New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a $127.5 million plan Thursday to help young black and Hispanic men. The effort includes money from financier George Soros and his philanthropy.
Koko signs: Smart men both, but neither of them has a holistic understanding of system design. In the jungle, connectivity matters. King of the Reflexive Practice Jungle, Dr. Russell Ackoff, would say this is a magnificent example of doing the wrong thing righter. Paying to connect these young men to a broken system makes no sense–funding them to build a new system to displace the broken one–now that is reflexivity. Good intentions, bad design. We have just two questions.
1. Has anyone asked the young men what they want?
2. In the context of a city failing the resilience test and likely to experience near-catastrophic unemployment in the middle class over the next ten years, is there a strategy for resilience?
By Katie Ghose, Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform Society
Left Foot Forward, BC, 5 August 2011
A farmer, a school teacher, a politician – just who would you trust to set the rules of politics?
That’s the question being posed this week with the launch of the In the Public Interest campaign. The call for a publicly funded ‘Citizens Jury’ to apply a “public interest first test” is a refreshing answer to the problem of entrenched elites and the failure of self-regulation. It’s a welcome reminder that we simply can’t leave banking to the bankers, journalism to the journalists or indeed politics to the politicians.
The state of Minnesota is home to the largest population of Somalis in North America. Like any Diaspora, the estimated 25,000 Somalis who live there ar closely linked to family members back home. They make thousands of phone calls every week to numerous different locations across Somalia. So why not make the Somali Diaspora a key partner in the humanitarian response taking place half-way across the world?
In Haiti, Mission 4636 was launched to crowdsource micro needs assessments from the disaster affected population via SMS. The project could not have happened without hundreds of volunteers from the Haitian Diaspora who translated and geo-referenced the incoming text messages. There’s no doubt that Diasporas can play a pivotal role in humanitarian response but they are typically ignored by large humanitarian organizations. This is why I’m excited to be part of an initiative that plans to partner with key members of the Diaspora to create a live crisis map of Somalia.
It is now widely accepted – and lamented — that US President Barack Obama failed dismally in attempting to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Defeated by Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, and by Israel’s friends in the U.S. — lobbyists, Congressmen and women, neo-conservatives, Christian Zionists, and assorted Arab-haters both inside and outside the Administration — the President threw in the towel.
What is less well understood is that Obama was also defeated in another major area of foreign policy – relations with Iran. When he came to office he vowed to ‘engage’ with the Islamic Republic, but this admirable objective was soon supplanted by a policy of threats, sanctions and intimidation aimed at isolating Iran, subverting its economy and overthrowing its regime.
Israel and its friends led the campaign against Iran, demonizing it as a threat to all mankind, and forcing the United States to follow suit. Israel has repeatedly, and very publicly, threatened to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities, and has done its best to drag the U.S. into war against it, in much the same way as pro-Israeli neo-conservatives – such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon — manipulated intelligence to push America into war against Iraq in 2003, with catastrophic consequences for the United States.
Phi Beta Iota: Brazil and Turkey are depicted as adults, the US as a retarded child misguided by Israel. There is no discernible difference between the Bush-Cheney Administrations and the Obama-Biden Administration with respect to foreign policy and national security, with one signal exception: the National Security Advisor is a Goldman Sachs lobbyist.
not to be confused with Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog
Ex-CIA official sounds alarm about hackers’ next targets (CNN):
The former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center raised concerns Wednesday about an impending “code war” in which hackers will tamper not just with the Internet but with technology that runs real-world infrastructure.
Somewhat fittingly, Cofer Black’s keynote talk at the Black Hat hacker conference at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas was interrupted by a literal alarm: flashing lights, sirens and the whole bit.
“Attention, please. Attention, please,” a robotic woman’s voice said repeatedly as Black smiled, apparently confused. “We are currently investigating the alarm signal you are hearing. Please remain calm.”
After a pause and some laughs from the audience, Black kept going.
Phi Beta Iota: He does not seem to realize he was put on the program as an inside joke, or that we all knew in 1990-1994 that cyber-space was going to be the next combat zone. What Mr. Black does not appear to understand, is that hackers are the good guys, while politicians, bureaucrats, and vendors who routinely betray the public trust are the bad guys. He is out of touch with both history and reality. He lives in a world of lies, not the world of truth. Only in the world of truth can problems be fully understood and intelligently addressed. Here above the line are one simple graphic and the most recent exposure of the cyber-scam that is on-going between ignorant Contracting Officers and equally ignorant vendors. Below the line are more references.
At the time of the July edition of Mazz-INT Blog, the government was tied in a knot over coming to grips with how to get long term spending under control so there would be the political conditions to raise the debt ceiling on August 2nd; NATO forces were engaged in a seeming stalemate in Libya to remove Gadhafi from power; there was rising concern about corruption in the Karzai “government” in Afghanistan; near open confrontation between Islamabad and the Washington over continuing US unilateral drone attacks against Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership inside of Pakistan; and the US Intelligence Community (IC) was finishing a quiet but well deserved victory lap for taking out Osama bin Laden. As August begins I am happy to report that Bin Laden remains dead —– with increasingly negative impacts for Al Qaeda, but little else as changed.
So what to discuss with you that is worth your time? As Eddie Layton, Nimitz’s N2 throughout WWII, was famous for saying “the biggest alligator is the one closest to you” which means to me the debt crisis and its impact on the on the IC. As I write this on 31 July, the Executive and Legislative branches are struggling to figure out how to raise the debt ceiling so the US government will not be in default on August 3rd when you are likely to be seeing these ramblings. So let’s focus on how debt crisis will likely impact the IC.
Phi Beta Iota: The interactive edition is well worth going through. Below are highlights from our own review.
Six Risks Stand Out: Fiscal crisis, Geopolitical Conflict, Climate Change, Extreme Energy Price Volatility, Economic Disparity, Global Governance Failure.
Risk Interconnectivity Map: Central to the map are Economic Disparity and Global Governance Failures. Three clusters add depth to the potential sustained crisis: Fiscal-Energy Volatility; Crime, Corruption, and Failed States; and Water-Food Security.
Overall this is one of the most extraordinary points of reference in existence.
The Global Risks Report 2011 from the World Economic Forum highlights two primary megatrends with the potential to inject significant disruption into global systems. From the report:
Two risks are especially significant given their high degrees of impact and interconnectedness. Economic disparity and global governance failures both influence the evolution of many other global risks and inhibit our capacity to respond effectively to them.
In this way, the global risk context in 2011 is defined by a 21st century paradox: as the world grows together, it is also growing apart.
It is worth noting how inter-related these two megatrends are as wealth consolidation into an elite class enables them to further deconstruct global governance mechanisms. This has been a feedback loop for at least the past 40 years, if not longer, as western growth fueled the rise of non-state economic bodies & super-empowered individuals who then lobbied against regulatory measures that would aim to keep their rise in check and mitigate the risk of disparity. Elites consolidate more money & power, further driving disparity and eroding governance. What results is an interstitial vacuum where corporate intervention fails to see any profit motive and where state intervention lacks the funds or will to govern effectively.
In effect, the combination of super-empowered non-state actors, failures of state governance, and widespread economic disparity undermines the Rule of Law by releasing elites from accountability and driving the underclass deeper into criminality.
