinton.
HALF-TRUE, HALF-FALSE. It would be foolish of Trump to invest a billion dollars of his own money in this campaign when he can so easily raise $1 billion or more within 90 days simply by taking over the web site I have offered him via multiple channels, http://bigbatusa.org. When I was running for president myself I hired Joe Trippi as a spot consultant and I have the deepest admiration for, and understanding of how to replicate, what Joe and Zephyr Teachout did for Howard Dean. 100 million pissed-off engaged citizens donating $10 each is $1B — overnight. Half that number donating $20 each is also $1B. Donald Trump does not lack for money, he lacks for staff with imagination and the ability to think and act BIG, NOW.
6. Trump cannot possibly learn in six months how not to appear racist or sexist.
FALSE. Trump is neither racist nor a sexist. Cynthia McKinney is on the record about this and so are many others. Trump has been attacked by George Soros and others, all of whom should be investigated for incitement of stupid people (some paid) to riot, and others (such as MoveOn.org) who should have their non-profit status revoked because of their blatant organizational engagement in political campaigning on behalf of specific candidates. Joan Blades, a woman of great integrity who founded MoveOn.org, has moved on to found Living Room Conversations, and I suspect she may well be appalled at how lacking MoveOn is now in both intelligence and integrity. I for one would love to see Trump create and fund a cadre of lawyers whose sole job is to bring charges against all of these individuals who do not know Donald Trump but who are so ready to defame him. I guarantee he has more money than they have time — this crap will dry up fast once black and Latino and women leaders emerge in support of Trump’s (still be to be defined) Empowerment Campaign. In comparison to Hillary Clinton, whom Lee Camp has famously said on RT, cannot be defined as a woman simply because she has a vagina, whom Cynthia McKinney has described on the Alex Jones Show as “woman of the hegemon,” a woman who has made $21 million in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs and others, generally at $225,000 a pop and often with multiple such speeches on the same day, I am pretty sure that Trump is as close as we are going to get to a potential leader who is Of, By, and For the 99% instead of the 1% — which is precisely why the false charges of racism and sexism are being bandied about. Trump’s big problem is the threat of being assassinated by small minds with big wallets who do not see that the is the last best hope for restoring integrity to a system before we go into a violent revolution. Below is my most popular chart at Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog — when combined with all that is done in our name and at the expense of future generations, I would humbly suggest that we have vast problems that need national unity with intelligence and integrity, not the piss-ant crap that we get from a despicably controlled media world lacking in all respects.
Pre-Conditions of Revolution Existing in the USA Today
7. When all you have to do is say, “I’m for adoption,” or, “No, the U.S. stands behind its obligations,” you are in really good shape.
FALSE. This is sophmoric crap. Hillary Clinton, Co-President with Bill Clinton (she actually kicked Al Gore out of the offices traditionally occupied by the Vice President and his staff in the Old Executive Office Building), is the most offensive, murderous, political con-artist and legalized crime specialist this country has produced in a generation. Right now she is riding on fumes. Once Dick Cheney helps Trump avoid assassination and settle the GOP children of privilege, and Trump puts together an A Team including a national ballot website and a Sunshine Government with a Coalition Cabinet, it is Game Over. This election is Trump’s to lose, and right now he is doing many things that could lose it, including premature discussion of the Vice Presidency with every elderly white male loser he has ever encountered.
8. The ads write themselves. Clinton is already using the accusations and claims made by Republicans to attack and ridicule Trump.
HALF-TRUE, HALF-FALSE. The shallowness and blatant demogoguery of the Republican primary is only matched by the shallowness and blatant pandering of Clinton and Sanders on the left. There has been no substance in the primary process. What Ms. Rubin and all other pundits fail to understand is that Donald Trump is the one candidate who could raise a billion dollars and roll out a Sunshine Cabinet and Balanced Budget within 30 days of deciding to do so. If he were to embrace each of the ideas outlined under #4 above, he would engage no less than 70% of the eligible voters — remember that Barack Obama was “elected” by 26% of the eligible voters in 2012, 100 million eligible voters chose not to vote. The new voters — many of them Latino — are the swing vote this year, but so also are the black voters now realizing that the Co-Clinton presidency put more of them into jail than any other combination of past presidents. There are more black people in jail today than there were slaves at the beginning of the Civil War. Thank you, Co-President Clinton.
9. Clinton knows how to reach out to Republicans.
HALF-TRUE, HALF-FALSE. Half-true — Republican Members love sluts and pages….as do Democratic members. Clinton is the chosen representative of the corrupt establishment — the corrupt establishment that is one bird with two wings to the exclusion of 60% if not more of all others — and she knows how to fully satisfy Goldman Sachs. What is changing today, and Speaker Paul Ryan as well as the Tea Party Members understand this — is that the public is now awake and no longer ready to tolerate “one bird, two wings, same crap.” Now is the time for elders like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich to emerge from the shadows and join with Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, Jesse Ventura and many others, to demand that the Speaker introduce the Electoral Reform Act of 2016 in partnership with Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) in the Senate. Put bluntly, if the Republicans want to survive the 2016 election at the state and local levels, they need to take the lead on restoring integrity to our electoral process. Clinton may be good at reaching out to Republicans with money and a vote for sale, Trump strikes me as vastly more credible with everyone else — which is to say, voters across all boundaries (if and only if he gets his A Game going). My letter to Tom Steyer is free online and offers added perspective on the positive process we might follow to restore integrity to both our electoral process and how we govern.
10. The media will finally get tough on Trump.
FALSE. With the exception of a few stellar investigative journalists, most of whom do not cover political theater, there is no media worthy of the name. What passes for “coverage” across the networks and in the major city newspapers is garbage with no redeeming value. It is not possible to “get tough” on Trump in part because he is unabashedly authentic and has no major peccadillos in his past other than his cozy relationship with the Cuomo family and a few affairs. That pales in comparison to how the Co-Clinton Presidency literally sold the US public and the US treasury to the highest bidders, while Hillary Clinton continued to at minimum have massive conflicts of interest with her private foreign policy managed via private email — she may easily be indictable on multiple fronts, and a case could be made that she committed treason. There is no such case to made against Trump. On the personal front, we have Bill Clinton making eleven trips on the Lolita Express of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, obviously not being satisfied by his wife of record, while Co-President Hillary Clinton continues to have a range of overnight guests whose names going back in time and up to today my retired Secret Service colleagues are aching to release to the public. As Ray McGovern has pointed out recently, all of Clinton’s emails (including her most intimate emails with individuals not her husband) are in the hands of the National Security Security Agency, Romanian hackers, the Russian government, and the Israelis. Hillary Clinton is COMPROMISED. Game over.
Comments Off on 10 reasons Hillary Clinton will beat Donald Trump
I have decided to focus on the possibilities of integrating True Cost Economics, Holistic Analytics, and Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE). This concept is human-centric, rooted in advanced digital information management including new concepts for embedded intelligence and big data at a world brain scale, and is a commitment toward enabling and empowering social enterprises within a national and international collaborative economy meant to serve the 99%. I present here my preliminary findings my hope that a hub might be created in London or New York City, with mirrors in China, India, and elsewhere as interest is generated and funding acquired. Among the products of this new endeavor would be an OSEE analytic toolkit and OSEE big data cloud able to do exascale near-real-time processing, the full integration of OSEE into the varied scientific and engineering disciplines being taught at all universities and – eventually – a School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance and a World Brain Institute as well as a new PhD/DBA degree in integral business and economic decision-support to open source everything processing and production. As the City of London and E.J. Rothschilds advance the concept of “inclusive capitalism,” I venture to offer a solution that addresses their concerns while making possible the creation of a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all, without waste.
AUTHOR
Robert Steele is the lead architect and writer for the OSEE initiative. Chief Executive Officer of the accredited US non-profit, Earth Intelligence Network, he has spent the past quarter-century championing first Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and now OSEE. MPA University of Oklahoma MA Lehigh University, Diploma Naval War College USA, AB Muhlenberg College.
I consider the Earth – and humanity at large – to be extraordinarily resilient. I am optimistic about the future in part because my proposals – if implemented by a multiplicity of nations and publics – will enable all of us to focus on creating a future that works for all, instead of going through the motions of forecasting a future in which all of the negatives persist without substantive challenge.
Here I will provide just two points of reference: the ten high-level threats to humanity as identified by the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004) and the twenty global problems identified by Jean-Francois Rischard, then Vice President for Europe of the World Bank (2003).
Ten High Level Threats
These are the ten high-level threats to humanity. They are in priority order. They are useful as a means of measuring the degree to which any particular government’s policies and programs are relevant to protecting their respective populations and promoting prosperity.
01 Poverty
02 Infectious Disease
03 Environmental Degradation
04 Inter-State Conflict
05 Civil War
06 Genocide07 Other Atrocities
08 Proliferation
09 Terrorism
10 Transnational Crime
Figure 1: Ten High-Level Threats to Humanity
These ten high-level threats are also a helpful starting point for any university, government, or other organizations seeking to be genuinely multidisciplinary in its strategic, operational, tactical, and technical processes and programs.
Here below are the twenty global challenges in three groups as devised by Jean-Francois Rischard.
