Robert Steele: McKinsey on Big Data & Internet of Things – Four Missing Perspectives

Advanced Cyber/IO
Robert David STEELE Vivas

A May 2011 report from McKinsey, “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity,” is assuredly worth reading.

McKinsey Page with various download options

While current commentaries, such as this February 2012 overview from The New York Times, “The Age of Big Data, focus on McKinsey's emphasis on the explosion of data, the other focus of the report was on the Internet of things — a micro-manager's dream come true.

For myself, I see several perspectives lacking in the McKinsey report.

01)  The report continues to think of big data in relation to specific companies and industries.  It fails to recognize that the really big data is multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, and multidomain.  A corollary of this failure of perspective is that it fails to emphasize the urgency of getting to open data access, to information sharing treaties and agreements, and to next big leap, hybrid intelligence, hybrid policy, hybrid budgets, and hybrid governance.

Continue reading “Robert Steele: McKinsey on Big Data & Internet of Things – Four Missing Perspectives”

David Swanson: Nobel Peace Prize in Toilet – Pressure Mounts to Rescind Obama Award and Clean Up the Entire Process

Ethics, Peace Intelligence
David Swanson

Petition: Investigate Betrayal of the Nobel Peace Prize

Dear Members of Stockholm's County Administrative Board:

The signers of this petition include an array of peace groups and peace activists based in the United States.   The undersigned wish to endorse and support the investigation that Stockholm’s County Administrative Board has reportedly begun based on it supervisory role over the Nobel Foundation and information received from Norwegian peace researcher/author Fredrik Heffermehl.  We understand your Board has formally asked the Nobel Foundation to respond to allegations that the peace prize no longer reflects Nobel's will that the purpose of the prize was to diminish the role of military power in international relations.  According to Heffermehl, “Nobel called it a prize for the champions of peace,…and it's indisputable that (Nobel) had in mind the peace movement, the movement which is actively pursuing a new global order … where nations safely can drop national armaments.”

The undersigned non-profit peace organizations and activists base their endorsement of your inquiry on the following facts:

Read full article.

What's the Matter With Norway?

The beautiful thing about the internet is that whenever you write an essay on a topic you imagine is new, some wonderful person contacts you within about an hour who's written a whole book about it.  This is different from writing a book about something new (or old) like the Kellogg-Briand Pact (everybody still thinks it must be a breakfast cereal).

Fredrik Heffermehl's book “The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted,” is a wonderful thing to discover.  I understand if you just can't stomach discovering that Norway and the committee that hands out the peace prizes have become as corrupted as a Congressman.  But if awardees like George Marshall, Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and Barack Obama already had you scratching your head a little bit, you may appreciate learning the details of where the prize bestowers ran off the rails and how they might manage to climb back aboard the peace train.

Alfred Nobel left behind a legally binding will that required giving a prize to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”  Like the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, the Nobel Committee has largely abandoned its original mission.

. . . . . .

Heffermehl argues persuasively that no Nobel prize for peace has been awarded with appropriate justification since 2001.  In fact, in his analysis, 50 of the 120 prizes given between 1901 and 2009 were not justified.  Heffermehl bases that judgment primarily on the case made for each laureate by the committee awarding the prize.  Were he to examine the laureates and those passed over, the number of unjustified prizes might increase.

Heffermehl also looks at the justification for the prizes awarded under each of the 12 committee chairs and six committee secretaries that have ever held those posts.  The two chairs who have served since 2003 receive far and away the worst scores, while the two who served up through 1941 score dramatically better than the others.  Similarly, the two secretaries who held that position up through 1945 receive high marks, while the one, Geir Lundestad, who has been Secretary since 1990 has, in Heffermehl's scoring, performed miserably.

Read rest of article.

Owl: Infanticide & Gendercide . . . Discuss . . .

07 Health, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Ethics
Who? Who?

When you have ethicists offering an argument that transforms infanticide – murder – to abortion, which is supposedly not murder, then the next step is to argue for murder of kids and finally, murder of adults. The challenge for the elite’s philosophers will be to find or create terms to hide the fact it is murder. But if infanticide can be made innocuous, they will have achieved a huge step towards efforts at legitimating murder of other age groups, their ultimate goal. The typical anti-abortionists (usually right-of-center Catholics and conservatives) indeed are right about abortion expressing a culture of death, but their error is to blame the establishment of such a culture on abortion alone, as if merely prohibiting abortion will end the culture of death.  Such an assumption is enormously naïve and false. There are many more components to that culture they seem to willfully ignore, such as the war machine, environmental exploitation and degradation, unbridled finance capitalism, and so much more. Limiting it to abortion gives too much credit to one facet of the whole, which has many other facets. Evil is one, but  evil does not have one tentacle, it has multiple tentacles, to more efficiently grab its victims.

