The Nobel Question: Will You Be Remembered for.. Destruction 🧨 or Peace? ✌️

 

We are in surreal times... the Trump administration, the pandemic, half the nation upset with the other half over their denial regarding what's true (or not) about both.

You need not be American to partake in the battle over what's going on in the US, as is captured in above Q&A clip with former Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, getting into it with The Australian's editor, Paul Kelly. News Corp & Rupert Murdoch's influence in Australia is as hot a topic down under as is Fox News' here. 

Which reminded me of one of my favorite stories of all time.. how there came to be The Nobel Peace Prize: 

When Alfred Nobel's brother, Ludvig, died the obituary accidentally named Alfred and stated  Le marchand de la mort est mort 

("The merchant of death is dead"). 

It went on, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." An inventor with 355 patents he was most well known as the creator of dynamite. 

Appalled that this is how he would be remembered, his last will specified that his fortune be used to create a series of prizes for those who confer the "greatest benefit on mankind" in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. 
119 years later a Nobel Prize is known as an honor and as a contribution to humanity.

I bring this up as a reminder to us all, but especially the Murdochs, Trumps and all GOP leaders, and any (D) & (I)s as well, who are sowing discourse for the sake of money and power. 

Are you bringing our country together or dividing it? Are you taking a principled stand or just riding a populist wave that is built on people's pain and fear? 

If this COVID has taught us anything, it is how lucky we are to be alive in a time where science and available advancements bring us hope. But also, that today's technology paired with some of our fellow-citizens' lack of belief in this science and willingness to cooperate as a nation can also have disastrous consequences as well (hello, climate crisis!). 

Even with the fantastic recent news of vaccines on the way, none of us knows what the upcoming year will bring. Or the year after or after that or for the rest of the years of our lives. We only have what we stand for. What we foster. Sure it's great to be rich and powerful, but it might also be the time to ponder what our obituary will say? What legacy we will leave behind for our kids and our country?

As relevant as it was those many years ago is the question: 

Are we looking to blow things up and cause more destruction 

or bring our nation and our world together and create peace?  

 What do we Prize? 

America 2.0: The How

Kara Swisher asked what America 2.0 should look like and people chimed in with, aside from a bit of snark, some smart quality ideas. Which mostly leads to the question: how can we make the good ideas happen?

Well I have some ideas on that!

No matter what suggestion came up the two main stopping points aren't going to be technology or lack of imagination, as always, it will be money and politics. These are the buzz killers of many great ideas but alas here are a couple of ways that Silicon Valley and others can try to move things forward:

EZ- Cash: Politics, news, art, music, philanthropy really almost anything could be improved if there was a way to utilize a micro-currency. Maybe you can't afford or aren't willing to take time to pledge funds to every piece of content you consume or cause you back but if you could micro-tip as easy as you could share a post, people would. We use E-ZPass to get around tollways, E-Z CA$H can be how we move money:  more here

Wiki-U: Education from elementary to higher learning is the key to a prosperous society and equality not just in US but around the world. What wikipedia has done for general information we can do to organize and democratize learning. What we need is a platform with each grade of school (or subject matter) organized in an accessible way with rich multimedia content. Think Khan-Academy but with a more robust mix of all the best teachers, historian and documentarians in the world. There is enough info already created to get started on this now, including the Khan tutorials, if a group of educators (and librarians) could begin to gather and organize the nuggets of knowledge in a digestible way.

New Crew: As a child I learned that in times of real peril the Justice League had to come together to save our world because even Superman couldn't do it alone. When I grew up I learned Lincoln did this to save the Republican Party and our country when we almost came apart. So in a time of pandemic and financial ruin we need an all-hands-on-deck approach to bring together the greatest minds and leaders to help save our economy, our divided country and our lives. If President Trump won't do it, candidate Biden should enroll the Obamas and Bushes, all his past rivals (including Trumps 2016 ones), captains of industry and great experts of our time and put out all the data, ideas, and resources he can muster.