Group 1: Sharing Our Planet· Global Warming
· Biodiversity & Ecosystem
· Fisheries Depletion
· Deforestation
· Water Deficits
· Maritime Safety & Pollution
Group 2: Sharing Our Humanity· Poverty
· Conflict Prevention
· Education for All
· Infectious Diseases
· Digital Divide
· Natural Disasters
Group 3: Sharing Our Rulebook
· Reinventing Taxation
· Biotechnology
· Global Financial Architecture
· Illegal Drugs
· Economic Competition
· Intelligence Property
· E-Commerce
· International Labor & Migration
Figure 2: Twenty Global Programs
There have been many other important contributions (Ahmed 2010, Brown 2009, Glenn 2014) but for my elementary purposes, these two very informed and widely-accepted summaries of the state of the world and our shared challenges will do. My intent is to devise an academic program useful to governments, banks, corporations, and other organizations – to nations and publics as a whole – for rapidly and affordably addressing these challenges intelligently and simultaneously.
The End of the Industrial Era
Charles Mann, in 1491 (2008) is among many who have documented the broad accomplishments of indigenous populations prior to incursions by Western powers. Others such as Philip Allott (2002) have documented the profound negative effects of varied forms of Western colonialism and militarism upon indigenous societies previously in harmony with nature. It is not our intent to focus on the many complaints about capitalism (Perkins 2004, Klein 2008, Taibbi 2011, inter alia). My focus is more on the fundamental divorce of Western forms of organization and information management from reality. While some conflate the industrial era with “the manufacture of evil” and point particularly to wage slavery and the separation of humanity from networks of kinship and trust (Tiger 2000), and others lament the enclosing of the commons and the criminalization of what used to be natural behavior by individuals (Linebaugh 2014), the real issue for me, here and now, is this: to what extent have the primary forms of Western organization met or failed to meet the needs of humanity as a whole?
I identify eight specific forms of organization in alphabetical order.
Academic Civil Society
Commerce Government
Law Enforcement Media
Military Non-Government
Figure 3: Eight Forms of Organization or Information Network
Here I offer simple snap-shots of generic failure.
Academic. The commercialization of the universities (Bok 2004) along with the perpetuation of a rote system of education intended to create docile factory workers (Gatto 2010) have resulted – in combination with the distortion of economies caused by the export of middle class jobs and the emphasis on financial profiteering (extracting value instead of creating value) – in growing numbers of poorly educated individuals unsuited for disappearing old jobs and unable to create new jobs for themselves. The academic emphasis has been on reductionism and the past.
Civil Society. Labor unions and religions are included in this domain, as well as citizen activist groups. What we see are labor unions that have failed to responsibly represent labor (Dine 2007); religions that have become fragmented and belligerent (Ashby 2006, Lerner 2007); and civil activists that are unable to come together in mass, all too easily splintered or bought off with hand-outs.
Commerce. Lee Iacocca has lamented the disappearance of real leaders, ethical leaders (2008). Despite the heroic efforts of small businesses that comprise the bulk of the commercial sector, the failure of the banks and major corporations that substitute lobbying and government subsidies for commercial intelligence and effectiveness have led to a situation in which financial manipulations have produced appreciations of seventeen times, versus hard asset appreciation of five times (Grieder 2003).
Government. Representative democracy has failed in large part because elected individuals have been self-serving and responsive to special interests rather than their own constituencies, while a usually standard two parties have leveraged their power to block all others from the ballot – in the US, disenfranchising close to half the public (Amato 2009).
Law Enforcement. The LIBOR scandal can be seen as a failure of law enforcement at the strategic level, along with the failure of the US Government to control its own banking community that was able to collapse the economies of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, among others — and of course including the US economy (Taibbi 2011, Taibbi 2014). Given that law enforcement as a concept only works when the majority of the population considers the government legitimate, in the context of an economic and social collapse, this is the most vulnerable of the eight networks.
Media. Many books document the failure of the traditional media, which has abandoned its role as a provider of independent information to the public, and instead become a combination of corporate profit centers (with five major owners across the US media) and co-conspirators with governments intent on lying to their publics. The ease with which the US Administration under Bush-Cheney was able to lead the world to war on the basis on 935 now-documented lies (Lewis 2014) – lies supported by the UK Government – suggests the complete failure of the “mainstream” corporate media.
Military. The US military, spending as much as the next 20 nations combined, is the poster child for expensive inefficacy, constantly losing wars and failing to combat terrorism precisely because it is a heavy-metal military and its budget leaves no money for diplomacy, commerce, or alternatives such as waging peace. The plans/reality mismatch (Spinney 1985) and the constancy of the US military-industrial complex (St. Clair 2005) continue to create a hollow military stretched too thin. As General Robert Scales, USA (Ret) has documented, the US infantry – 1% of the force – takes 80% of the causalities and receives
Non-Government. Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart (2008) have documented the failure of the non-government domain, and particularly international assistance. It is now known that out of any given amount – say Sterling 1 billion – less than 20% and often less than 10% and sometimes as little as 1% — actually gets to the village level in Afghanistan or anywhere else. When combined with the poor decision-making and poor spending by governments and corporations, the failure of this element is particularly catastrophic.
Taken together, the failure of all eight of these domains using the Industrial Era approach to information and to management – an approach that neglects the vast majority of the relevant information, much of it locally known and in languages we do not speak – offer us all an opportunity for change.
I believe that the charge to society of these eight failures together is on the order of 50-75% of gross domestic product (GDP).
This is to say, across each discipline from agriculture to energy to health to the military to water, 50% or more of our natural and human and financial resources are being wasted due to poor information and decision practices.
I further believe that advances in embedded intelligence and the adoption of open source everything engineering (OSEE), true cost economics, and holistic analytics, will allow us to devise an alternative academy, economy, governance, and society within which the five billion poorest can aspire to Western standards of living without Western waste. We can, with intelligence and integrity, create a world that works for all.
Emerging Economic Concepts and Practices
For the past half-century financial capitalism has reigned over the affairs of men and been a master of governments, universities, and all other forms of organization. This has led to a diminution of the influence of ideas and those who specialize in education, intelligence (decision-support), and research. This has also had the perhaps unintended effect of severely handicapping entrepreneurship and innovation by mis-directing emphasis toward paths chosen for their short-term financial exploitability, while withholding funds for holistic analytics and true cost economics, the only relevant foundation for achieving sustainable profit – profit that does not externalize costs to others while privatizing profit to an ever smaller segment of society but instead produces ever-increasing sustainable profit for the many.
Now, in 2014 and in the aftermath of a failure of integrity and process in global banking a number of new forms of economy, some in gestation for decades, are emerging to be considered by the lords of banking and the captains of commerce. Of enormous potential is the fact that the City of London and E.J. Rothschilds have themselves coined the term “Inclusive Capitalism” and sponsored a first conference on this topic (Conference 2014). They know they are in trouble. They do not know how to migrate away from their unsustainable position. I can show them the way.
There seem to be good prospects for a favorable hearing in relation to the substance of this proposal to create a banking, business, education, engineering, information management, governance, and scientific alternative that is explicitly intended to protect existing wealth among the 1% while creating infinite wealth among the 99% with an Open Source Everything approach to all disciplines.
Language remains an issue – there is a great deal of confusion, some overlap, and many bits of unclear thinking in relation to varied terms associated with emerging economic practices. Terms include circular (Lovins et al 2014), collaborative (Lowitt 2013, Schwartz 2014), ecological (Daly 2010) ethical (Arvidsson and Peitersen 2013) , free (Sirico 2012), gift (Eisenstein 2011), happiness (Anielski 2007, Frey 2010), inclusive (Scott 2013), mutuality (Roche 2014, Badger et al 2014), new (Kelly 1999), open source (Lerner and Tirole 2002, Benkler 2005, Steele 2012), purpose (Hurst 2014), peer-to-peer (Bauwens 2011), regenerative (Tillman, 1996), redemptive (Rinaldi 2014), resilient (Briguglio et al 2006), sharing (Botsman and Rogers 2010, Gansky 2012)), and solidarity (Davidson 2010). Other terms in vogue include cognitive surplus (Shirky 2011), conscious manufacturing (Kutz 2007), direct economic democracy (Boik 2014), social enterprise (Frankel and Bromberger 2013), and the triple-bottom line (Savitz 2013). This is a partial list, merely the most prominent among the descriptors.
I have chosen to focus on the Collaborative Economy as the best over-all term, with Social Enterprise as the organizational manifestation, and our four process elements, Open Source Everything, True Cost Economics, Holistic Analytics, and Embedded Intelligence, as the method. I specifically embrace Mutuality Economics as one of the best-developed foundations for the Collaborative Economy and single out the Mars Family in the USA and the varied contributions to the January 2014 issue of The Brewery (Badger et al) as a most helpful starting point for both researchers and practitioners.
Below I draw on this seminal work to conclude this section on the economic context for my innovative ideas that I hope to implement through as many universities as possible.
Dr. Arlo Brady, Managing Editor of the Corporate Practice at freuds and fellow at Judge Business School, Cambridge University, tells us:
We need to consider how we can breed more ‘hero businesses’ that have a more mutual relationship with their full range of stakeholders – businesses that recognize and act upon the implied social contract as much as any formal commercial arrangements and which accept environmental and civic issues as part of their basic model of trade. These are the businesses that would have thrived in ancient Greece, and will succeed today.
From Philip Dilley, Group Board Chairman of Arup, an employee-owned company, writing under the title of “Putting a premium on value creation over value extraction:”
If capitalism is to continue to be viewed as one of the greatest engines the world has ever seen for reducing poverty and driving innovation, it simply has to be designed to work for, and with, a broader range of social stakeholders and not just in its own self-interest.
From Dennis Nally, Chairman of PriceWaterhouseCoopers International (PWCI), writing under the title “Measuring the impact of a company on society: how to gain an all-round view,” addressing the trust deficit, comes the below graphic.
Figure 4: Evaluating All-Round Mutuality Between the Enterprise and All Others
The above has been brought together by PWCI personnel based in London under what they are calling Total Impact Measurement and Management (TIMM).