Abortion article author receives death threats

Dr Francesca Minerva, a former Oxford University ethicist, who co-wrote a controversial article that argued killing newborn babies should be as permissible as abortion, has said she has received death threats over the paper.

Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent

The Telegraph, 2 March 2012

The article, which argued newborns and foetuses were only “potential persons” and not “actual persons”, has provoked a storm of protest.

Dr Minerva, a research associate at Oxford while being based at the University of Melbourne, said the recent days had been “the worst in my life” after the article attracted widespread attention.

“This is not a proposal for law,” she told an Australian news website. “This is pure academic discussion.

“I wish I could explain to people it is not a policy and I'm not suggesting that and I'm not encouraging that.”

The authors, whose piece was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, suggested that “what we call after-birth abortion (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”.

Read full article.

See Also:

Owl: Medical Ethics Extend Abortion Okay to Adults

Owl: Greece Explodes on 20 March – Massive Credit Insurance Whirlpool Speeds Up — and Forced Population Reduction…

Event: 16-18 / 19-21 April London Executive Leadership in Peacebuilding, International Development, Human Rights

Peace Intelligence

Are you working in peacebuilding, international development or human rights?

Would you like to improve the strategic impact, quality and effectiveness of your operations?

Would you like to ensure effective monitoring and evaluation for your projects?

World renowned expert Kai Brand Jacobsen will be in London this April to run two programmes for practitioners working in peacebuilding, international development, violence prevention, human rights and related fields.

The details of the programme can be found on the following links, together with information on Kai.

1. Improving Strategic Impact, Quality and Effectiveness in Peacebuilding & Peace Support Operations 

Executive Leadership Programme 

16th – 18th of April, 2012, London, UK

Fee: GBP 495 (includes course fee, preparation materials, certification)

Special discount: Early Payment, Multiple Participants, Two Courses Taken Together

Improving Strategic Impact is a three-day Executive Leadership Programme (ELP) designed for senior practitioners, peacebuilding experts, and heads of agencies working in peacebuilding and peace support operations.

This includes:

crisis management; violence prevention; mediation, peacemaking and peace processes during armed conflict; peacebuilding and development; post-war recovery and reconciliation; and demobilization, disarmament and reintegration programmes.

The course draws on best practices in programme and strategic planning and design. It is a highly practical, hands-on training to help organisations, agencies and governments improve the quality, impact and effectiveness of their programmes and operations.

2. Designing & Implementing Effective Monitoring and Evaluation for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation Programmes, UN Missions & Post-War Recovery & Rebuilding

Executive Leadership Programme

19th – 21st of April, 2012, London, UK

Fee: GBP 495 (includes course fee, preparation materials, certification)

Special discount: Early Payment, Multiple Participants, Two Courses Taken Together

This is a three-day Executive Leadership Programme designed for senior practitioners, monitoring & evaluation units, field staff, and heads of agencies working in peacebuilding and peace support operations. This includes:

crisis management; violence prevention; mediation, peacemaking and peace processes during armed conflict; peacebuilding and development; post-war recovery and reconciliation; UN missions; and demobilization, disarmament and reintegration programmes

The programme has been designed to assist organisations, agencies and missions in the field to see how to develop appropriate monitoring & evaluation systems and processes customized for their exact needs and contexts.

Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen

Director, Department of Peace Operations – PATRIR

Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen is an international expert in strategic planning, mediation and peace processes, violence prevention, infrastructure for peace (I4P) and post-war stabilisation and recovery. Kai consults widely for governments, foreign ministries, and international and national organisations. He works as an advisor to several governments and international and national agencies, including the OSCE, the Commonwealth Secretariat, and the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues. He is a co-founder and President of the Peace Action, Training and Research Institute of Romania (PATRIR).

Further information and links:

Kai Brand Jacobsen

Kai's TED talk

PATRIR wins World Vision International Peace Prize.

Tip of the Hat to Berto Jongman.

DefDog: $15 Billion for Cyber-Command, Zero for Actual Needs + Meta-RECAP

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Military
DefDog

The myths behind the spending — disavowed by true subject-matter experts, manipulated by the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) to spend more on vaporware….

RSA Conference: On the Subject of Cyber War and Industrial Espionage

Talk of an impending ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor’ is not an uncommon image evoked during discussions of cyber threats to the critical infrastructure of the United States. But the countries with the most capability do not necessarily have the most interest in launching the types of attacks against the United States that make for movie plots, a panel of experts said at the RSA Conference Wednesday.