MMXX League of HEROES!

So that's what I think, thanks for asking Kara.😊🇺🇸

Russian Influence-za

The US-Russian saga is the most interesting (and terrifying) thing going on in the world today. And if it's seemed too piecemeal and confusing to follow, I totally get it. But even if you think it doesn't affect you, I promise it does. Therefore, we need to understand even just the basics.
So here we go...

Where to start? Let's begin with:

Putin
He believed the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the century. As a KGB officer he was humiliated by the fall of the USSR and blamed the west- specifically the United States. He's made it his mission to bring Russia back to its former glory and will do anything it takes to humiliate the U.S. and vindicate his homeland.

Watch Putin's Revenge the two part series from FRONTLINE to understand why Putin hates the U.S., despises Hillary Clinton, and desperately needs to have a way to protect himself and his wealth.



In order for Putin to get revenge he needs two thing: money and power. 

Money 
Putin needs money: one to maintain his power and two to ensure his safety. But it does him little good to hoard all his money in Russia so he needs to launder it out of the country. He was doing that successfully by building up oligarchs' (beholden to him) fortunes until lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, working for an American-born British financier, Bill Browder, was tortured and killed while in a Moscow prison. 

Browder vowed to avenge his lawyer/friend's death and lobbied and passed the Magnitsky Act which: 

authorizes the U.S. government to sanction those who it sees as human rights offenders, freeze their assets, and ban them from entering the U.S. 

Hear more about Browder and Magnitsky in this Stay Tuned with Preet podcast or this interview. It ties in why Putin was desperate to get sanctions removed and why the Trump Tower meeting which invoked "Russian adoptions" was really codeword for getting the U.S. to remove these financial restrictions through a back channel. 

Active Measures
If the oligarchs, and therefore Putin, are prevented from laundering money out of Russia they are backed into a corner and feel provoked to do ever more desperate things. 

What they did was accelerate ongoing active measures:

Active measures is a term for the actions of political warfare conducted by the Soviet and Russian security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, FSB) to influence the course of world events.

These measures included calling in favors from the likes of Paul Manafort and Donald Trump to the Russian mob that had aided in money laundering and suspicious dealings over the years.  



So how will Putin ensure sanctions are removed and maintain his power and wealth?

Roger Stone
Well, before we get to the how we need to introduce Roger Stone into the picture. It's easy to think Roger is just a bad joke and write him off as a would-be-Batman-villain, but in actuality he is one of the most important back-seat political drivers of the last 40+ years.

Watch Get Me Roger Stone to see how one man messing around behind the scenes- not to mention blatantly in front of the cameras- can alter an election in front of our very eyes. See how his ties with Paul Manafort (they were business partners from back in the 80's); his 30+ year relationship with Donald Trump; his dirty-trickster ways; and his link to WikiLeaks affected the 2016 election.



For the logistics of the how, we check in with Steve Bannon and the Cambridge Analytica folks. Their manipulation of our data through Facebook and in conjunction with Russian active measures was a perfect storm which blew Trump into office. 

The Great Hack


This accomplished several things for Putin: took down Hillary Clinton, stirred chaos with Trump and U.S. allies and got our fellow citizens to turn against each other.  

Putin has been successful using active measures so much so we are now in a place where Republicans who were until recently staunch Russian opponents are now either doing his bidding or at least not preventing him from waging a cyber/disinformation war on the American public. 

Are our politicians infected with Russian influence-za? Do they not know what is going on beneath their very noses? Or are they choosing to surrender our elections and our very democracy to save their careers and their power? Is this Putin's dream come true or are we going to wake up and unite behind securing our elections, holding accountable those who betrayed our country and defending our nation from foes foreign and domestic? 

______________________________________________________________________

Update:

On July 10, 2020 President Trump commuted Roger Stones prison sentence. This is the same day that Stone told reporter Howard Fineman: 

One would ask: what information pray-tell would Roger have on Trump that would allow him this leverage? And if Trump is willing to play ball with Stone what would he be willing to do if Putin had kompromat on him? 

