I observed blog silence yesterday, out of respect for the people who died ...
Al Qaeda and their affiliated groups have declared war on our civilization, and we’ve responded by being feckless and distracted. Why, 4 years after 9/11, and just hours after 7/7, are we continuing to allow Pakistan’s borders to likely harbor Bin Laden - we allow the Saudis to finance terror How many more innocent human beings have to die because our leaders refuse to hunt down these killers and end them?
Eye on Politics & Law Lords: A Radical Way to Be: Full-focus attention is the next aphrodisiac
Attention captured by marketing messages and leaders who give us a sense of trust, belonging in a meaningful way.
Now we long for a quality of life that comes in meaningful connections to friends, colleagues, family that we experience with full-focus attention on relationships, etc. The next aphrodisiac is committed full-attention focus. In this new area, experiencing this engaged attention is to feel alive. Trusted filters, trusted protectors, trusted concierge, human or technical, removing distractions and managing boundaries, filtering signal from noise, enabling meaningful connections, that make us feel secure, are the opportunity for the next generation. Opportunity will be the tools and technologies to take our power back
• We Contain Multitudes [War Made Easy How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death Harsh insight into how we make war ; Tolstoy used fewer pages to sketch Napoleon's invasion of Czarist Russia - Writers of many stripes grapple with a country going off the rail Shock and awe - Five books on the war in Iraq ; Can We Fight The War On Terror Now? ]
• · Australian millionaires are reluctant to recognise themselves as well-to-do, and even the very rich still cry poor. Newly Rich: First Class, Upper Crust, Cream of Society Poor little millionaires ; History teaches us that there are two types of tyrants. Those who preserve the structures and forces that carry them to power - and those who, once they have attained their goal of unbridled domination, seek to destroy the organizations and people they had used to get to where they are Purging vs. Co-opting Tyrants
• · · The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means ; If the era of the Cold War is over it is, perhaps, less because one side has 'won' than because the legitimation of each political discourse found itself fundamentally challenged by material developments themselves The Betrayal of History: Dreamworld and Catastrophe ; The dumbing-down of audiences is as dangerous to newfound political and economic freedoms as are more explicit forms of repression. Both democracy and the free market will not survive long in the absence of an informed, alert, intellectually agile public. It is hard to retain one's critical faculties under the onslaught of televised conspicuous consumption and the unmitigated folly of mass entertainers Garbage in, money out
• · · · Focus groups? I thought we elected politicians to make big decisions Focus groups were almost as controversial within the Conservative Party as taxation ; The alliance between the NGO coalition Make Poverty History and the spectacular global Live8 concerts may seem a formidable challenge to the G8, but Tom Burgis in Edinburgh hears radical NGO campaigners who think it is far too close to power Insider-outsider: the NGO fracture zone ; Over the past 15 years, 'street politics' has lost its critical edge Live 8: How did protests become love-ins?
• · · · · Wes Boyd and Joan Blades and the formation of MoveOn.org The Internet And Democrats ; For the sake of party unity, many Democrats last year put aside their differences with John Kerry's foreign policy positions, in particular his tortured support for the war in Ira Reconnecting to the World
• · · · · · An op-ed on activist judges So Who Are the Activists? ; The libertarian case for judicial activism Unleash the Judges ; 'Electing Justice': The People's Court