“There are nation-states that absolutely have the capability (to launch a major attack), but they don’t have the intent – mostly because it wouldn’t be in their own interest, and the spillover effects would be very damaging to the world economy and a lot of other things,” said Eric Rosenbach, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy in the Department of Defense. “The other reason is, that type of attack, contrary maybe to what the conventional wisdom is, I think would be very difficult to disguise.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  The alarm was sounded — and the solution proffered — in 1994.  What we should have been doing all this time is going with full open source software across the board, and an end to buggy irresponsible proprietary code and even worse, buggy irresponsible secret code.  It now appears that intelligent cities and states are going to have to take matters into their own hands — this is consistent with what some states are already doing (planning for federal collapse, refusing corporate business absent a waiver of corporate personality).

See Also:

Continue reading “DefDog: $15 Billion for Cyber-Command, Zero for Actual Needs + Meta-RECAP”

Owl: Medical Ethics Extend Abortion Okay to Adults

Ethics
Who? Who?

Given all the murder we do via war, economic embargoes, subsidized drug trafficking, etcetera, there is a certain logic to this satirical piece.

When do we get to euthanize the medical ethicists who say murdering newborn babies is good for society?

Mike Adams

NaturalNews, 2 March 2012

EXTRACT:

“Lest you think this genocidal streak among the so-called scientific community is limited to just a couple of medical whackos who wrote a paper in a science journal, recall the fact that famed physicist Stephen Hawking openly and adamantly insists human beings are nothing more than “biological robots” who have no souls, no consciousness, no free will and therefore no value as anything other than a collection of cells. Snuffing out the lights on something that isn't really alive can't exactly be called murder, can it? So the bizarre view that human beings are not conscious beings with minds or souls is, of course, the prerequisite argument to justifying their mass murder. “It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by  physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.” – Stephen Hawking, the Grand Design. If free will is nothing more than an illusion, then that means you aren't responsible for your own actions anyway, so committing mass murder against others is morally neutral for you. Killing babies is of no consequence. Heck, you might as well just pick up a full-auto M4, march into a local high school, and start blasting away all the students, teachers and principal, then claim it must have been your biology that caused you to do it because according to Stephen Hawking, you have no mind or consciousness to begin with. That's the kind of madness the quack philosophies of people like Hawking end up promoting. But it isn't just Hawking who believes humans have no value as conscious, living beings — DNA discovered Francis Crick also pushed the same stilted beliefs: “You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules,”, Crick claimed in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis.” This view by Crick, just like the view of Hawking, is that human beings are merely biological machines that only appear to house conscious beings inside. A newborn is just a really advanced fetus, and a fetus is just a couple of cells, they might argue. So a teenage boy playing baseball at the local park is just an advanced version of a newborn, and we can murder him too, if we like. In fact, nobody is off limits from these genocidal maniacs because at no point in human development do psychotic scientific whackos like Hawking or Crick admit that consciousness enters the body, thereby achieving some degree of merit or value as a living, breathing, free-thinking being. These same views are mirrored across the so-called “scientific” community, which has increasingly revealed itself to be a collection of death merchants, corporate sellouts, clinical quacks and hyper-arrogant God complex worshippers whose deepest dreams always seem to involve destroying humanity…Because after all, if the argument is that we can openly kill people as long as such murders benefit society, then there's a really, really long list of people who need to be taken out, starting with many of the top death-merchant scientists who push all this madness. (But we don't do that kind of thing, because we're decent people, see?) If we kill them at age 55, it's not really murder, remember. It's just a really drawn-out post-partum abortion, they say. In fact, according to these science psychos, you can kill anybody right up to the day they die and still call it an abortion. It's all just a matter of time, and time is an illusion, the physicists claim.”

Complete article with links below the line.

Continue reading “Owl: Medical Ethics Extend Abortion Okay to Adults”

Mini-Me: If You Can Find It, Can You Handle the Truth?

Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Ethics, Government
Who? Mini-Me?

Americans Will Need “Black Markets” To Survive

Brandon Smith

SHTFplan.com, 2 March 2012

EXTRACT

If the events in EU nations such as Greece, Spain, and Italy are any indication, the U.S., with its massive debt to GDP ratio (real debt includes entitlement programs), is looking at one of two possible scenarios:  default, austerity measures, and high taxes, or, hyperinflation, and then default, austerity measures, and high taxes.

. . . . . .

Black markets give the citizenry a means to protest the taxation of a government that no longer represents them.  In a country stricken with austerity, these networks allow the public to thrive without having to pay for the mistakes or misdeeds of political officials and corporate swindlers.

Read full article.

See Also:

If This Is Such a Strong Economy, Why Does This Chart Look Recessionary?