Our elections are coming and Trump will do anything to stay in power so he doesn't need to face charges and investigations he is now shielded from as POTUS. Roger Stone and Paul Manafort are now out of jail and we as a country are more divided and distracted from the real enemy. 

While Covid-19 is killing 130,000+ Americans, we need to also fight the Russian Influence-za that is about to kill our democracy. We must join together and vote like our lives and our very country depends on it- because it does!!! 

__________________________________________________________________

Update II: 

Agents of Chaos came out in September from HBO and adds more to social media piece:

Note: End of year Trump pardons of Manafort and Stone. 😏

Stay tuned, I'm sure there will be much more of this story to unfold over the years to come...

Will Mark & Jack Cause WWIII? or Save US From It?

We were cyber attacked by Russia during the 2016 election and it's not OK. I mean it's really really not OK. And the astonishing thing is Russia shot a weapon at the U.S. and we're going to let them reload for 2018 like there is nothing we can do about it.

There is!

We need to demand that Facebook and Twitter either get their services under control or take them offline and shut them down while any and all voting is taking place in our country. We don't let this type of sabotage and not only false advertising but blanket foreign propaganda on our airways we can not allow it on our other media platforms as well.

I'm no tech expert but there must be a way to block IP addresses that spam, unleash bots, or are found to be connected with nefarious foreign sources. Start a volunteer bot-army brigade that provides the company with suspected violators- I'm sure your communities would step up to help. Or just spit-balling here...how about asking Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney to head bi-partisan group to work with both the government and Silicon Valley to unite behind American Commission on Cyber Safety.

We now have Russia sitting back and relishing Trump starting tough talk with other nations. Who knows how far this will go? Are we going to let our enemies use our own technology against us?

I am a huge fan of Twitter and before they screwed with my feed (another rant for another day) loved Facebook as well. I dare say they have been two of the best inventions of our time. But with great power comes great responsibility and these two brilliant guys need to know their country needs them to put our nation's sovereignty and well being before their shareholders and even their customers. 

Tech-war could start a real war and there is no like-ing our way back from all the loss of life, treasure, and progress this will cause. I'm calling on Mark and Jack to step up and stand up for their companies to stop aiding and abetting our enemies.

Come one guys, I know you want to do good in the world - now's your time!

Making Trump Great: Unite The OWL Council

I am not fan of Donald Trump and was less than thrilled he is our new president... BUT, after my pity-party and reading this tweet:

it struck me that the lesson and the legacy Obama instilled in us is to have HOPE. So in that vain I offer up The OWL Council (or The OWLs).

Two of the things that President Trump will have going for him is that he loves building and also loves entertaining and being around celebrities and people of importance. So let's expand on Uncle Rush's advice and surround him with the wisest, deepest, most honorable bench of advisors.

Since his win many have tweeted (yes, the times we live in) words of conciliatory congratulations, and although few leaders are brave enough he could do as one of our all time greatest presidents Lincoln did and surround himself with a Team of Rivals.

The OWLs would be a group of Omnes* World Leaders that would be assembled, say monthly, to offer President Trump a full range of views on important governing issues. Include the greatest experts on leadership and other specific topics (the economy, trade, business, education, climate) and have differing views discuss all points of debate with him. He would make the policy but would have a plethora of arguments flushed out instead of relying on only his cabinet and those who would seek to merely serve him.

The one thing Trump would like to do is succeed and be the greatest president ever. He is in office because people are tired of politicians same old way of doing business. Dividing our country further will serve no good for our country nor our citizens. We must give him this final opportunity to bring us together before we permanently end what makes us the UNITED States of America.

I have many other thoughts on how to expand this idea, so as a patriotic citizen I offer my help to make President Trump's dream come true and make this country as great as it can possibly be.

(*Latin: for all)