This article was written for a progressive magazine which asked for an updated version of my earlier essay on the Haitian crisis. http://bit.ly/7pJ0iF
I decided that rather than updating it I would reorganize it to reflect some deeper dynamics I see in our responses to catastrophes in general. Although in the end the magazine felt they couldn't use what I came up with, I want to share it with you.
Pessimism about global climate talks deepened Thursday as Yvo de Boer, the United Nations' top climate official, resigned after struggling for 3 1/2 years to produce a binding legal treaty requiring the world's major emitters of greenhouse gases to slash their carbon output in the coming decades. He will step down July 1 with that goal unmet.
Robert Steele, former CIA clandestine officer, founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Center and expert on open source and real time intelligence, offers his perspective on how the latest information technology can greatly enhance America's national security capabilities.
Because of his expenses and lack of income, Mr. Stack wrote, he didn't file a tax return, prompting an IRS audit that cost him $10,000. He wrote that he had other problems involving “Sheryl's unreported income.”
“I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are,” the author wrote.
Phi Beta Iota: See the small selection below for a sense of the growing rage across America. The Wall Street bail-out has been in our view, “the last straw” for most Americans who wonder why the IRS or any other federal agency is spending time harassing them at the same time that the US Government is doing so many very expensive and highly questionable things including allowing US taxpayer funds to pay multi-million dollar bonuses to individuals who knowingly cheated multiple governments and millions of shareholders. This is called Cognitive Dissonance. The last reference below is to a Chapter 20: 21st Century Counterintelligence: Evaluating the Health of the Nation. We predict a wave of death threats against serving Members of Congress (more of whom will announce their retirement); a wave of threats–many false but intended to distrub–against federal buildings; and a growing wave of civil disobedience reflective of the public's deep anger at the bi-partisan betrayal of the public trust these past forty years. There are 65 political parties in America–63 of them have been locked out of what must be seen as a fraudulent democracy that does not meet minimalist international standards.
As Vermont seethes with radioactive contamination and the Democratic Party crumbles, Barack Obama has plunged into the atomic abyss.
In the face of fierce green opposition and withering scorn from both liberal and conservative budget hawks, Obama has done what George W. Bush could not—pledge billions of taxpayer dollars for a relapse of the 20th Century’s most expensive technological failure.
Harvey Wasserman is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. His SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.solartopia.org.
Egged on by a nuclear-armed Israel and its wholly owned subsidiaries throughout the US government, a blizzard of recent news reports make it clear that President Obama's foreign policy team is becoming obsessed with Iran, particularly, but not exclusively, its nascent atomic energy program.
Arab Chuckles Over SecState
Obsessions are dangerous, because in any conflict, be it political, economic, or military, they create vulnerabilities that can be exploited by one's adversaries — not to mention one's purported allies. That is because obsessions shape the Orientation of one's Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) loop in a way that induces one to see and act on what one “wants” to see rather than what “is.” When this happens, one's decision cycle looks inward and becomes disconnected from its environment, and as a result, the actions decided on will not have the desired outcome. The mismatch between desires and reality will then feed back into subsequent decision cycle, and if the obsession is not corrected inside the decision-maker's orientation , the mismatches will amplify themselves in subsequent actions. Left unaddressed only one outcome is possible: what the American strategist Colonel John Boyd, the inventor of the OODA Loop, used to call “incestuous amplification,” or an increasingly self-referencing decision making spiral, that by “talking to itself, succumbs to an inevitable evolution into chaos.
