Public Intelligence Blog

Michael Parenti is an American political writer, historian, and culture critic who writes on scholarly and popular subjects.  A progressive armed with facts instead of ideology, he pays special attention to the enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world, and what common Americans think they are doing — the difference between toxic reality and the domestic story line that goes unchallenged by the corporate media.

Amazon / Michael Parenti

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Official Site / Michael Parenti

Below the line: most popular online writings and presentations.

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Colman McCarthy (born March 24, 1938 in Glen Head, New York), an American journalist, teacher, lecturer, pacifist, progressive, an anarchist and long-time peace activist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C. From 1969 to 1997, he wrote columns for The Washington Post. His topics ranged from politics, religion, health, and sports to education, poverty, and peacemaking. Washingtonian magazine called him “the liberal conscience of The Washington Post.” Smithsonian magazine said he is “a man of profound spiritual awareness.” He has written for The New Yorker, The Nation, The Progressive, The Atlantic, and Reader’s Digest. Since 1999, he has written biweekly columns for National Catholic Reporter.

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John was born and raised in Upstate New York. He attained his undergraduate degree in History Education from the State University of Brockport in 2007.  Disillusioned, he successfully dropped out of graduate school in 2009 to pursue a happier and more authentic life. Slowly at first, he initiated a program of autodidactic learning and self-exploration that has been ongoing since. Believing truth and authenticity are the only things worth pursuing, most of his days revolve around such aims. When necessary, he pays for the ego-driven demands of life by way of substitute teaching and poker. He currently lives in North Carolina with his ever-patient girlfriend Nikohl.

John Maguire’s YouTube Channel

John Maguire’s Blog

Phi Beta Iota / John Maguire

Daniel Pinchbeck (born June 15, 1966) is an author living in New York’s East Village, where he is editorial director of Reality Sandwich, a blog website centered around New Age philosophy and activism.^[1] H

In his own words:

I grew up in the New York counterculture of the 1970s and ’80s. My father, Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract painter, and my mother, Joyce Johnson, is a writer who participated in the Beat Generation. She was dating Jack Kerouac when On the Road hit the bestseller lists in 1957 (chronicled in her book, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir). As a journalist, I have written for Esquire, Magazine,The New York Times Magazine,  the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, etcetera. I am currently the editorial director of the Evolver Project (www.evolver.net).

In my late twenties, I fell into a deep spiritual crisis that led me to the study of shamanism and psychedelic susbtances. My first book, Breaking Open the Head, recounted my initiation into several tribal cultures that use hallucinogens in their rituals. Over time, I became convinced of the legitimacy of the shamanic and mystical worldview held by indigenous peoples around the world. This led me to my most recent book, 2012, a study of prophecy.

DuckDuckGo for Daniel Pinckbeck

2007 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

2003 Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism

Col Mike Pheneger, U.S. Army (Ret.), U.S. Special Operations Command

OSS ’95:  Col Mike Pheneger, USA (Ret.), former J-2 U.S. Special Operations Command, for his paradigm-shattering unclassified exposures of our lack of tactical military maps for 90% of the world, and our enormous over-investment in duplicative and contradictory orders of battle.

Colonel Pheneger spent 30 years on active duty as a US Army Intelligence Officer retiring in 1993. He had overseas assignments in Germany, Vietnam, Korea, Panama, and the Middle East. Key assignments include: Commander, US Army Intelligence School (Fort Devens – then part of the National Security Agency’s Cryptologic Training System); Director of Intelligence, US Special Operations Command (MacDill AFB); Deputy Director of Intelligence, US Central Command (MacDill AFB); Commander, 470th MI Group (Panama); G2, Second Infantry Division (Korea), and Director of Operations, 66th MI Brigade (Germany). As Director of Intelligence for USSOCOM, Colonel Pheneger campaigned to end duplicative intelligence production to expand our focus on neglected third-world and low intensity conflict situations that were more likely to require the deployment of US forces.  He holds an M.P.A. from Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, a B.S from Bowling Green State University, and is a graduate of the Command & Staff Course, US Naval War College, and the US Army War College.  After military retirement he developed training programs for adult professionals for the University of South Florida’s Professional and Workforce Development Division. He teaches courses on the Bill of Rights, The Constitution, Terrorism and Geo-Politics for learning-in-retirement programs in Tampa and Sarasota.  He received the Open Source Solutions’ Golden Candle Award in 1995.

