September 2009 – Page 20 – Public Intelligence Blog

Integrity Demands a Five, One of Three in My Review Trilogy

September 6, 2009

John Pilger

This is the third of three books by John Pilger (he has written others, I had to be selective) that I ordered and have read this long-week-end. The others:
2002 The New Rulers of the World
2005 Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism That Changed the World (29 authors, edited)

I read this book with the advantage of having first gone through the two listed above. C. Middleton has summarized the chapters so I will not do that. Here are my fly-leaf notes for those that follow my reviews (Amazon deletes votes from my 500+ “fans” something else that rankles).

Chapter 1. The entire nation of British CITIZENS that once inhabited the island group known as Diego Garcia was destroyed by US-UK secret agreement without Parliamentary knowledge. This is a crime against humanity, a genocide. The US Executive lied to the US Congress about the matter.

Continue reading “Review: Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire”

2009/09/062009/09/06

Worth a Look: Real-Time Intelligence (RTI)

Worth A Look

Although trademarked by some we ignore that since “real time intelligence” has been a term of art for over a decade. Still, the gradual emergence of tools, tactics, and technigues for Real Time Intelligence (RTI) and Near Real Time Intelligence (NRTI) are starting to gain traction.

Much of what is called RTI or NRTI is not intelligence at all, merely real-time information, and the bridge has not been made to decision-support. There are analytic packages and analytic algorithyms in the mix, but stove-piping still rules.

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Real-Time Intelligence (RTI)”

2009/09/062009/09/06

Journal: Petition for Peace Engineering

02 Diplomacy, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Ethics, Peace Intelligence, Reform, Strategy, Worth A Look

The average American is now in motion. The Independent movement has reached critical mass, and the public recognition that everything the government is doing lacks a strategic analytic rationale as well as–in many cases–a moral rationale, is gathering force.

The below message captured our attention. Note the “social engineering” of the military-industrial complex that has labored for decades to connect jobs to war, patronage to war, bribes to war, high crimes and midemeanors (betrayal of the public trust) to war. The call for social engineering for peace is, in our view, a strong signal that public intelligence is now becoming more commonplace, but we make the observation that the “lag time” between Congressional and Executive high crimes and misdemeanors, and the public discovery, analytis, outrage, and action, is still too great. Public intelligence is going to have to do something secret intelligence cannot do: develop global REAL-TIME and NEAR-REAL-TIME information-sharing and sense-making, and do this across all ten high-level threats and all twelve policies that must be harmonized across all boundaries.

Continue reading “Journal: Petition for Peace Engineering”

2009/09/062009/09/06

Worth a Look: The Infrastructurist

03 Economy, 07 Health, Worth A Look

Here is the bit that got our attention:

What’s the financial argument? You reap $7 dollars in economic rewards for every dollar you spend in basic sanitation. That makes it a really, really good investment. In the developing world, it may cost a couple hundred dollars to install a decent latrine, but think of what you save in terms of health costs and what you would otherwise lose when your workers are off with dysentery or whatever. And in developed world we’re learning that if you don’t continue investing in infrastructure you just going to pay a lot more later. It’s that simple.

We have added this site to the Righteous Site blogroll. There are gems–and humor, throughout–that reflect a remarkable public intelligence in relation to national infrastructure.

What is clear is that “the numbers” that are presented to the public for any given public works project are those that favor the decision that has already been made, one based on corporate numbers that seek to spend public funds to create capabilities that extract profit from the public at public expense.

Public intelligence is how we get government back into the business of sserving the public rather than serving as the wealth transfer mechanism from individual taxation to corporate profiteering.

2009/09/052009/09/06

Review: Weapons of Mass Instruction

6 Star Top 10%, Corruption, Democracy, Education (General), Education (Universities), Misinformation & Propaganda

Beyond Six Stars–a Manifesto for Liberty

September 5, 2009

John Taylor Gatto

This book shocked me, and while I am not easily shocked, in shocking me made me realize how even my own radical outlook (as Howard Zinn notes, a radical is someone who no longer believes government is part of the solution) has come to accommodate, to accept, the most obvious tool of subordination, the public school system.

First, my fly-leaf notes, and then a couple of conclusions.

Constructive quote up front (xiv):

“We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness–curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight–simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student the autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.”

The author's bottom line: public schooling is a deliberate transplant from Germany that Carnegie and Rockefeller and Ford and other foundations designed as a deliberate means of dumbing down the mass population and segregating elite learning from mass “functional” learning devoid of political or philosophical reflection.

Continue reading “Review: Weapons of Mass Instruction”

2009/09/042009/09/05

Review: A Vision for 2012: Planning for Extraordinary Change

3 Star, Future

Annoying

September 4, 2009

John L. Petersen

John Petersen's earlier work was vastly more interesting and more structured than this little 4.5 inch by 7 inch 100 page double-spaced blowing in the ears of Gary Hart and Leon Fuerth, among others. See my reviews of his earlier work:
Out of the blue: Wild cards and other big future surprises : how to anticipate and respond to profound change
The Road to 2015: Profiles of the Future

This book lacks a strategic analytic model and fluffs around the edges of important literatures without ever striking the right note.

The author is a dedicated, intelligent practitioner, but he is neither a scholar nor an analyst in the classic sense of the word–I found this book, in the larger context in which I read and think, annoying. A form of classic comic book for busy people in Washington who will nod and confirm the author's sagacity without ever recognizing that there is really nothing here.

There is not a word in this book about corruption, integrity, information asymmetries, data pathologies, or the out and out rape of America by the two political parties.

The author is flat out wrong when he states on page 52 that “Humans don't deal well with discontinuites and rapid change.” That alone dropped this book to three stars, and the rest of the fluffy-face stuff kept it there, including the intelligent but recycled and truncated material from earlier books.

Continue reading “Review: A Vision for 2012: Planning for Extraordinary Change”

2009/09/04

Event: 9-11 Nov 09 Vancouver CA, Thriving on Diversity: Information Opportunities in a Pluralistic World (American Society for Information Science and Technology–ASIS)

Uncategorized

ASIS 2009 Conference

We've done all these conferences for 20 years. While most organizations tend to repeat the same themes and one also tends to see the same faces as speakers, this particular conference appears to have been especially well-developed and we therefore recommend it. Pre-Conference Workshops are offered on 6 Nov 09.