Cultural Intelligence – Page 847 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/08/07

Marcus Aurelius: White People! It Is Your Duty to Die.

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency, Policies

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius

The below is provided as a window into emergent very strong feelings from the white middle and lower class that has been disenfranchised by Wall Street yet unwilling to focus their animosity on those who have failed to govern America in the public interest. This is a cultural intelligence snap-shot.

Politricks

YOU OLD WHITE PEOPLE. IT IS YOUR DUTY TO DIE

SO SAY THE HISPANIC LEADERS

By California Coalition for Immigration Reform

Augustin Cebada , Brown Berets; “Go back to Boston ! Go back to Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims! Get out! We are the future. You are old and tired. Go on. We have beaten you. Leave like beaten rats. You old white people. It is your duty to die. Through love of having children, we are going to take over.

Richard Alatorre , Los Angeles City Council. “They're afraid we're going to take over the governmental institutions and other institutions. They're right. We will take them over . . . We are here to stay.”

Excelsior , the national newspaper of Mexico, “The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot.”

Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez , University of Texas; “We have an aging white America . They are not making babies. They are dying. The explosion is in our population . . . I love it. They are shitting in their pants with fear. I love it.”

2011/08/072011/08/07

Richard Wright: F-22 Raptor Goes Under the Bus

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Technologies

It is amazing that the L.A. Times would publish this story. Maybe even the ‘lame stream media' is starting to wake up to the foolishness of the MICC.

High costs, malfunctions plague F-22 Raptor fighter jets

W. J. Hennigan

Los Angeles Times, 6 August 2011

The fleet of 158 F-22 planes — costing $412 million each — has never entered combat and has been grounded since May 3 because of a government safety investigation. The probe follows more than a dozen incidents in which oxygen was cut off to pilots, a problem suspected of contributing to at least one fatal accident.

Phi Beta Iota: The Los Angeles Times was among several mainstream newspapers that refused $100,000 full page ads against the Iraq War. Like CNN and Fareed Zakaria, they do not stray from the approved party line. This is a very clear sign (to us, at least) that Wall Street is throwing DoD under the bus. Leon Panetta probably has no idea what is about to hit him–hyping Al Qaeda will not match a deliberate Wall Street shut down of all support for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Comples (MICC). A Civil War is in progress in the USA, on multiple fronts.

2011/08/072011/08/07

Fareed Zakaria: Why Defense Should be Cut BIG

03 Economy, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military

Why defense spending should be cut

By Fareed Zakaria

August 3, 2011

Fareed Zakaria: “the U.S. defense establishment is the world’s largest socialist economy”

Phi Beta Iota: This talented individual has never left the “lane in the road” assigned to him. He thrives on “civility” and not questioning what passes for conventional wisdom among the elites. As much as all of us who have been saying this for decades are glad to hear him speak such common sense, what this really tells us is that Wall Street is now ready to sacrifice the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) and all their jobs, to save its own multi-million dollar bonuses. Banks and Big Oil are the winners, the public continues to lose precisely because no one is actually representing the public interest.

2011/08/072011/08/07

DefDog: Leon Panetta AQ Fear-Mongering w/o a Clue

10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military, Threats

It is obvious that this man has no clue. We are developing fighters
(F-22/35) that have no threat that cannot be handled by the F-117 (which is the be all to end all) but we are dangerously close to imploding if more budget cuts come our way? Strengthen the force, reduce the technology (which doesn't work in most cases) and let's put DoD on the right path, defense of the Nation (and not police force of the world)……

Leon Panetta Hypes al Qaeda to Ward Off More Defense Cuts

Steve Clemons

The Atlantic, 6 August 2011

EXTRACT:

It seems that one week, al Qaeda is on the run and “near collapse” and the next, al Qaeda remains the reason why the US needs to continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a Pentagon designed to fight the wrong wars. This is irresponsible hyping of a threat to justify massive defense spending during a period of real fiscal stress.

Phi Beta Iota: Daniel Ellsberg had it exactly right when he lectured Henry Kissinger in the 1970's on Viet-Nam:

The danger is, you’ll become like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information].

Panetta would be well-served by attending to what Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York) has to say:

When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.

2011/08/07

Paul Jacob: Rogue Government USA

03 Economy, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, IO Deeds of War, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Paul Jacob is president of Citizens in Charge, a non-profit, non-partisan group working to protect and expand voter initiative rights, and the Citizens in Charge Foundation, a charitable foundation conducting research on the initiative process, educating the public and litigating to defend the petition rights of Americans.