From Dr. Pamela Hartigan, Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Said Business School, University of Oxford:
The challenge of innovation in the 21st Century is therefore about reshaping societies to be not only tolerant, but actually welcoming of innovators – particularly of the disruptive kind.
When Mutuality Economics reaches its end-state, the Social Enterprise, the primary purpose of the firm is to do good, with profit as a secondary (but still essential) value (Roche 2014).
The term “social enterprise” is used within the UK and around the world to recognize businesses that are explicitly structured, organized, and led so as to apply the power of business to achieve social and environmental change. In this rendition of the term, financial profit is secondary, and when earned, is generally reinvested back into the enterprise and its social or environmental capacities.
Among the champions to be respected in this arena are Social Enterprise UK, which has published a number of useful guides for local authorities, local enterprise partnerships, and organizations desiring to embrace the Public Services Act.
The below graphic depicts my vision for creating a university-based process that impacts most constructively on the US and UK economies and eventually the local to global economy everywhere.[1]
Figure 5: The Open Source Everything Innovation Hub Concept & Sought-After Effects
True Cost Economics in Earnest
True cost economics, sometimes also called the “triple bottom line” (Savitz 2013), seeks to integrate not just the well-understood financial costs established by contract and convention, but also the less well defined social and ecological costs. Ecological economics (Daly 2010) is the foundation, still in gestation.
Below is a depiction of some, not all, of the true costs of a single cotton T-Shirt (Liszkiewicz, 2011).
Figure 6: Representative True Cost Information for a Single Product
When fully developed, the practice of true cost economics will be multidisciplinary in nature, as individual scientific and social scientific disciplines and sub-disciplines develop new means to calculate with precision the inputs such as energy and water that each of their objects of observation consume, and the outputs in the form of toxins and other negative externalities and diseconomies.
It is my hope to develop a standardized process as well as an open database in the open cloud for all potential contributors and stakeholders, such that over time, each discipline within each university – and others including non-profit and for-profit organizations as well as government laboratories – can begin documenting the actual true costs of every product, process, service, and policy.
I have in addition devised a concept for a cellular application that shows the true cost of any item, if available, in easy to understand green, yellow, and red circles, while also suggesting alternatives products with lower true costs, should that be of interest to the consumer. My total offering will be Open in every way, but with legal protection against its corruption or mis-use. I am acutely conscious of the degree to which open access has been tainted by predatory parties. While not addressed in this preliminary overview, I have already given substantial thought to assuring the integration of anonymity, identity, privacy, and rights into the emerging ecology of Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE). My intent is to create a rigorous new architecture that is robust in every aspect.
Below I share a depiction created by Maps of Science (Klavans and Boyack 2007), showing the dysfunctional fragmentation of the varied scientific disciplines and their sub-disciplines. If one adds to this the fragmentation inherent in the separation of those doing research in any of 33 core languages, our point should be irrefutable. Beyond this, we are simply not being serious about research –less than 1% of what is done is published (Stockstad, 2014).
Figure 7: Fragmented Web of Science
Add to this scientific fragmentation the separation of the humanities from the sciences, a matter of concern to E. O. Wilson (1999), and compound that with the isolation of quantum everything including new consciousness movements, and one has a rather poor representation of what humanity is capable of doing if it were to be coherent to the extent of which we are all capable if we work together.
The analytic situation is worse when one examines specific deficiencies and separations in the process of knowledge management. Here for this preliminary concept I will simply list eight deficiencies and four separations together (Steele 2014, Steele 2008).
Analytic Foundations – Eight Deficiencies
Four Information Separations
Source DiversitySource Integrity
Processing Big Data
Processing Desktop
Analyst Education & TrainingAnalyst Outreach
Analyst Access to Decision-Makers
Decision-Maker Integrity
Knowledge Management/Data MiningCollaborative Work Tools for Sharing
External Information Access Tools
Organizational Intelligence Capabilities
Figure 8: Analytic and Knowledge Management Deficiencies
My total thrust is firmly focused on creating a new gold standard for information sharing and sense-making. Our intent is to elevate individual and collective intelligence qua decision-support across all boundaries, connecting all minds to all relevant information within an open information architecture.
Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE)
Open Source is not, as many assume, simply a legal and technical concept referring primarily to software and increasingly also to hardware, denoting that the software or hardware is freely available and open to both redistribution and modification without substantive encumbrance.
Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) is a meme, a mind-set, and a philosophy of education, intelligence (decision-support), and research. The below diagram is representative.
Figure 9: Selected Elements of the Open Source Everything Ecology
In commercial terms, OSEE is a means of harvesting the Cognitive Surplus of a broadly distributed, self-motivated network. Of particular note is that OSEE is the only technical approach that is affordable, inter-operable across all boundaries, and scalable toward the 6 billion comprising humanity today.
OSEE is the ethical, intellectual, commercial, and legal underpinning for the emergent new economy that is collaborative, ethical, inclusive, and sharing in nature.
The essence of financial profit within this new economy lies in a mix of free education combined with licensing, services, and the monetization of transactions. OSEE can be licensed in multiple forms using Creative Commons designations, such that the code, to use a software example, is open to modification and redistribution, but cannot be used to collect financial remuneration without engaging the originator. HOWEVER, Creative Commons, while a viable legal construct,is not yet fully established in law or in technology to the extent that it actually protects social enterprises and their intellectual right (Lessig 2014). I have also concluded that the time has come to give every bit of open source code, as part of its documentation, a PayPal-like address and an Application Oriented Network (AON) rate sheet, such that the code can proliferate and eventually send money home, without having a call-back choke point.
OSEE is the underpinning for local to global information-sharing and sense-making, allowing for the efficient harvesting and harnessing of cultural, historical, and linguistically specific information across all boundaries, human, financial, and technical. The term of art for the human aspect is Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2). In combination with OSE, a predominantly technical term of art, the two define a virtual World Brain in which all minds eventually are connected to all information in all languages and domains, all the time and – this is really important – all humans have information tools with which to make sense of it all.
Of note: Computational Science and Computational Mathematics appear to be making possible order of magnitude advances in the near term. Add to this the emergence of credible thinking in relation to FemtoTech Atomic Scale Manufacturing (Garis 2014) and I can perceive both a crisis – are we moving fast enough in advancing our information management concepts and capabilities? – and an opportunity.
We are all fortunate to have had pioneers such as Richard Stallman (2010) laboring for a quarter century to reach this year, 2014, when it has been said that open source finally went mainstream. According to one report (Jurin 2014), albeit focused on the USA, in 2014:
$60 billion saved collectively by US businesses per year due to open source software
50% of all purchases of software will be open source in 5 years
2 million open source projects in 2014 – twice the number in 2012
80% increase in open source venture investment in US from 2011 ($307M) to 2012 ($553M)
$2 billion estimated open source software sales in 2013
1.47 million open source-related software jobs in US by 2018
41.6% of people plan to deploy an open source solution in 1-2 years
Across both government, especially local governments of which there are over 100,000 of them in the USA alone and business, the high cost of proprietary software – both licensing and maintenance – has become a top issue for information managers (Dixon 2014). As one summary puts it, between inherent quality, functionality and ease of deployment on the output side, and new people, new technologies and new economics on the input side, open source software and hybrid cloud offerings are exploding (Deans 2014).
Open Cloud – and specifically OpenStack – is said to have made major gains in 2014, with Oracle relenting and joining, and Hewlett Packard announcing a billion dollar investment to “make its entire portfolio a pure open source play” (Shalom 2014, Deans 2014). We must of course be very cautious about industry claims, since a great deal of what is alleged to be open source turns out to be merely open core – a portion, not the whole, is open source. The validation of offerings in terms of purity of open source, and the identification of gaps needed “true” open source alternatives, remain important. An ability to do this across all forms of information, mechanical, and other technologies could be a world-changer. This is precisely one of my objectives at the engineering level of detail –for the first time there will be a provider of validation and integration for all opens, rather than the existing scattering of opens isolated from one another. We anticipate accelerative value in this service from the university.
It merits strong comment, my objective being full employment for all graduates, that open source is a labor-intensive industry. Free code is a calling card – in the ideal it leads to perpetual employment.
Embedded Intelligence
Embedded Intelligence is characterized as the ability of a product, process or service to reflect on its own operational performance, usage load, or in relation to the end-user or environment in terms of satisfactory experience. This self-reflection is facilitated by information collected by sensors and processed locally or remotely to derive insight. These aspects must be considered from the design stage such as to enhance product lifetime and performance, increase quality of process or service delivery, or ensure customer satisfaction and market acceptance (Centre 2014).
The below graphic combines the Centre original concept focused on the manufacturing aspect, with the new concepts in this paper focused on the decision-support of design aspect.
Figure 10: Enhanced Approach to Embedded Intelligence
The prevailing approach to EI is that of IBM and its “Smart Cities” concept. This is an example of doing the wrong things righter (Ackoff 2004). Doing the right think would involve adding True Cost Economics as Supply Intelligence, Holistic Analytics as Demand Intelligence, and Open Source Everything as Engineering Intelligence. Taking this approach will, I believe, create a new gold standard for both the emergent discipline of embedded intelligence, and the emerging discipline of integral decision-support. As shown in Figure 5 on page 8, I are going far beyond devices merely talking to one another and feeding industrial era big data concepts. My focus is on a complete re-design of the academy, the economy, government, and society, to embed intelligence in what we build, how we build it, and how we use it.
