Category: Commercial Intelligence

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Berto Jongman: The Elephant in the Room – Organized Crime and Peace Operations

Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

The Elephant in the Room: How Can Peace Operations Deal with Organized Crime?

Although the threats that organized crime pose to UN peace operations are increasing, most missions lack either the mandate or resources to deal with them effectively. By using case studies from Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, and Kosovo, this paper not only illustrates the nature of the problem, it provides recommendations on how peace agents can deal with it more effectively.

Download:

Author: Walter Kemp, Mark Shaw, Arthur Boutellis   Editor: Adam Lupel

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: The Elephant in the Room – Organized Crime and Peace Operations”

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John Frankenstein: Interpreting the “China Dream”

02 China, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence
John Frankenstein
John Frankenstein

The “China Dream” is a slogan that can be interpreted at multiple levels.  Here is one pretty good analysis:

What does Xi Jinping's China Dream mean? (BBC, 5 June 2013)

In my writing and lecturing I like to say that the Chinese leadership is trying to answer “4 basic questions”–

1. How to rule a large country with a large population from a single place

2. How to make China great again

3. If China is to become great again, how to transform the country and

4. How to deal with the outside world.

My short answers:

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Anthony Judge: World Introversion through Paracycling – Global Potential for Living Sustainabily “Outside-Inside”

Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence
Anthony Judge
Anthony Judge

World Introversion through Paracycling

Global potential for living sustainably “outside-inside”

Introduction
Incoherence of external reality
Transformation of worldview from “inside-outside” to “outside-inside”
Imagining a window of strategic opportunity for change
Insightful confusion: outside-in, inversion, introversion?
Alleviating the “weight” of external matters
Alternation of worldview between “inside-outside” and “outside-inside”
Paradoxical cycling between “inside-outside” and “outside-inside”
Paracycling: towards a terminological and visual clarification
Sphere eversion as guide to the cognitive twist of global introversion?
Imagining transcendence appropriately challenging to comprehension
Approaches to distinguishing requisite cognitive variety
Paradoxically dynamic coherence of internalized “pantheons”
Engaging with “peaceful” and “wrathful” deities
Embodying the world as a strategic opportunity
References

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SmartPlanet: Should Bus Fares Go Away — What Is True Cost of Fares, and True Falue of Optimzing Public Transport Use?

Commercial Intelligence

smartplanet logoShould bus fares be free?

By | June 20, 2013

As bus fare hikes in Brazil helped spark the largest protests that the country has seen in 20 years (those fare hikes have since been reversed in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro), The Economist has a provocative proposition: make buses free.

They come to this conclusion looking at the proof-of-payment fare-collection systems that many transit systems have adopted as a way to make transit systems more efficient. But The Economist says that making transit free would take that efficiency a step further. Here’s the argument:

Fares bring in a lot of money, but they cost money to collect—6% of the MTA’s budget, according to a 2007 report in New York magazine. Fare boxes and turnstiles have to be maintained; buses idle while waiting for passengers to pay up, wasting fuel; and everyone loses time. Proof-of-payment systems don’t solve the problem of fare-collection costs as they require inspectors and other staff to handle enforcement, paperwork and payment processing. Making buses and subways free, on the other hand, would increase passenger numbers, opening up space on the streets for essential traffic and saving time by reducing road congestion.

Transit systems aren’t cheap so, of course, the lost fare revenue would have to be made up somehow. That can be done in a number of ways: a congestion charge for cars entering dense downtowns; funneling money from downtown parking into transit; or getting private sponsorships.

Continue reading “SmartPlanet: Should Bus Fares Go Away — What Is True Cost of Fares, and True Falue of Optimzing Public Transport Use?”

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Neal Rauhauser: Transcript of Meeting Between Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt with Department of State Staff

Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence
Neal Rauhauser
Neal Rauhauser

All sort of stuff popping up today.  Worth a complete and careful reading.

Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Friday April 19, 2013

On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was under house arrest in rural UK at the time and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Also in attendance was Jared Cohen, a former Secretary of State advisor to Hillary Clinton, Scott Malcomson, Director of Speechwriting for Ambassador Susan Rice at the US State Department and current Communications Director of the International Crisis Group, and Lisa Shields, Vice President of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting, they said, to discuss ideas for “The New Digital World”, their forthcoming book to be published on April 23, 2013.

We provide here a verbatim transcript of the majority of the meeting; a close reading, particularly of the latter half, is revealing.

You can download the recording here (ogg)

 

[beginning of tape]

Complete Transcript Below the Line

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SchwartzReport: Everything Americans Think They Know About Drugs Is Wrong: A Scientist Explodes the Myths

Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

schwartz reportFinally some actual facts about drugs and drug use. This report is, I hope, the first of many making it clear that the War on Drugs is basically a racist jihad against the poor and disadvantaged used to support an entire bureaucracy of police, judges, prosecutors, prisons, prison guards, and everyone else who can figure an angle to get their snout in the public tax money trough under this umbrella. All these people ar! e making a living off the pain and suffering of millions, mostly people of color. Worse this war is responsible, in the same way the alcohol prohibition created the modern Mafia, for creating the Drug cartels. The entire effort is a study in dysfunction, greed, racism, and stupidity, and it has been going on now for decades with no appreciable effect on reducing drug availability.

Everything Americans Think They Know About Drugs Is Wrong: A Scientist Explodes the Myths
KRISTEN GWYNNE – AlterNet (U.S.)

noble gold