The first priority is coming to terms with how we prioritize in the first place.

The following post was prompted by the Daily Beast article linked below.

 This is all part and parcel of not being able to engage in a reasonable process of determining what our priorities are, and then going about the most practical approach to address those priorities.

And the main reason for that inability is that every established process group wants to keep their part of the gravy train going precisely because of the money and prestige an established channel represents. A wide range of competing priorities get bounced around within the arena of collective discourse, but the rest of us hardly know where to begin to sort it out as so much of what passes as informed debate is really just various combinations of embellishment, misdirection, lack of complete context, or outright fabrication. The truly interested few, you see, are, at the very least, sorely tempted to make their solution to a priority as sacrosanct as the priority itself; which puts nominal competitors joining forces on at least the common ground of one or another priority, and to hell with what that does to the other priorities.

As may or may not be obvious here, the ability to forge consensus on what is, in a truly big picture context, the best trade off between what we are able to do, and the things most immediate, and requiring of action, does not fare well when a few have not only so much need to say what they will, but the ability to say it with more overall control of content. But this very thing is a fundamental aspect of a commercial, specialized production, commodity form of social organization. Especially now that money and information are the same thing, and human skill is no longer a viable commodity.

The fact of the matter now is that we face a very wide range of threats. These cross historical boundaries of what we have established as institutions to address them with. And the real kicker is that each of them have impacts on the other. We can no longer consider them in isolation. Everything has to be an integrated solution with what ought to have already been fully integrated processes. Unfortunately, our current economic model has prevented the latter even as it thwarts the former.

This chaotic squandering of intent and ability will continue as long as we continue to fail to accept that a new operating model is required. It is really that simple.

#CapitalismIsObsolete

The Pentagon is On Course for Fiscal Disaster

See also:
America’s out-of-control war machine: Why the new authorization is so problematic