Search: “best practices” and “osint training”

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Thank you.  Complex searches do not do well within Word Press.  Here are two distinct results for you, the first within Reviews, the second within Journal.

Reviews: Best Practices in Management (96)

OSINT is like anything else–clarity, diversity, and integrity matter.

Other using search term training (OSINT is irrelevant, this entire site is about OSINT):

Search: free intelligence training

Search: United Nations Intelligence Training

Search: The Future of OSINT [is M4IS2-Multinational]

Search: Intelligence and the Viet-Nam War

See also:

About the Idea (39);  Definitiions (9);   Handbooks (39); Historic Contributions (226);  History of Opposition (13) and of course all the Articles & Chapters (68);   Books (OSS/EIN) (11);   Briefings & Lectures (66).

Worth a Look: Davos 2010 – MIT Collective Intelligence

Uncategorized

YouTube 4 minute 13 second Thomas Malone at Davos on emerging Collective Intelligence.

His bottom line:  Human + Computers Converging toward a single global brain, eventually we may be able to harness global collective intelligence.

See also:

What is collective intelligence and what will we do about it?

2008 World Brain as EarthGame

2008 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

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Journal: Iraqi Insurgents Capture Human Terrain Team (HTT) Member Issa T. Salomi

Academia, Military, Peace Intelligence
Full Story Online

Steve Fondacaro and Montgomery Clough, senior program management of the US Army's Human Terrain System (HTS), were warned as early as 2007 that Human Terrain Team members in Iraq and Afghanistan would become prey for insurgent groups. They were advised repeatedly that training must emphasize the dangerous environment HTS employees would be operating in. That training needed to focus on practices and procedures for handling life threatening situations to include kidnapping.

Issa Salomi, a 60 year old HTT member operating in a combat zone, was taken in January 2010 by an Iraqi insurgent group and a video of him was released on the Net in February 2010 by the same group. This tragic event drives home, once again, the core failings of the Human Terrain Team System: the inability to find qualified personnel, to train them properly and to, quite simply, take care of them. Some allege that many team leaders and HTS management itself have no clue where many of their teams are. “Some HTT members disappear for days and then return.”

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Journal: Haiti Update 7 February 2010

Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence

Haiti: Building Back Better – and Beyond

We already know that some 150,000 people were killed, 200,000 were injured and one million more lost their homes. After all the collapsed buildings are finally removed, this earthquake may be among the three or four worst disasters ever recorded anywhere on earth in terms of loss of life and injury.

Lessons Learned from Past:
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Journal: Lockheed Mark to Market Pentagon Style

03 Economy, 10 Security
Chuck Spinney

“Mark to Market” is (or was?) an accounting standard  that required financial institutions to value their assets at their current market value.  Thus a stock portfolio would be valued at an amount determined by the stock market, if the stock holder sold all his assets in that market.

Last Spring, when the government was contemplating its plan to rescue the big banks, it settled on the idea of using taxpayer money to purchase or guarantee the so-called toxic assets of the large “investment” banks and their insurers (e.g., collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps).  The banks lobbied furiously against the mark to market rule, because the toxic assets could not be sold in a market that was frozen, and under the rule, they would be valued a fraction (somewhere between 0% and 60%) of their original purchase prices.  Under mark to market, the banks would take a bath or even become insolvent.  So, they concocted a new concept of “fair value,” which came close to reimbursing them at cost, thus implying the capitalist market was inherently unfair.  The Federal Government ended up guaranteeing the debt at taxpayer expense, thus securing an American economic system that guarantees private profits at the expense of public losses for the privileged entities on Wall Street.

But don't blame the banks for this kind of system.  They are only doing what is natural when one is working with the best government money can buy.  In fact, the American political economy has many ways of guaranteeing private profits with public subsidies of what should be private losses.

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Journal: The Tea Party Phenomenon

Uncategorized

The Tea Party is still taking shape (Washington Post)

Six hundred tea party leaders arrived Thursday, Feb. 4, 2010, for the first-ever three-day National Tea Party Convention. Organizers announced the creation of a political action committee called Ensuring Liberty Corp.

Phi Beta Iota: 1,100 reportsed to be present for the keynote by Sarah Palin.

Tea party' convention a forum for woes, worries (Los Angeles Times)

Reporting from Nashville – Ask Gail Hathaway, a warm 61-year-old retired nurse from Vonore, Tenn., what she wants out of the “tea party” movement, and she returns the quizzical look of someone worried she's been asked a trick question.

The Other Tea Party Convention: Activists Meet In DC (The Atlantic Online)

The activists and organizers at the DC meeting did not attempt to draft any kind of doctrine, though one activist in attendance, Ryan Hecker, is working on a document that will state Tea Party principles. He plans to take thousands of suggestions, posed by Tea Partiers themselves, and let activists vote on them online–open-sourcing a loose sort of Tea Party platform, in effect.

“The goal is to create a grassroots, bottom-up contract with America,” Hecker told the reporters and activists in attendance.

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Review: Comeback America–Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility (Hardcover)

3 Star, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Budget Process & Politics, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Economics, Electoral Reform USA, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

3.0 out of 5 stars Ten Years Late, More Whimper than Roar

February 7, 2010

David Walker

I was watching David Walker as he served nine of his fifteen years at Comptroller General, with light-weight whimpers to Congress until he finally got Peter Peterson to bail him out of government and give him a chunk of cash for making movies and writing a book and creating a web site that very few serious under 40 pioneers pay attention to.

I was thrilled to see him tell Congress in 2007 that the US was bankrupt–both Senator McCain and Senator Obama could have cared less–and so he walked quietly back to his holding cell at the General Accountability Office (GAO).  His “loyalty” to impeachable masters is just as troubling to me as the loyalty of our military leaders during the neo-con rampage.

This book loses one star for the publishers arrogance and ineptitude in failing to use all of the tools Amazon provides, so that readers like myself who read a great deal and do not buy books on whim, can actually look at the table of contents. If you want a sense what the author has to say, see the Wikipedia page on the US Federal Budget where the author's fingerprints are elegantly visible.

If and when the publisher acts more responsibly and provides Look Inside the Book information as well standard entries via Amazon Advantage (about the book, about the author, editorial reviews), I will buy the book, read it, and review it.

The book loses a second star for being wildly praised by all the unethical losers that got us into this mess in the first place by sacrificing their ethics and selling the two party system out to Wall Street. Bill Bradley in particular is a major disappointment, he slunk off to Allen and Company where George “Slam Dunk” Tenet is also in hiding, and they have profited handsomely for betraying the public trust for over a decade. Edumund Burke said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Even better is the following from Chief Justice Louis Brandeis:

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