The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
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Analyzing the Libya Crisis Map Data in 3D (Video)
Posted on June 1, 2011 by Patrick Meier|
I first blogged about GeoTime exactly two years ago in a blog post entitled “GeoTime: Crisis Mapping in 3D.” The rationale for visualizing geospatial data in 3D very much resonates with me and in my opinion becomes particularly compelling when analyzing crisis mapping data.
This is why I invited my GeoTime colleague Adeel Khamisa to present their platform at the first International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2009). Adeel used the Ushahidi-Haiti data to demonstrate the added value of using a 3D approach, which you can watch in the short video below.
Click Here For First Video (5:32)
Earlier this year, I asked Adeel whether he might be interested in analyzing the Libya Crisis Map data using GeoTime. He was indeed curious and kindly produced the short video below on his preliminary findings.
Click Here for Second Video (5:32)
The above visual overview of the Libya data is really worth watching. I hope that fellow Crisis Mappers will consider making more use of GeoTime in their projects. The platform really is ideal for Crisis Mapping Analysis.
Nobel Laureate: Globalism Has Been Ruinous for Americans
How Offshoring Has Destroyed the Economy
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, Counterpunch, 31 May 2011
These are discouraging times, but once in a blue moon a bit of hope appears. I am pleased to report on the bit of hope delivered in March of 2011 by Michael Spence, a Nobel prize-winning economist, assisted by Sandile Hlatshwayo, a researcher at New York University. The two economists have taken a careful empirical look at jobs offshoring and concluded that it has ruined the income and employment prospects for most Americans.
To add to the amazement, their research report, “The Evolving Structure of the American Economy and the Employment Challenge,” was published by the very establishment Council on Foreign Relations.
For a decade I have warned that US corporations, pressed by Wall Street and large retailers such as Wal-Mart, to move offshore their production for US consumer markets, were simultaneously moving offshore US GDP, US tax base, US consumer income, and irreplaceable career opportunities for American citizens.
Among the serious consequences of offshoring are
Phi Beta Iota: Everything killing the USA today was properly briefed to the Senate and the White House in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's. The missing ingredient was INTEGRITY on the part of the listeners. Intelligence without integrity is irrelevant; integrity without intelligence is dangerously uninformed.
Insights into the Taliban….not available from US intelligence….
TALIBAN: The Unknown Enemy
By James Fergusson
Da Capo, 432 pp., $27.50
By Chuck Leddy – Boston Globe Correspondent / June 1, 2011
Journalist James Fergusson has spent more than a decade covering the Taliban, from its beginnings in the 1990s as a militant Islamist response to the brutal warlordism then dominating Afghanistan to its 2001 ouster by US-led forces to its present-day battle to topple the US-supported Afghan regime of President Hamid Karzai. Rather than present the Taliban as a caricature of jihadist, misogynistic thugs, Fergusson has worked hard to understand them. Filled with insights about the group’s origins and motivations, this sympathetic and eye-opening account should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Afghanistan.
Fergusson opens with a portrait of the burned-out, lawless hellscape of Afghanistan in the aftermath of Soviet occupation. With multiple tribal warlords practicing highway robbery and murder, absent any control from a viable, centralized government, Afghanistan was a Hobbesian “failed state’’ run by bandits. The Taliban coalesced around a few mujahideen — holy warriors — who had been part of the insurgency that ousted the Soviet army. These fighters sought to restore order under sharia, Islamic holy law. But the Taliban were also Pashtun tribesmen. It is in explaining the complex interconnections between Pashtun and Islamic traditions that Fergusson truly shows his understanding of the organization.
Fergusson describes how the militarily powerful Taliban took over Afghanistan in the late 1990s but lost the global public relations war. The movement was irreparably tainted by horrific videos of public executions and reports of extreme restrictions against women. “From 1997 on,’’ Fergusson writes, “the Taliban were almost universally portrayed in the West as a regime beyond comprehension or redemption.’’
But what these Western reports never quite explained, Fergusson notes, is how the Taliban brought law (however harsh) and order to a nation that had rarely seen either. Today, Fergusson reports, the Taliban are riding a growing wave of anti-Americanism and anti-corruption sentiment triggered by both US military operations and strong support for Karzai, who is considered unusually corrupt by the standards of a country where governmental corruption is the norm.