The Way Ahead
It is helpful, as I begin to outline my preliminary thinking – with responses most earnestly solicited – to remind ourselves that we live in a system of systems world where feedback loops are loaded with useful information, and yet, as shown in Figure 7 on page 10, we are operating in a scattered, badly fragmented and largely incommunicative environment in which there are iron curtains between industries, wooden walls between organizations, and plastic barriers between individuals. Our challenge is to optimize what we can know, when we can know it, and what we can do with what we know, about the below world that we inhabit with some rather deep ignorance persistent on our part.
Figure 11: Context for Multidisciplinary Multilingual Whole Systems Analytics
While I am capable of championing multidisciplinary education, intelligence (decision-support), and research on our own and in partnership with other universities and external stakeholders in the US and UK, the multilingual and multicultural aspect – including proper discovery, documentation, and integration of historic indigenous best practices, for example in relation to water management – demands that my vision be considered and hopefully embraced by other universities abroad, particularly those in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) as well as potential wild cards such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela in South America; Nigeria and Turkey in the Near East and North Africa, and Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Viet-Nam in the Far East – and of course anyone anywhere.
While I do not address the geospatial factor in this preliminary discussion, it is ever-present in my thinking. I conceptualize an open variation of Google Earth that integrates Crisis Mappers and OpenStreetMap, with a sparse matrix and an open variation of Keyhole Markup Language (KML) such that all information in all languages and mediums can be plotted across time and space henceforth.
A New Knowledge Paradigm
I have concluded that education, intelligence (decision-support), and research are now badly trained, equipped, and organized. Changes must be made. My intent is to make it possible for every government element, every other organization, and individuals, to access information relevant to their mission or interest across all boundaries, while being able to aggregate and exploit that information rooted in geospatial and time-date visualization, aggregated by threat or policy domain, and further separable for consideration at each level of analysis: strategy, operational, tactical, technical.
This graphic (Steele 2014c) is the foundational concept for my new initiative.
Figure 12: Grand Strategic Design for Integral Education, Intelligence, & Research
This vision integrates all forms of knowledge with particular emphasis on the integration – for life – of education – teaching, intelligence (decision-support to government and business), and research. This restores the primacy of the human being, both as an individual and in community so as to do more with less – ephemeralism – while re-establishing the human as master of comprehensivity and synergetics (Fuller 1982a 1982b 2008). The implementing bodies should fully integrate true cost economics across all disciplines, industries, products, services, and behaviors; a Smart Nation in which all eight information communities are transparent to one another and fully engaged in sharing information and sense-making; and a global creative commons (or World Brain) that enables all minds to access all information in all languages all the time. The four core values are clarity, diversity, integrity, and sustainability, each manifested as shown in the outer ring above.
I believe that education is on the verge of being transformed – Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) have been a wrong turn with their 4% completion rates (McKendrick 2013). I offer an alternative.
Intellectually and morally this innovation reinstates the university as the center – the hub – for society, commerce, and governance, assuring that a majority of the individuals in any given community are afforded the opportunity to continue learning – both free and for fee – over the course of their lifetime.
Put in a more mercenary fashion, and adopting the approach of some medical and scientific career paths, traditional educational degrees will have expiration dates and require annual, repetitive renewal through refresher training and structured engagement with new knowledge relevant to the individual, their employer, and the community at large.
An Open Source Everything Engineering initiative is a means of providing affordable, inter-operable, scalable education for life while striving to double the revenue earning potential of the University as a whole.
Here are four broad implementation ideas.
01 Education & Skill Training for life “one cell call at a time.”This is a mix of free daily prompts to the hand-held device with elementary education or new knowledge, together with clear answers to any question anytime from a mix of volunteers and sponsored call center personnel, as well as on-demand short videos for any skill element in any trade or profession…if none exists, it will be created as needed.
02 Citizen & Executive Decision Support (Commercial Intelligence) “on demand.”Commercial intelligence (CI) or decision-support (DS) require mastery of multi-disciplinary sources and methods, as well as mastery of constantly changing information technologies. For the majority of businesses in any economy, it is neither intellectually nor technically feasible to establish “in-house” capacity. This is a major opportunity for increasing ethical revenue for the university.
03 Hybrid Intelligence. There is an immediate market, local to global, for decision-support to hybrid governance of agriculture, education, energy, health, and water, to name just a few policy areas where the gap between those with power and those with knowledge is now catastrophic. A London or New York City-based School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance could develop new educational constructs, educate cadres of customers, and serve as a consulting enterprise as well.
04 Multidisciplinary Research Over Time and Space. The Center approach is not working. To achieve true multidisciplinary research one must be able to identify all credible voices – both published and unpublished – in all languages, far back in time as well as the most recent. An Open Source Hub that includes an Open Cloud as well as an Open Analytics suite of tools for local to global information-sharing and sense-making makes its sponsor the incontestable center of global knowledge.
05 Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) Platform for Universities, Small Businesses, and Others. Substantial revenue and innovation potential are to be found in the creation of a platform and process for education, intelligence, and research that could be leased to other universities while creating the first truly national – and then international – web of science and social science, humanities, philosophy, ethics, linking all of this to real world actors. My intent is to create a globally scalable open source information technology platform, and a structure for harmonizing multidisciplinary research and data while enabling real-time science and near-real-time exascale computational science and engineering.
Open Source Analytic Toolkit
Consistent with my view that OSEE demands an “all in” approach, one of my first priorities will be to create a completely open source laptop – all open source hardware (Waid 2014), all open source software – with one huge advantage: the world’s first all-source analytic desktop workstation with eighteen long-known but still neglected functionalities in one kit. The below graphic depicts the requirements defined by the Directorate of Intelligence of the Central Intelligence Agency as early as 1986, but still not available today in proprietary software, much less open source software (Webb 1989).
Figure 13: Proposed Integrated Open Source Analytic Workstation Elements
I must stress that the open source analytic workstation is merely a starting point for a much greater open source and multidisciplinary approach to both the treatment of information in all forms and from all sources, and with regard to design, engineering, and sustainable maintenance across all disciplines.
This means that the open source mind-set would be applied from raw data collection to final engineering production of resilience-enhancing innovations. When combined with varied other opens, but most especially Open Cloud, Open Data, and Open Spectrum, startling possibilities appear for affordable, interoperable, and rapidly scalable local to global information-sharing and sense-making.
My intent – working in collaboration with innovators in India and elsewhere striving to create very low-cost laptops as well as free cell phones (OpenBTS[2]) and Open Spectrum or free Wi-Fi – is to enable both on-demand education, the harnessing of distributed intelligence, and the eradication of waste.
Big Data Obstacles and Opportunities
We must begin with the fact that less than 1% of all big data is actually analyzed (Meeker 2014).
Let us add to that the reality that most legacy databases were created in by-gone eras, are non-standard, tend to be heavy, and cannot be ported electronically (the pipes are in the 10MB to 100MB range while the data is in the TB to PB range), and also cannot be accessed for simultaneous processing at most data centers because they lack the excess processing capacity (Arnold et al 2014, Hruska 2013).
Add to this the reality that relational databases were never designed for an era of big data, and the carriers have all been lazy about investing in dark fiber (Newby 2014) and you have digital grid-lock.
21st Century multidisciplinary big data requires a soup to nuts design make-over.
Below is a single graphic (Hruska 2013) illuminating the tsunami of change coming to communications and computing — this is nothing less than an opportunity for an Open Source Hub able to mobilize the full human, financial, and technical resources of a great university and everyone else that it can engage.
Figure 14: Computing Paradigm Shift Demanding Open Source Response
I believe the Open Source Innovation Hub can sweep past Industrial era obstacles provided we go “all in” across all the opens, and are able to engage economic, government, and social partners in this quest.
Here again I must stress the human factor – in contrast to computers costing trillions to date, the human brain has petaflop and higher speeds, is less than a liter in size, and requires only ten watts of power (Bamford 2002). My innovation hub concept is centered on empowering billions of human brains with OSEE information technology and leveraging OSEE manufacturing tools and processes.
Waste – the Near Frontier
Waste is an educational opportunity and an information management challenge. Waste addressed in a timely and thoughtful manner – this is to say, a multidisciplinary manner with collaboration across all institutional boundaries – can yield savings on the order of 40-50% (Gray 1999, Rhodan 2014, Wilson 2003).
Agriculture. In 2012 there was a spate of attention to the loss of 40-50% of food from its production to its processing to its distribution to wholesale and retail vendors, to the home, and thence into the trash (Gunders 2012, Arumugam 2012). This waste is apart from that associated with water and fuel waste associated with mega-agriculture and inefficient mega-processing, storage, and transport systems, and also excludes the true costs to society of genetically modified foods that range from suicidal to pesticide resistant to being the cause of sterility in test animals by the third generation.
Energy. While it has been known for some time that close to 50% of the energy generated in a centralized and fossil fuel-based system is “spilled” in the process of migrating down to the end-user at the socket level, the cost of renewable energy has not been sufficiently attractive to warrant national-level attention sufficient to overcome the lobbying of the legacy industry. In 2013 based on 2012 data the headline was “US Wastes 61-86% Of Its Energy” (Fischer 2013). As with agriculture, this is strictly waste as defined by the traditional analysis model without regard to externalized costs imposed on society, such as earthquakes and contaminated aquifers from fracking.
Health. In 2008 PriceWaterhouseCoopers conducted an original survey whose findings remain relevant to any multidisciplinary endeavor seeking to address behavioral, clinical, and operational waste in the health industry. Their research concluded that US$1.2 trillion out of US$2.2 trillion – 54% – of every health dollar was waste (Galper et al 2008). Their methodology is a helpful model for rapidly evaluating waste in other policy domains.
