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A Few Good Rules

21 January 2009

After a year or more of running this blog without rules, we seemed to have recently crossed the Rubicon: in moving from our internal member conversations to a more open, perhaps wild frontier on the Net, the dialogue has gone from that of mutual respect and intellectual exchange to anonymous insult and emotional attack.

So, as of today I am putting the same rules in place on this blog as we use in our newsletter.  They are very simple:

1. All comments must be signed, hopefully with real names.  Since we are not naive, there is also:

2. Comments should be about issues, and not personal and / or emotional attacks.  Fine to say you don’t agree or like something, but say why.

3. We will allow anonymous (to the public) comments in only one situation: when the poster would suffer career damage from the expression of ideas.  In these cases, we will require the poster’s real name be shared with us, and we will post the comments anonymously.

In other words: vigorous debate is encouraged, hate mail is not allowed. 

I have no doubt that my recent posting on Bush administration officials being tried and jailed for crimes made some folks angry.  Fair enough: write a comment, with your name, indicating why you think these people are innnocent. 

I will note that Keith Olberman, the object of one hate mail, tonight reported two major new stories that all Americans should find of interest: first, that the NSA has been warrantlessly wiretapping every U.S. citizen, at home (not overseas), with a special focus on journalists; and, second, that the top U.N. official in charge of war crimes investigations believes that Bush and Rumsfeld are guilty of same, that his charter does not require domestic prosecution first, and that he is therefore free to pursue Bush and Rumsfeld as of now.

That didn’t take long.

One Response to “A Few Good Rules”

1. Tim Reha Says:
   January 27th, 2009 at 12:02 pm

   Mark,

   I want to thank you for putting your personal neck out on the line to shine light on these matters, when you could be like most others and just focus on the all mighty dollar.

   Back in 2002 I hosted the defacto Homeland Security Venture Forums as a method to dig deep into what was really going on with oil military complex and highest offices of our government. Guests at our conference ranged from the Washington Military Department, Boeing Ventures all the way to the CIA’s Venture Fund — INQTEL.

   I recall a number of TIA (Total Informational Awareness) and NSA projects launched in 2002 that were shocking. However, the “fear, greed curve” enabled these projects to thrive at the time when we were receiving “Orange and Red Level Security Threats”.

   The email program that scanned all of our USA civilian emails developed was called something really nasty.. Later it was re-branded to be more palatable to the USA “sheep population”.

   Pointdexter was a week away from launching a real NASDAQ style auction where people could place there bets on “security threats” and make real money. Thankfully the project was stopped, only after we burned $7mm in tax dollars.

   * Futures Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP) was intended to harness collective intelligence by researching market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events. The intent was to explore the feasibility of market-based trading mechanisms to predict political instability, threats to national security, and other major events in the near future.[20]

   I thought a lot of these projects were to “far out” to be real, but they were not, they were far too real and being funded.

   I believe in the wrong hands these programs have the potential to segregate voter classes and be used for a massive social network influence generators.

   See for yourself:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office

   Scalable Social Network Analysis

   Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID)

   At the end of the day, the past administration in my opinion illegally used USA Tax dollars to create programs that were totally against the fundamental rights and freedoms that this country was founded upon.

   I have to thank you and others for fighting for this freedom and again for putting your personal brand and business on the line as a platform to make noise when so many others sit on there hands.

   I personally do not want to have a chip embeded in my brain in order to remain a “free” citizen.

   Warm Regards, Tim Reha

   Tim Reha
   CEO
   Venture All Stars