“Had Enough? Vote Democratic!” Is NOT ENOUGH,
We Need a New Dual Membership Party

Robert David Steele Vivas

A few days ago I was discussing strategy with Jock Gill. Both of us tried to help Dean, Edwards, and then Kerry, in that order, with a concept for winning over non-Democrats like me (a moderate Republican). None of the staffs had sufficient gravitas to realize that we were absolutely right when we said, over and over, that the Democrats cannot beat the Republicans on base, issues, or leadership alone.

Last week, I conceptualized the concept of a “dual membership” party, the Citizens Party. This new party would not ask its members to leave their original party, but would, instead, serve as a second home, a unifying party, committed to one issue and one issue only: achieving electoral reform by electing a coalition government committed to the American Independence Act of 2007. Thereafter, the Party could serve as a second home for individuals, like myself, who are proud of what the Republican Party once stood for, but do not wish to consort with impeachable leaders or the extremists who have hijacked the party.

Today, I read with admiration a really superb Op-Ed by Tim Roemer in the New York Times (Saturday, 29 April 2006) entitled ‘Enough Already,’ that suggested that all the Democrats need to win in 2006 and 2008 is the simple slogan, “Had Enough? Vote Democratic!.” This worthy gentleman is half-right.

The Democrats, in my view, cannot beat the Republicans base-on-base or on the issues. Even a character debate will be a toss-up. There is, however, a major opportunity for a lasting revitalization of democracy if the Democrats will match up their most promising unity candidate with a new party, the American Independence Party, and a commitment to a Coalition Cabinet and Coalition Legislature committed to electoral reform.

Robert David Steele
04.18.06, 6:00 PM ET

Why Secret Intelligence is Bad

Director of National Intelligence [DNI] Covers 17.5%

In the Age of Information, when secret sources are less valuable and open sources are more essential in understanding reality and crafting responsible public policy, what are the ten greatest threats to the United States of America? What ten questions should the reformed and revitalized Director of National Intelligence (DNI) be able to answer for Congress and the public? This challenge has been answered generally by the Report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A more secure world, Our shared responsibility (United Nations, 2004), but nothing the DNI is doing today is helpful in actually addressing, in a substantive sustained way, each of these threats.

The Nation 19 April 2006 , www.nation.com/pk

DR FAROOQ HASSAN

To learn of the bomb explosions in the famous Sankatmochan temple in Benaras and Varanasi Railway Station on 8th March was deeply shocking for me. Over a year ago I was highly honoured by Beneras Hindu University to give a Memorial lecture at their beautiful lush green campus.

During this memorable visit I saw the scared places of great religious significance for hundreds of millions of adherents of the Hindu and Buddhist Faiths. Apart from its many historic temples and places of worship, I had an opportunity to go over by boat on the magnificent Ganges River seeing at close hand how deeply felt centuries old sacred rites and rituals are performed. Regretfully these explosions jolted South Asia severely by bringing into focus the dreaded potential of the menace of communal lack of confidence between the followers of main religious persuasions in this region.

I posted an irritable rant at my blog Weblogsky about the wonks driving the new, diminished Wonkette blog; after the fact I realized I was less irritated with the lack of wit (I was never a Wonkette regular) than by the careless cynicism of the of the posts I referred to and others at the [...]

“The Revolution will not be televised”. Gil Scott-Heron told us so. Joe Trippi repeated it, but CTBlogger, Spazeboy and Scarce, among others are doing it anyway.

“The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox”. No, it will be brought to you by Kinko’s and YouTube, by Sony and Microsoft. They will sell you Lenin’s rope.

“The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon”. It will show you pictures of Bush and Lieberman.

“The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb, Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.” However, clips from each of them are likely to appear in the mashup.

“The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live.” It will be recorded by all of us. It will be animated in flash. It will be mashed up, spread by emails and downloaded to video Ipods.

Maybe Marshall McLuhan was right. Maybe the medium is the message. When I was young, I had “thirteen channels of shit on the TV to chose from”. In other countries, where there was one state run television, the TV studios were the first thing to be taken over during a coup.

Now, we have YouTube, Google Video, and plethora of other tools for distributing video. We have Flash, Movie Maker and iMovies to make our content.

The seeds of the revolution is everyone becoming able create and distribute their own content. We saw the beginning of this with blogs. Now, we are seeing it with online videos.

[I'll post this to my new diary on Daily Kos after my one week waiting period is up.]

To shape our politics we have to shape our communications.

Here is a little personal history about the Dean campaign and how communications shaped it.

In 2003 I was asked by Steve Grossman to go to Burlington to work with Joe Trippi’s team on creating the Dean campaign’s internet strategies. At one point we were discussing a new tool that would allow Dean supporters to find one another. The original idea was to find supporters with 1, 2, 5 or so miles from your location. After some energetic exchanges, I was able to persuade Zephyr that the most important Dean supporter I needed to find was the one who lived in my building or on my block. We could then begin the face-to-face relationship building that would allow us to support each other in over-coming our inhibitions and to swing into local, retail political action supporting Dean: leafleting, hosting events in our homes, visibilities, and so forth.