Military. The US military is the gold standard for waste in all possible forms (Paltrow 2013). At the strategic level it spends more than then next 8 countries combined (SIPRI 2014), and is used so badly as to inspire rage rather than resolve disputes, at the same time that its waste deprives diplomatic and commercial and informational capabilities of proper funding. In acquisition it is now known to not be able to build effective ships or aircraft, and to have wasted up to 70% of all dollars spent in Afghanistan (Chiaramonte 2014). When one adds elective wars based on 935 now-documented lies (Lewis 2014) – wars that suck the UK and others in – the cost of a military as now equipped and utilized appears catastrophic.
Water. The water cycle cannot be owned, but it can be destroyed. It is the ultimate manifestation of why we must, as a human species, achieve conscious evolution and get a grip on the true cost of our wanton ways with water. We must understand that only 1% of the water on earth is potable; that corporations are consuming 70% of it led by Nestle and Coca-Cola; and that once an aquifer is depleted and fills with salt water, it can never be restored (Steele 2011).
Corruption is waste – as we make all processes transparent, we will begin to eradicate corruption.
Human-Centric Values-Based Society
Although I place great emphasis within this innovation endeavor on information technology as well as the science and engineering associated with applications engineering, manufacturing solutions, and system services, I find it helpful, as the Industrial Era collapses from a lack of ethics and respect for humanity, to emphasize the human factor, human scale, and human values.
It is in this context that I find the Mars Family emphasis on all of the human stakeholders itemized below, a persistent foundation for sustainable enterprise (Mars 1947, Badger 2014).
ConsumersDistributors
CompetitorsSuppliers
Governmental BodiesEmployees & Shareholders
Figure 15: Human Stakeholders in the Sustainable Enterprise
I wish to make possible a holistic mind-shift across the academy, economy, government, and society. Below, based on work by Monica Anderson (2010), is a unifying depiction of where I hope to help our community – local to global – can advance, rooted in OSEE, True Cost Economics, and Holistic Analytics.
Figure 16: Human-Centric Holistic Mind-Shift
Science is – like any artifact – as good as or as bad as the human intentions and human hands that wield the power that science gives. Science is also stunted in the absence of the humanities (Saul 1993, Wilson 1999), of philosophy (Durant 2008), and religion (Kung 2008, Molben 2011). I strive to connect all minds to all information in all forms, confident that the human factor will surprise us time and again.
The Collaborative Economy & The Social Enterprise
The Collaborative Economy
The collaborative economy is defined by Jeremiah Owyang (2013) as the convergence of three ideas: the sharing economy, the maker movement, and the “co-innovation” movement. In relation to a research university focused on community service and enterprise outreach, this translates into an opportunity to fully integrate design, information management, engineering, and each of the disciplines in turn.
Design translates into accelerated production, performance, and adoption. Information management can change the marketplace by changing public understanding of the true cost of specific products, services, policies, or behaviors. Engineering can dramatically reduce cost by rejecting the last fifty years in which the Americans have substituted “cost plus government specification” engineering for the more brilliant engineering that optimizes design to dramatically reduce total costs across an entire life cycle and is repeatable across different mission areas. The simplified designs and shared components characteristic of the Global Village Construction Set are a real-world achievement worthy of emulation across many disciplines. Central concepts in gestation include these four below.
The Social Enterprise
A helpful definition of Social Enterprise is offered by the Centre for Social Enterprise of Canada:
Social enterprises are revenue-generating businesses with a twist. Whether operated by a non-profit organization or by a for-profit company, a social enterprise has two goals: to achieve social, cultural, community economic or environmental outcomes; and, to earn revenue. On the surface, many social enterprises look, feel, and even operate like traditional businesses. But looking more deeply, one discovers the defining characteristics of the social enterprise: mission is at the centre of business, with income generation playing an important supporting role.
The signal flaw in both of the above concepts is their neglect of the three innovations that I propose to bring together in order to accelerate the collaborative economy and the social enterprise.
However good the intentions might be, a lack of intelligence with integrity (Steele 2010) is still a fatal debility. Changing the objective of the enterprise (from pure profit to social good) does not change the underlying information and manufacturing processes in any substantive manner.
As Figure 5 on page 8 shows, I believe that in combination, True Cost Economics, Holistic Analytics, and OSEE will help eradicate waste while radically lowering the cost of living (buy less, share more), the cost of production (open green, open science, open tools), and the cost of consumption (billions more will live well at a fraction of the prior cost).
One might say that I wish to enable intelligent social enterprise and fully-informed collaborative economics. This could be the advance that makes possible a metamorphosis of our academy, economy, government, and society away from war and profit for the few, toward peace and prosperity for the many.
Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance
The question must be asked: what does it mean to be a smart nation? I offer a preliminary answer rooted in my view that collective information sharing and sense-making firmly grounded in past history and deeply respectful of our ability to both harm and help the future, is the starting point. This is in fact the original approach of our indigenous forebearers and it diverges sharply from our current practice of fragemented, hierarchical decision-making by the few, often without accountability due to secrecy. I find that secrecy prevades all eight of the information networks, not only elements of banking, commerce, and governance (Long 2008, Marrs 2001, Moran 2013, Wilkinson 2009, Young 2012).
Figure 17: Industrial versus Indigenous (Restored) Decision Processes
More broadly, I find that there are numerous information pathologies that prevent – hinder – the establishment of public understanding and consensus on vital matters in the public interest. A few titles merit mention, in alphabetical order: Fog Facts (Beinhart 2006), Forbidden Knowledge (Shattuck 1997), Lost History (Parry 1999), Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky and Herman 2002),Missing Information (McKibben 2006), Propaganda (Ellul 1973), Weapons of Mass Deception (Rampton and Stauber 2003), and Weapons of Mass Instruction(Gatto 2010).
Within individual disciplines, notably those associated with agriculture, energy, and health, there are further pathologies associated with a mix of corruption, ignorance, and public inattention. Within individual communities, from local to provincial, from national to regional, there are further biases, distortions, absences of understanding, and even malicious underminings of the public interest.
It is not for me – or any outsiders – to directly address the persistent information pathologies that hold back disciplines and communities. What I seek to do is create an architecture for information-sharing and sense-making that is affordable, interoperable, and scalable. OSEE, True Cost Economics, Holistic Analytics, and Embedded Intelligence are the means by which we empower citizens and communities in every clime and place.
Creating the World Brain
I envision – for discussion and in a preliminary manner seeking commentary – a new school with four integrated information management elements, and a multiplicity of open source endeavors.
The School for Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance would bring together cadres from all eight of the information networks into annual classes at three levels: junior, mid-career, and senior. Bringing human beings together, face to face, is the primordial role of this element, which should eventually be replicated within every university that wishes to be an effective catalyst for 21st Century peace and prosperity, and thus internationalize the concepts and practices. Within the School, a Global (Serious Game) – the preliminary work has been done (Gabel 2006, Gabel 2014) would put big open data and the open cloud in the service of the public in an interactive issue-oriented manner, augmented by a university-wide Provost Center for Comprehensive Architecture, a prototypical Center for Public Intelligence, and a World Brain Institute to manage a global network of human and data resources.
Figure 18: Elements of the School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance
School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance. This is envisioned as a new residential school at the main campus of the participating university, with an extension program for non-resident students as well as a very robust program of faculty and student exchange, joint investigations, shared online databases, and other forms of outreach to universities, governments, corporations and non-governmental organizations around the world. While proposed as contingent on earmarked funding, the School could nevertheless be started as a virtual entity from existing human, physical, and financial resources. A new building and green village complex are envisioned with twelve wings – one each for each of the eight information networks or tribes[3] as well as the four Centers shown above.
My intent is to create a model that can be replicated – and adapted – to any local circumstance.
1) the Provost Centre for Comprehensive Architecture where all of the schools and departments might form an intellectual, data-sharing, and methods council – the new high table of academia.
2) the Global (Serious) Game as the interactive manifestation of the Open Source Everything Innovation Hub applied to real world challenges using real world information.
3) the World Brain Institute as the local to global proponent for extending the platform to every organization world-wide, while empowering individuals via the four online domains.
a) World-Brain.Net strives to register as many as wish to in a manner that both validates their identities when such validation is essential to the process and they opt-in; while also providing them with reliable anonymity & privacy, as well as means of reserving rights related to any knowledge or data they share. This is not a revenue producer, but this creates a first to market and barrier to entry for all others, capturing billions of human minds that can be monetized through the other three online networks.
b) World-Brain.Edu strives to be the platform for persistent pervasive free online education for life, while also serving as a foundation for any individuals and organizations who wish to organize localized face to face and both physical and online human to human educational options. This will take testing and tutoring as well as team learning to entirely new levels of excellence and effectiveness.
c) World-Brain.Org is a revenue-producer and makes LUiL and the larger University the hub for M4IS2 world-wide at all levels of practice from local to global. From knowledge gap identification to research funding and new forms of co-investment (including the harnessing of cognitive surplus and crowd-sourcing) to new forms of quality control that eradicate plagiarism and optimize Creative Commons credit and compensation, this aspect seeks to double or triple the return on investment of the existing research base while cleansing it of waste from redundancy and corruption related to plagiarism and poor sources and methods.
d) World-Brain.Com is a revenue producer implementing the Herring Triangle of shared monitoring, shared help desk, tailored decision-support, tailored strategic forecasting (Herring 2004) with its local to global online structured and validate information commons (displacing the erratic and shallow archipelago of unreliable and biased sources today), its local to global distributed network of help desks (reference librarians without borders augmented by information brokers, private investigators, investigative journalist, citizen activists, and so many others), and of course as a central registry for commercial intelligence with each source having a validated record of past performance.