As he travels a few miles outside the capital, Kabul, Fergusson observes the resurgent Taliban collecting taxes, meting out local justice, attacking American soldiers, and pockmarking the roads with bombs. Taliban commanders repeatedly tell Fergusson that the Americans must depart before national reconciliation can begin. Even an Afghan police officer, ostensibly an agent of the Karzai government, denounces the American military presence: “If [US soldiers] kill fifty people, they create five hundred Taliban,’’ he tells Fergusson, “If they did something to my family . . . I’d take revenge. I hate the Americans.’’ And he’s supposed to be on our side.
One disillusioned local official tells Fergusson, “Warlordism and insecurity have returned, and the people are fed up. They are ready to welcome the Taliban back again.’’ Indeed, the Taliban are coming back just when the Obama administration has reduced US forces in Afghanistan. Fergusson makes clear the differences between the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Many of those inside the Taliban told Fergusson that they would welcome an agreement with Washington that would swap the exclusion of Al Qaeda from Afghanistan for an American pullout and foreign aid.
Fergusson makes a powerful case that US strategy in the region is failing, and that bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table is the most sensible option. This is a provocative account written by somebody who’s talked to all the relevant parties, however unsavory, and has learned to navigate some of the world’s most treacherous terrain. In the end, Fergusson believes that talking with the Taliban might work better than fighting them.
Chuck Leddy, a freelance writer who lives in Dorchester, can be reached at chuckleddy@comcast.net.
A Conversation with Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle
David Thorburn
Books by Shirley Turkle
1984 The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit
1997 Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
2011 Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Shows that the Pentagon does not understand Cyber Warfare…..for example, when a virus is unleashed it can no longer be controlled – the epitome of collateral damage…
Cyber-weapons developed by Pentagon to enter online warfare soon
By IB Times Staff Reporter | June 1, 2011 6:05 AM EDT
International Business Times
The Pentagon has designed a list of cyber weapons which include viruses that can disrupt important networks belonging to the enemy, a report in the Washington Post said.
Phi Beta Iota: This is criminally insane. An honest president and Congress should go to ALL STOP on this idiocy, while implementing the original 1994 Sounding the Alarm suggestions.
Advisers urge military to rely less on drones, more on expertise
Eli Lake, 1 June 2011
The Washington Times
Military operations in Afghanistan rely too much on intelligence gathered by unmanned drones, often exclude important publicly available data and do not focus enough on the recruitment of human agents, a Pentagon report says.
The report by the Defense Science Board, a panel that advises the Pentagon, says that the defense budget does not properly direct funding for open-source intelligence collection – information available to the public and gathered from a wide variety of sources, including academic papers and newspapers.
“Overall, these problems tend to exclude valuable sources of social and behavioral science data, including human geography,” according to the report.
It also says analysts often are overwhelmed by the volume of data collected by ball-shaped sensors outfitted on the bottom of military aircraft and from high-tech camera and radar pods placed on blimps and sometimes even telephone poles. While the technology has helped pinpoint and kill enemy combatants and to detect cellphone conversations on the battlefield, its created a “a crisis in processing, exploitation, and dissemination” of the information.
DSB May 2011 Counterinsurgency (COIN) Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Operations
Phi Beta Iota: There is NOTHING NEW here. All of this was in General Al Gray's seminal article, “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's” (American Intelligence Journal, Winter 1989-1990) and in the original modern intelligence reform book, ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000). Joe Markowitz continues his polite urgings on the importance of open source intelligence, but in this corrupt environment he is as effective as Brent Scowcroft with Dick Cheney. The Department of Defense is OUT OF CONTROL. It lacks intelligence and integrity. This will not change until we get a Secretary of Defense committed to intelligence and integrity; OR we get an honest President, a Congress that fulfills its Article 1 responsibilities, and an Open Source Agency that can empower the public the way that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason all agreed was necessary if the Republic were to be preserved.
Continue reading “Defense Science Board to DoD: Get Brain + RECAP”