Colonel Pheneger is President of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. He previously served on the ACLU’s National Board and National Executive Committee.  He speaks frequently on issues involving Civil Liberties and National Security and the ethical and constitutional aspects of intelligence collection and operations. He has spoken widely on the USA Patriot Act, torture, Guantanamo, and warrantless wiretapping and has submitted declarations in federal court proceedings supporting the ACLU’s requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act.  He served as an expert witness in a case to enjoin the Tampa Sports Authority from conducting pat-down searches as a condition of attending NFL football games.

Professor Eben Moglen is a long-standing champion of free and open source software and one of the top twelve to twenty-five minds thinking deeply in the English language about the future of the Internet consistent with creating a prosperous world at peace.  Among many other accomplishments, including global mind-melds in multiple languages, Professor Moglen is the founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center, and most recently, the FreedomBox Foundation.

Learn more….

See Especially:

Before and After IP: Ownership of Ideas in the 21st Century, Digital Studies Group, CUNY Graduate Center, November 17. 2010 (audio stream). Download: Ogg Vorbis | MP3

Venessa Miemis is a futurist and digital ethnographer, researching the impacts of social technologies on society and culture and designing systems to facilitate innovation and the evolution of consciousness. She is currently pursuing a Masters in Media Studies at the New School in NYC.

She is the principal organizer with Doug Rushkoff of CONTACT, a new event.

Wikipedia Biography with Many Links

The Macgregor Briefings: An Information Age Vision for the U.S. Army

NOTE 1:  HTML versions work, PPT do not

NOTE 2:  Cyber/IO is the enabler of all that he envisions.

Warrior’s Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting (2009)

Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights (2004)

Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Landpower in the 21st Century (1997)

Harrison Owen lives in Maryland and is immediately available to help any element of the U.S. Government, from White House to the smallest independent element of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

“Learning as Transformation” is one of his more important and most widely-read online papers.

He is the inventor of Open Space Technology (OST).  Below are links to reviews of his two most important books.  At his home page (click on the photo) are links to Papers and other gold nuggets.

Review: Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World

Review: The Practice of Peace

We consider his offering so very important to our shared future that below we summarize the ingredients.  This knowledge is free and can be used by anyone anywhere.

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Jane McGonigal, Ph.D. (born 1977) is a game designer and games researcher, specializing in pervasive gaming and alternate reality games. She worked with alternate reality game design company 42 Entertainment from 2004 to 2006, on projects including I Love Bees (2004) as Community Lead / Puzzle Designer, and Last Call Poker (2005) as Live Events Lead. Additionally, she has collaborated on commissioned games for the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.^{[citation needed]}

In recent years, McGonigal has grown especially interested in the way that massively multiplayer online gaming generates collective intelligence, and interested in the way that the collective intelligences thus generated can be utilized as a means of improving the world, either by improving the quality of human life or by working towards the solution of social ills. She has expressed a desire that gaming should be moving “towards Nobel Prizes.”^[1] These ideas informed her collaboration in World Without Oil (2007), a simulation designed to brainstorm (and potentially avert) the challenges of a post-peak oil future.

Reality is broken, says Jane McGonigal, and we need to make it work more like a game. Her work shows us how.

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

TED Speaker Bio

Wikipedia Bio with Many Links

Institute for the Future

Avant Game (Her Home Base)

DuckDuckGo Search Results

See Also:

Who’s Who in Earth Intelligence: Medard Gabel

Who’s Who in Collective Intelligence: Jerome Glenn

Who’s Who in Collective Intelligence: Pierre Levy