4) the Center for Public Intelligence as the model that can be replicated at any level anywhere by anyone using free open source software and hardware that in turn enables localized free open cloud to open spectrum public agency. The value of the whole is found in its clarity, diversity, integrity – and the sustainability it enables (Steele 2010).
As Figure 18 on page 23 illustrates, two of the four World Brain elements generate revenue – I anticipate substantial revenue, more than sufficient to amply fund the implementation of these ideas.
A New Discipline – the PhD/DBA in Embedded Open Source Intelligence
If implemented as envisioned, whatever refinements may emerge, this proposal will allow for the award of the world’s first PhD/DBA in holistic analytics, true cost economics, and OSEE. The PhD would be those seeking to devote their life to research in a university setting; the DBA would be for those seeking to take as much from the academic experience as possible, and then apply it in an entrepreneurial form in any of the eight networks that comprise the totality of the OSEE/M4IS2 local to global network: academia as an administrator, civil society as an activist leader, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit.
Organizations are all well and good, but in the end a great university must offer substance in a process that yields a tangible outcome – graduates in demand because of what they know and how they use what they know. Central to the design of a PhD/DBA to be offered by the School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance is the concept of eight information networks – each of the eight networks must provide members of the oversight board as well as varied mentoring networks; there must be practitioner involvement in the design and teaching of the course and the testing of the students; and finally, the student must exit the program not only being in great demand within their chosen network, but so versatile and skilled at leveraging the other seven networks they are destined for rapid advancement at all levels from local to global.
Course Intent
There is a need for a multidisciplinary mind-set, process, and constellation of best practices drawn from across all the disciplines, on a sound business footing. There is a need for a PhD/DBA that is neither about managing a business nor about economics, but rather about the totality of knowledge as it applies to creating wealth and managing resources on the basis of ethical open sources and methods. This is a meta-degree, a meta-process, creating a tangible web of knowledge across all boundaries.
In my view, the time has come for a normative discipline of Public Intelligence that is the proponent for both Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (the human solution) and the adoption of OSEE (the technical solution). International Relations, Public Administration (dramatically advanced into a new sub-discipline of Public Hybrid Governance), and a variety of other primary university disciplines would converge in this School. Neither parastatals nor narrow public-private partnerships encompass the larger human-centric data-driven vision that this project seeks to actualize.
This PhD/DBA degree proposal is tentatively bracketed on the one hand by technopolitics or digital activism, striving to study, design, test, and then promulgate a theory and practice of grassroots multi-stakeholder decision-support and decision-making (two completely different processes) – and by Smart Nations, Smart Cities, Smart Enterprises on the other – helping achieve ephemeralism (doing more with less) while also dramatically enhancing the prospects of creating prosperity and peace for all. Three “what if” questions are proposed for consideration by the Open Source Everything Steering Group (a university-wide body assuring that all schools and departments are part of the program).
WHAT IF OSEE/M4IS2 were to make the evolving craft of intelligence (decision-support) its central focus, such that a new norm is established in which politics is evaluated in relation to its ability to engage in deep multi-cultural history and holistic analytics that are public in nature and inclusive of all eight tribes of public hybrid governance (academic, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, non-government/non-profit)?
WHAT IF OSEE/M4IS2 enhanced its scientific credentials by embracing Whole Systems True Cost Economics as a foundational multi-disciplinary science with data indexed geospatially and in time? This would create a more grounded landscape of financial, social, and ecological opportunity and threat — a basis for being a normative discipline.
WHAT IF OSEE/M4IS2 recognized that in the Age of Information no discipline can be credible without the ability to collect, process, analyze, and share information affordably, inter-operably, and universally, which is to say, in an Open Source Everything fashion? This restores agency to the public – we put the public back into politics, but this time we connect all minds with all information in all languages.
The value proposition for the University and the community is that in today’s world, if the both the public and individual enterprises across each of the eight information networks can be provided with free information tools and access to all relevant information, the academy, the economy, government, and society, all change for the better.
At a practical individual PhD/DBA student level, this is a three-part challenge that many students aided by staff, will conquer:
a) create an “application” for decision-support that anyone can use;
b) create a model for assuring that true cost economic metrics are considered within the decision-support application; and
c) leverage existing open source information technology and encourage development of needed new open source information technology applications to empower citizens and enterprises of every size with tools for thinking, communicating, and mobilizing effectively not just on one issue at a time, but on all issues all of the time.
Course Design
Track 1: Holistic Analytics. Every discipline has its means of teaching sources and methods, how to think, how to investigate hypotheses, how to validate and present findings. Track 1 would devise an integrated multi-disciplinary course of instruction drawing on the best that various disciplines have to offer, in order to produce a PhD/DBA level leader in their chosen discipline who is fully familiar with alternative investigative schema across multiple disciplines, and able to credibly organize, oversee, evaluate, and exploit very large scale inquiries and projects that depend on evidence-based decision-support across the most complex combinations of challenges and circumstances.
Among the many skills that I wish to make standards in this new program are:
a) Citation Analytics. A new standard for literature reviews must be established, one that not only finds and evaluates best in class contributors in all languages and disciplines, but learns to go beyond the published literature to identify best in class practitioners at the field and practitioner level.
b) Time & Space Analytics. There is a growing body of thought that suggests we have been too dismissive of indigenous practices and wisdom prior to 1491, and still today in many areas where tribal practices and communal ownership are still flourishing. At the same time, geospatial analytics is in its infancy, but with some very promising advances being made both in the laboratory and in the field, the latter with open source humanitarian technologies and crowd-sourcing. A major university-wide value of this sub-track will be the development of new open standards and methods for integrating information across all of the disciplines in near real time and over great spans of time.
c) True Cost Analytics. The Earth and our children as well as future generations have no voice in politics and economics today. We are far past due for a radical change in the narrative at all levels, such that the true cost of every product, service, policy, and behavior can be researched, taught, and appreciated. A major university-wide value of this sub-track will be the development of a university-wide capability – unique at first and then replicated around the world – to determine trues costs for all processes and products, discipline by discipline. Cross-fertilizations inspiring of innovation should result.
Track 2: True Cost Economics. Although the concept is well established – and its pioneering economist, Dr. Herman Daly, is available to serve as an Emeritus member of the oversight board and mentoring network, no one, anywhere, is known to have gone “all in” on actually doing true cost economics across any single discipline, much less all disciplines. A major university-wide value of this track is the immediate establishment of the university as the “world bank” for validated data about the true cost of any product, service, policy, or behavior.
Track 3: Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE). All business processes and products – not only those dealing with information – are in urgent need of ephemeralism. OSEE is how we help them achieve this goal. At a minimum the graduate will fully understand how to integrate all of the opens having to do with communications and computing. Ideally – and assuredly in their chosen network and practice sub-set, they will understand how to apply the OSEE mind-set and method to any given set of business products and processes.
If there were one word lacking in the vocabulary of most college graduates today, that word is “context.” In the face of massive ignorance, obfuscation, and as often as not outright lies from the pinnacles of all eight information networks, our young adults entering the white collar workforce are sadly disadvantaged. They are ready for a life in cubicles that are no longer available for occupation. They are not ready to make their own way, to be entrepreneurial on their own or their employer’s behalf.
The first three tracks focus on self-development; the fourth track focuses very specifically on creating jobs, healing communities, and generating sustainable profit in a collaborative economy.
As the United Kingdom, India, and other attentive countries pursue policies intended to create Smart Cities, as varied cities, councils, and bouroughs pursue “hack days” in relation to their data streams and their varied challenges, we believe that our integration of open source everything, true cost economics, and holistic analytics offers the academy, the economy, the government, and society an opportunity to accelerate innovation in a manner not previously considered and yet imminently affordable, interoperable, and scalable. Below is my graphic in relation to where tenders tend to be today, showing how our practical implementation offers alternatives that are superior to the current state of mind.
Figure 19: Beyond Big Data and Smart Cities
OSEE is how we enable local to national and then international governments, universities, and all others to share data while respecting anonymnity, identity, privacy, and rights. This is the only affordable, interoperable, scalable solution. Those that limit themselves to Open Data are destined for failure, and more rapidly so when corporations refuse to share their own data with the government.
True Cost Economics is how we transform the entire data ecology of any given community – all stakeholders and not only the government – so as to radically reduce waste and achieve design and engineering efficiencies simply not contemplated nor realized beforehand.
Unifying the Eight Information Communities or Networks
Hybrid governance, thoughtfully addressed by a few (Ostrom 1990, Reinicke 1998), requires that all possible stakeholders be able to share all possible relevant information and interact with one another to bring forth the perspectives and insights that have not been published. It is not enough to share information! There is a process of Co-Intelligence (Atlee 2010), Peer-to-Peer engagement (Bauwens 2011) and Dynamic Facilitation (Rough 2014) that is essential to these ideas being implemented and useful. The human face to face element and the creation of human bonds of trust across all boundaries and mission areas cannot be understated.
Below is a graphic that symbolizes the role I hope to see OSEE playing – with embedded intelligence, holistic analytics, and true cost economics – in bringing together these eight information network for the greater good of humanity.
Figure 20: Eight Information Networks Empowered and Unified by Open Source Everything
This may become the logo of the generic innovation hub, protected by a Creative Commons license, and used to “badge” individuals belonging to organizations that make the commitment to go “all in” on OSEE.
Conclusion – Next Steps
We are at the very beginning of a complex process intended to change for all time how we as a species make decisions about every matter at every level.