Paul Jacob

Rogue government, USA

Early last week, insider Republican and CNN columnist David Frum lashed out at the GOP’s Tea Party wing, writing: “You can’t save the system by destroying the system.” I responded on This is Common Sense:

If the system has put America on a crash course with disaster, then that system must be replaced. With a better one.

When I wrote that I had not yet fully comprehended the full import of the goofy creation (by the debt deal) of what Rep. Ron Paul calls a Super Congress — the select committee of senators and representatives to be put in charge of budgeting, with the rest of Congress not allowed to amend their proposals, just vote yea or nay.

See Also by Paul Jacob:

Unrepresentative government

What do you call a “representative government” that enjoys the approval of less than one in four of the people it is charged with… more

2011/08/06

Jason Silva: Creativity, Marijuana, & Butterfly Effect

09 Justice, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

On Creativity, Marijuana and “a Butterfly Effect in Thought”

Jason Silva

Reality Sandwich

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.” […] “…by some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.” — Pearl Buck, Winner of a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.

In a blog post last year entitled “Marijuana and Divergent Thinking”, Jonah Lehrer explains that many creative
tasks require the cultivation of an “expansive associative net, or what psychologists refer to as a “flat associative hierarchy.” What this essentially suggests is that creative people should be able to make far-reaching connections among all sorts of seemingly unrelated ideas, and to not dismiss one possible connection just because it seems far-fetched.

Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in whicwe perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.

The Imaginary Foundation says that “to understand is to perceive patterns” and this is exactly what all great thinkers have done throughout the ages: they have provided a larger, dot-connecting, aerial view of things that subsumes the previous paradigm. As Richard Metzger has written:

What great minds have done throughout history is provide an aerial view of things. A larger more encompassing view that often subsumes the previous paradigm and then surpasses it in completeness with the vividness of its metaphors. Consider now how the evolving notions of a flat earth, Copernican astronomy and Einsteinian physics have subsequently changed how mankind sees its place in the cosmos, continuously updating the past explanations with something superior.

2011/08/06

Pierre Sprey Skewers Chuck Spinny & Stephen Walt — Big Oil, Wall Street, and Military-Industrial Complex Destroying USA

03 Economy, 10 Security, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, IO Deeds of War, Military, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy

My good friend Pierre Sprey took issue with my characterization of Steven Walt's critique of US grand strategy as being excellent subject to two omissions. Attached herewith are Pierre's comments — they are spot on, and I stand corrected on my characterization of “excellent” … or perhaps more accurately … I stand clearly and fairly skewered. 😉

Chuck Spinney
Cap Ferrat, France

Comments by Pierre Sprey:

Chuck,

Although I appreciate that Mr. Walt's heart is in the right place–particularly regarding his admirably staunch opposition to the malign influence of the Israelis, the neocons and “W”–his essay's concept of US grand strategy for the last two decades is just as shallow as the crap from the NYT, the WSJ, the Post and the Council on Foreign Relations. He commits the two fundamental errors common to nearly all foreign policy pundits, errors that inevitably reduce their beard-stroking discussions of “grand strategy” to silliness:

1. He assumes that the US has a foreign policy or a grand strategy when in fact it has none. The US government's actions, like every other country's, are dominated by its domestic politics. And those politics dominate every move made with regard to other countries.

2. He ignores the three most powerful–and most permanent–domestic influences on America's actions abroad: Big Oil, Wall Street and the MICC. Anybody who ignores these three in recounting U.S. actions abroad is either a) hopelessly out of touch, or b) is serving the interests of the defense, financial or oil establishments, or all three.

Aside from these two crippling errors in his reasoning, Mr. Walt's fulsome praise for the success of the USG's “offshore balancing”–that is, the Big Oil (and MICC) inspired policy of setting Iran and Iraq at each other's throats since the 1940s–shows either profound ignorance or profound Kissingerian cynicism.

One last piece of silliness in the Walt essay, quite common to journalists and historians seeking a “hook” for their American Empire story, is the idea of the August 2, 1990 “turning point”, a date that marks the beginning of the decline in our allegedly successful empire. Such hooks only mask the inescapable spread of rot within empires, usually starting at birth.

With Mr. Walt's help, I am coming to believe all public discussions of grand strategy should be greeted with howls of derisive laughter.

Pierre

Post Under Discussion:

Chuck Spinney: Madness in White House, K Street Thrives