The key was that the Dean campaign, like the Clinton Gore campaign in 1992, trusted us to communicate amongst ourselves in a true, symmetrical, peer-to-peer model. As a result, both Clinton and Dean enjoyed powerful benefits created by their supporters.
In contrast, the Kerry campaign did not.

I was subsequently asked in April 2004, by the then CTO of the Kerry campaign, to work with a very small team of online community organizers [DemTech/DemComm members] to develop a vibrant peer-to-peer social networking strategy for the Kerry team. A small sub-group, including Howard Rheingold, AOL’s Director of Community Management, Nanci Meng and Jon Lebkowsky, were tasked to create and submitted a draft proposal to Kerry HQ. We never heard back. We could only watch as Kerry imposed a traditional, asymmetrical, industrial era Master/Slave broadcast communications organizing principal on his campaign. Kerry did not trust the voters to generally do the right thing most of the time. Thus he was basically unable to leverage cooperative gain created by the collective actions of his supporters at the edges of his campaign. Kerry only understood power as it is created by asymmetrical relationships. This lead him to treat his supporters as sheeple, not as citizen activists.

The Open Source Intelligence site has posted this news item:

News Flash: Depleted Uranium Reaches England?

Depleted uranium from the Iraqi campaign has evidently reached England.

A repeat of Gulf War syndrome, which put over a quarter million US veterans on disability, appears to be joining the massive number of amputees.

Some of the coverage of this new finding is quasi-hysterical, but what we find very interesting is the combination of policy acceptance of depleted uranium impacts on both our own troops as well as our downwind allies, and the larger discussion of deliberate depopulation strategies including genetically modified corn.

The post includes an interesting list of links.

You might enjoy this art work — and the sound track as well. The artist is Jane Marsching,

Note the RAIN drops.

Sheeple Consumers or Citizen Activists?

Language matters. When Municipal wireless projects talk in terms of the “last mile in” to the “customer”, it pretty clearly indicates that they have opted to maintain the old industrial era “Master/Slave” metaphor for their municipal wireless solution — And probably for their politics and businesses as well.

The other option, of course, is to adopt a modern, peer-to-peer, mesh network architecture in which ALL nodes on the network are active participants in the mesh. This is the only way a municipality can create a truly Extra-Ordinary outcome for its citizens. This also creates a “first mile out” solution. In turn, a peer-to-peer mesh solution has the added benefit of giving all participants an incentive to improve their local infrastructure to improve their personal conditions. In the past, this has been called “leveraging end-user capital.” It is what financed so much of the PC revolution that so benefited the US innovation economy. It is what creates a virtuous cycle of improvements.

The question is simply: Why do municipalities chose today to abandon this proven engine for economic innovation and growth?

Of course, the current EULAs from the “incumbents”, such as Comcast, Verizon, AT&T etc., all specifically forbid sharing of connectivity by, at or for the end points. Intended or otherwise, this has the result of making a true peer-to-peer mesh a forbidden fruit. But is it really a municipality’s function to pick business plan winners? Or is it to provide the very best solutions for its citizens?

From the above, it is clear that, until Peer-to-Peer business models are adopted by the incumbents, only municipalities are able to create and sustain modern, peer-to-peer, mesh network architecture in which ALL nodes on the network are active participants. Today, only municipalities can create networks that enable a virtuous cycle of improvements financed largely by end-user investments.

If a municipality fails to develop a municipal wireless solution that allows it to benefit from leveraging end-user capital, and the resulting cooperative gain created by this edge capital, I predict that such a system will have a substantially higher risk of failure. If we treat our fellow citizens like sheeple, as in the Master/Slave model imbedded in WiMax technology, they have no incentive to spend their own money to make local improvements. Thus they can never realize the innovation economy benefits of a system with inherent cooperative gain.

So what, my fellow citizens, do we expect from our government leaders? Master/Slave or Peer-to-Peer? The past or the future?

The Nation, 11 April 2006

DR FAROOQ HASSAN

The writ of the present regime is seen by some to be met with open defiance in the kite flying “revolt” by a section of the population in the province of Punjab. Through out the 11th and 12th of March, in the face of a total ban imposed by the Punjab Government, kite flyers indulged in this [kite fighting] pastime, which is menacing to the wellbeing of thousands of innocent people. So manifest was this act of “illegality” that the TV channels gave this news throughout these two days. However, neither the police nor the administration did precious little to enforce its own orders. In the process, more lives were lost as well as injury to many others.

Can one imagine NY City police, after denying the holding of a procession, watching silently for hours the same prohibited rally defiantly proceed, resulting in deaths? The local cable TV networks have been having plenty of talk shows on this defiance of the law, with the diversity of views being as striking as the fact of this open disobedience to the law. This act of defiance of law concerned the kite flying ban imposed by the Punjab Government on 9th of March, on the eve of the impending Basant day celebrations on all kite flying activity.