There are some small tangible steps that I propose to any university that wishes to adopt me and my ideas – indeed I dare hope that these small steps might result in a first class for the new PhD/DBA of 64 students – eight from each of the eight information networks – as well as a first tranche of fund-raising to better initialize the innovation hub.
Preliminary Outreach
Engage in systematic outreach across the eight tribes of information in the country of interest.
Regulatory and Legal Workshop
My initial impression is that OSEE has failed to advance as rapidly as it might in part because of confusion and ignorance among regulatory agencies, and laxity in enforcing Creative Commons legal protections necessary to protecting rights to commercial exploitation and revenue.
Implementation Plan (Academic)
Working across all of the elements of the innovating university, I anticipate the rapid creation of an implementation plan for a PhD/DBA to be offered over four years full-time, with MA/MS options.
Implementation Plan (Financial)
It is clear to me, based on myinitial survey, that some of the wealthiest families on Earth are now focused on the urgency of devising a sustainable alternative to what some have called Vampire Capitalism. I have a concept for raising and obligating no less than Sterling 100 million.
Creating a Social Enterprise as a Laboratory
I see a need for a model social enterprise that can be empowered with OSEE and all relevant information it needs with respect to True Cost Economics and Holistic Analytics. As best I can tell, no enterprise anywhere has ever been created and operated with this kind of foundation.
Conference
I am proposing a conference to take place in late 2016. My objective is to validate, refine, and document these ideas in partnership with a broader range of contributing authors, publish a book quickly, and secure approval for establishing the new PhD/DBA in time to accept students for matriculation in 2017.
Comments Off on Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE): Creating the Academy, Economy, Government, and Society of the Future
If you want to be a dictator, the first thing you do is control the press in the country you’re aiming to rule. That’s what Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been doing ever since he was elected President of Turkey in 2014.
It’s not easy to be a dictator when you’ve been a member of NATO since 1952, part of the Council of Europe in 1949, which is now the European Union, and a major strategic ally of the United States—first during the Cold War and now in the war against ISIS. For many months, Erdogan declined to join the coalition fighting the terrorists, and Turkey was considered a nominal ally in the war against terror.
Then, last summer, Turkey joined the U.S. led campaign against ISIS. As a result, the terror group began targeting Turkey, and the U.S. government last September authorized the voluntary departure of 900 family members of personnel stationed at Incirlik air base and the U.S. consulate in Adana. On March 29, all U.S. military families in southern Turkey were evacuated.
Last summer also witnessed the end of a ceasefire between the Turkish government and the Kurdish separatists. Yet Turkey’s current problems are not to be blamed on security issues only. They are the results of Erdogan’s national security and foreign policy decisions. Despite its strategic location, Erdogan’s decisions have reduced Turkey’s status in the world arena.
Erdogan has a master plan—as a diehard Islamist, he wants to revive the glory of the Ottoman Empire, restore Islamic rule, and purge the country of undesirables—especially the Kurds. Turkey considers the Kurds (whether Turkish Kurds, Syrian Kurds, or Iraqi Kurds) the main threat to Turkish national security. The Kurds want autonomy, and independence is viewed as endangering Turkey’s sovereign unity. Turkey has anxiously observed the gains Syrian Kurds achieved over the last few years. For Turkey, ISIS is the lesser of two evils compared to the Kurds.
Turkey has maintained a backdoor channel with ISIS for years. This channel helped secure the release of dozens of Turkish diplomats and drivers who were taken hostage by ISIS when the terror group captured Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in June 2014. In return, Turkey released a group of ISIS detained operatives. Turkey also turned a blind eye on ISIS’s oil trade with its southern provinces and on jihadists crossing the Turkish – Syrian borders to join the fight against the Syrian government. Many of them eventually joined ISIS.
Turkey’s alliance with the U.S. led campaign against ISIS came with a price: unleashing a renewed crackdown on its own Kurds. The Kurdish fighters are the best (and the only, in the case of Syria) reliable forces on the ground in the fight against ISIS.
About a month ago, the Syrian government launched a major assault on Aleppo, Syria’s largest city to the north to weaken the rebels and claim their territory. The Syrian Kurds took advantage of the government campaign to expand their area of control in order to connect a Kurdish pocket in northwest Syria with the rest of the Kurdish territories in northern Syria by the Turkish border. The Syrian Kurds tried to control a strategic town called Azaz, located 25 miles to the north on the supply line to Aleppo.
That gave Turkey the incentive they needed to launch an air attack on the Syrian Kurds to prevent them from capturing the city. Turkey’s shelling of the Syrian Kurds was condemned by most of the world, including the United States and the United Nations’ Security Council. Moreover, Turkey arranged for hundreds of Syrian Sunni Arab fighters to cross its border to Turkey then come back to Syria from another border center, to the town of Azaz, to join the fight against the Kurds. The Turkish bombardment of the Kurds has jeopardized the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS in Syria because the Kurds then began looking for support from the Syrian government and even from Russia.
The Iraqi Kurdish forces have recently regained ground around Mosul with the help of US air strikes. Yet, last December, a Turkish army battalion was deployed to the north of Mosul over the protests of the Iraqi government, the United States, and the United Nations. Iraq also threatened to fight the Turkish invaders. The Americans publicly said that the Turkish deployment was not part of the US-led coalition against ISIS. None of these actions could persuade the Turks to back off.
Turkey claimed that its forces in northern Iraq protected the Iraqi Sunni forces from attacks launched by ISIS. But Turkey’s interests in Iraq are similar to its interests in Syria. The Turkish government wants to make sure that the Kurds will not expand their territories in the Arab Sunni regions or the Turkmen areas. Turkey also wants assurance that it will have a say in Mosul’s political structure after the liberation. This week, ISIS and Turkey have exchanged artillery bombardment in the Mosul area. On Tuesday, an Iraqi politician from Mosul accused Turkey of shelling Mosul indiscriminately.
Erdogan and Ottoman Dreams
For a number of years, the Turkish president Erdogan was viewed as an able diplomat who built a bridge between the Islamic world and the West. Yet the longer his tenure, the more frustrating his policies were for his people, the Middle East and the world. Somewhere during his years in power, he had a dream: he envisioned himself as an Ottoman Sultan, able to control the Middle East from Baghdad to Casablanca. The problem is that no one has awakened him from the dream.
When a Turkish newspaper criticized him, he nationalized it. When the Judiciary investigated his actions, he fired the judges. He sent his army to punish the Kurds in Turkey. His military downed a Russian fighter after violating the Turkish airspace for a few seconds, yet he wasn’t shy about sending his unwelcomed army to Iraq.
Erdogan has engaged in a regional conflict with Egypt and Saudi Arabia for crushing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, yet he did not hesitate to silence the protests in his own country. His country’s relations with Israel, Syria, Iraq and Iran have suffered the consequences of his polices. Turkey’s relations with the U.S. have suffered as well. President Obama said recently that he was disappointed with Erdogan’s leadership. Erdogan has assumed applause would follow, rather than the long line of cold shoulders.
Erdogan has compromised his country, now in crisis with itself and the rest of the world. Despite its hopes of manipulating geopolitics to its own favor, Turkey’s fashioned role as an outlier with an independent agenda has caused the region and the world to think the Ottoman Empire is a bad dream best left between the covers of history books.
Comments Off on Turkey Is Playing a Dangerous Game With ISIS as It Seeks Islamic Glory
For questions 6-10, please describe the greatest forces of change that you believe will affect the future of the Internet over the coming five to seven years.
6. Social. The five billion poor, empowered by the Internet, and the 99% within the one billion rich, empowered by the Internet, will no longer tolerate what Matt Taibbi calls Griftopia — the merger of financial and political crime.
7. Technological. MaidSafe or something like it will explode overnight and put many legacy information technology businesses out of business, while setting the stage for a World Brain to evolve rapidly, with attention finally being paid to the I in IT. A few corporations may finally realize they must make the leap to fractional pricing at the paragraph or datum level (Oracle and Thompson Reuters come to mind), and this will accelerate the demise of other content providers trying to keep a hold on the 1% (published) of the 1% (written) of the 1% (known).
8. Economic. The Middle East, Europe, and the USA could suffer near total economic collapses in which central banks and traditional banks go belly up within a few years while dictators and two-party tyrannies are literally run out of town. The barter, System D, and cyber economics, as well a community-based safety networks and an end to all absentee landlords, perhaps locally enforced debt jubilees as well, will liberate the 99% toward a renaissance.
9. Environmental. Geoengineering will become well known and vigilante justice including active sabotage and wide-spread violence will be the Third World War. On a positive note, the geoengineeering exposure and the collapse of the medical associations over their continued manfeasance in relation to vaccines, GMO, etcetera, will end government fraud — “question authority” will take on new meaning, and local nullification of predatory federal regulations will end fracking and other abuses.
10. Political/Regulatory. Hybrid evidence-based governance will become possible. Government will be recognized for what it is — the most ignorant and corrupt among the eight tribes of information — and will over time be cut down to 20% of its present size, with an end to all taxes and most military and federal level spending. Regulation will be eliminated — public education, including true cost economics displayed at point of sale on every hand-held device, will put Monsanto, Coca Cola, Nestle, and the Koch Brothers out of business. Self-governance will become real across all domains.
11. Please describe what you believe would be the most ideal scenario for the future of the global Internet. What must happen over the next several years to realize a best-case vision for the Internet in 2021?
The creation of an Open Source (Technologies) Agency would be helpful, especially since the vast majority of the benefits will not come from open software and open hardware but rather from Open Manufacturing and Open Provisioning that eliminates the 50% waste and corruption endemic in all domains. Blockchain, distributed storage, local to global geospatial registries, will all become common. Individuals will have rights of anonymity, privacy, and security as well as authentication and the ability to earn karma and MaidSafe storage and processing credits over time. The United Nations will pay attention the briefing athttp://tinyurl.com/EIN-BRICS-OSEE. Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) Innovation Centres will emerge at every university, along with nodes of the World Brain Institute. A Global (Serious) Game will exist in cyberspace, a massive sparse matrix grounded in a 1:20,000 geospatial chart that is accurate to within one meter and everyone will have voice and vote on every issue. Applied Collective Intelligence will be the norm.
12. Please describe what you believe would be the most pessimistic scenario for the future of the global Internet. What could happen over the next several years to realize a worst-case vision for the Internet in 2021?
The US-UK will continue to be controlled by Wall Street and the City of London, with politicians continuing to abuse the public interest, actively committing treason every day as is now the case with the two-party tyranny that disenfranchises 60% of the public. Draconian national security laws and a perpetuation of public apathy and ignorance will allow the easy “disappearance” of dissidents, iconoclasts, and hackers.
13. Given your areas of focus, what are the greatest questions you have about how the Internet (and the world that interacts with it) will look in 2021?
Why on earth are Oracle, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon so selfish and ignorant about the possibilities of a truly open global world brain?
Comments Off on ISOC Future of the Internet – My Take
The tide has clearly turned against the techno-financial paradigm that disregards natural capital costs and exploits the 99% in favor of the 1%. Even a few billionaires have figured this out.
Time, however, is not on our side, nor is truth easy to find in today’s severely corrupt information environment where all eight tribes of information — including self-absorbed “progressive” activists — operate on no more than 2% of the relevant information and ignore the three things that I consider essential to saving civilization and creating a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all: holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering.
I was asked recently to sum my life’s work up in an “elevator speech.” Below is an early attempt to do exactly that:
The truth at any cost lowers all other costs. We have been living a lie across all domains from government and corporate to academia, media, and non-profits, consuming natural capital and concentrating financial capital for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. As Lady Lynn Rothschild (Inclusive Capitalism) and others (Redemptive Capitalism) are now realizing, nature bats last and a public uprising of the 99% is inevitable on our present course. To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and stabilize the world — both protecting the existing wealth of the 1% and creating infinite new wealth for the 99% while stopping the suicidal paths we are on with unilateral militarism, predatory capitalism, and virtual colonialism, requires one simple but total change: a migration toward the truth as the new currency, manifested in holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering.
In this short post I will explain each of these three terms, and conclude with the specific institutional and local to global networks I believe we can and must build now if we are to achieve our potential as homo sapiens.
THREE CONCEPTS
Holistic Analytics. The problem with all efforts by all tribes — without exception — is that none of them attempt to define and study all threats simultaneously with all policy domains against all demographics. Below is an illustration of one holistic approach, there are others. Noteworthy below is the reality that corrupt governments, led by the US Government, focus on inter-state conflict and terrorism — threats of our own making — while ignoring the fundamentals. They do this because an apathetic dumbed-down public does not realize that peace and prosperity are vastly more profitable for the whole, and failing to keep government honest — the point of democracy — is a form of social suicide.
True Cost Economics.
We are close to but not yet at a point where everyone appreciates true cost economics as pioneered by Herman Daly and a few others. True cost economics refers to the actual natural capital cost of specific policies, produces, services and behaviors. Buckminster Fuller is reputed to have said that most Western jobs are not worth the petrol required to get the worker to and from their factory job or cubicle job. Today some of us understand the human cost, the social cost, the long-term economic and political cost, of truly insane choices including elective wars and legalized financial crime — what Matt Taibbi calls Griftopia, but this has not become mainstream. Also lacking is the ability to track true costs with geo-tagging of supply and use chains so that we can get to the exact amount of virtual water, fuel consumption, toxins generated, child labor, regulatory violation, and tax avoidance.
Open Source Everything Engineering.
Two of over 2,000 non-fiction books I have read capture for me the essence of our dilemma. The first, by Peter Linebaugh, STOP THIEF! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, head-slaps every politician, corporate leader, and non-profit pontificator. The second, by Charles Bednar, Transforming the Dream: Ecologism and the Shaping of an Alternative American Vision, goes to the educational and ethical roots of our current impasse — the divide between people with power and money, and those with knowledge and ethics. My own awakening came from my experience as the senior civilian creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, spending millions on access to all our secrets only to find out that the secret world knows, “at best,” 4% of what one needs to know to make intelligent ethical decisions about strategy, policy, acquisition, and ethics. I started the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) revolution in 1988, and have been sad to see trillions of dollars and millions of lives wasted over a quarter century because of the refusal of the US Government to be serious about holistic analytics, true cost economics, and OSINT. In 2012 I expanded my vision with The Open Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust, and I now understand that the greatest enemies of humanity are bankers, lawyers, and politicians — they serve the 1%, not the 99%, and enable recurring crimes against humanity. The solution, one I devised with some counsel from Marcin Jakubowski of Open Source Ecology and the Global Village Construction Set, and Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer to Peer (P2P) Foundation, is shown below. We must abandon the proprietary world that seeks to fence knowledge as the physical world has been fenced, and move immediately to an Open Source Everything approach to everything from Smart Cities to Sustainable Defense.
FIVE INSTITUTIONS & NETWORKS
It has been my great privilege to learn from giants in the Collective Intelligence arena, such as Tom Atlee and Francis Heylighen, as well as the 2,000 plus non-fiction authors I have reviewed at Amazon, and the 7,500 adult students that have attended my international conference and small training sessions. Below are the five institutions and networks I want to build over the next twenty years.
Open Source (Technologies) Agency (OSA).
My memorandum to Vice President Joe Biden — certified as delivered to the White House but evidently not read — makes the three-page case for this $2 billion a year new agency that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has twice approved. This agency would be an innovation engine for the country and the world. With two bureaus, a D3 (defense, diplomacy, development) Information Bureau and a D3 Innovation Bureau, it would accelerate the availability of free solar and other forms of renewable energy along with unlimited desalinated water, pressed brick construction with composing, free cellular and Internet access, and aquaponics. Naturally the legacy systems see this as a threat, one reason I have been focused on the need to restore integrity to our electoral and governance processes. This agency is needed to stabilize and reconstruct the world — not just “over there” but here at home where over 30 Texas towns are about to run out of water, in Kansas were unethical leaders have allowed fracking to threaten their entire society and economy, and beyond.
United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (UNODIN).
Despite my grave reservations about the United Nations (UN) stemming in part from the corruption across all of the specialized agencies that are not subject to the authority of the Secretary-General, I do consider the UN a local to global vehicle with great potential, provided it can out-grow its inherently ignorant approach to information and its very unsophisticated dependence on statistics about the past instead of pro-active decision support shaping the future. My invited white paper for the UN, delivered to the Secretary General but evidently not read, Beyond Data Monitoring: Achieving the Sustainability Development Goals through Intelligence (Decision-Support) Integrating Holistic Analytics, True Cost Economics, and Open Source Everything is not as detailed as some might wish, but it is a starting point. If the UN wishes to achieve the SDG goals in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost, this white paper explains how to do that. As with the OSA, there are many entrenched interested that would rather protect the 80-90% of donor dollars they are able to steal while going through the motions. This too demands integrity in leadership.
Within this larger UNODIN, or separate from it if we cannot get funding for the OSA and UNODIN, are three critical civilization-saving elements.
Multinational Decision-Support Centre.
The current governance and corporate paradigm is based on lies and a lack of accountability for willful malfeasance. The reliance upon secrecy and bi-lateral information exchanges instead of open multi-lateral information sharing and sense-making makes everything worse. The 935 lies that were told to justify a US invasion of Iraq stand out as worthy of an International Tribunal and a lesson for the future. Never again must any international body allow itself to be lied to in this fashion. In order for Europe, and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the African Union and others — Brazil, China, India, Russia, South Africa (BRICS) to be effective at detecting and confronting American lies in the future, they must have their own decision-support centres and those centres must be open and multination. We still need some spies and we need something we do not have now, ruthless pervasive counterintelligence against financial, ideological, and religious traitors, but 95% of our needs can be met with open multinational decision-support processes and we are irresponsible to ignore this fundamental fact.
School of Future Oriented Hybrid Governance.
No one, anywhere, is bringing together all of the disciplines (we pay lip-service to multidisciplinary studies, and are generally mono-lingual at that) and all eight tribes of information to design a future that is sustainable, ephemeral, and human-centric. Our schools do not teach holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering innovation as a whole. There is a need for a new PhD program, perhaps the first “meta” PhD, one I would like to create, teach, and earn.
Such a School would embody the above meta concepts while implementing the below practical forms of developing, testing, and promulgating Applied Collective Intelligence.
World Brain Institute.
Finally we come to something I have long felt the need for (and I in fact own the domain names, World-Brain.net, World-Brain.org, and World-Brain.com, lacking only World-Brain.edu). As the concepts for collaborative and sharing economics develop, we are finding that fifty percent or the “profit” is to be found in the eradication of corruption and waste across every domain from agriculture to education to energy to family to health to the military and water and more. We are finding that Applied Collective Intelligence allows us to fully satisfy and nurture individuals with free energy, free water, free cellular, free Internet, and the makings of an aquaponics industry free of pesticides, for $500 each. We can achieve a prosperous world at peace, a world where a head of household need only work 60 days a year to support a family of five (as was the case with the Mayans prior to 1492). The balance of the time can be spent innovating for humanity and becoming worthy of more cosmic possibilities.
These are the ideas that need a home. Have brain, will travel.
Comments Off on Saving civilization – Time & truth matter