Category: Cultural Intelligence

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New Army Chief of Staff: Out of Touch? NEW: Blistering Bullshit Flag Waved from Afghanistan

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Military, Officers Call, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Standards, Tools
Marcus Aurelius Recommends

For information.

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Source of Letter

From Afghanistan for ACOS: I have not seen so much BS in a while.  The 10th Mountain deployed to Afghanistan without the proper equipment to operate in the mountains. They lacked adequate cold weather gear and our lift capability does not fly well here either.  With the exception of 40 year old Chinooks, most can't climb over the lofty peaks that permeate this country.

I attended a farewell for a friend of mine, there were 33 people there, 11 of them in the rank of 06, two in the rank of 08.  What these guys did everyday is beyond me, but little work gets done in the palace of King David I can assure you.  There are Green Berets out in villages that depend on their families to help them with the Hearts and Minds that Petraeus so often says he is trying to win, but doesn't support.  That type of warfare does little to increase the coffers of the MICC….

Chuck Spinney–we read all your stuff and his–has it right: this guy lives in a palace, Versailles on the Potomac, and is totally out of touch with reality.

Phi Beta Iota: It is not at all clear that the new Army Chief of Staff (ACOS) understands that the standard issue weapon is worthless beyond 300 meters, or that his force in combat (4% of the total force) takes 80% of the casualties while receiving 1% of the total military budget.  We know what our troops are fighting for–what is this guy fighting for on behalf of his troops?

Continue reading “New Army Chief of Staff: Out of Touch? NEW: Blistering Bullshit Flag Waved from Afghanistan”

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$500 Billion in Cuts is Minimal Mandatory….

03 Economy, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency
Michael Ostrolenk Sounds Off...

Responding to the question in The Arena, with respect to whether budget cuts are a good deal for taxpayers.

12 April 2011

If the deficit and debt are real problems that can only be addressed by cutting government spending as the Republicans claim than the budget the Republicans agreed to is a joke. It shows that the Republicans either don't believe their own rhetoric about the need to drastically curtail government spending or that they are just politicians and not statesmen. They might say the “right” thing to the tea party movement but in practice they wont lead us out of the mess that they caused in the first place starting under Bush and continuing under Obama.

If the Republicans were serious about cutting the deficit and the debt, they would do at least three things. First, they would follow the lead of then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who on Sept. 10, 2001 held a press conference at which he called for a war against wasteful Pentagon spending. He said that there was $2.3 trillion dollars unaccounted for in the Department of Defense. So what the Republicans should do is call for a full and transparent audit of the Pentagon.

The second thing they should do is support Sen. Rand Paul's moderate $500 billion in cuts as a starting point for the discussion. The third thing the Republicans should do is take a serious look at the costs of having 1,200 government organizations working on counter-terrorism. Between weeding out waste at the Pentagon, rethinking our counter-terrorism organizational strategy and Sen. Paul's cuts, the Republicans would at least be taken seriously as fiscal conservatives.

Continue reading “$500 Billion in Cuts is Minimal Mandatory….”

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Pakistan Demarche to CIA, Envoy Leaves Early

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency
DefDog Recommends...

From the trenches…..the gulf dividing the West (primarily the US) and AFPAK continues to expand….lack of understanding is the primary reason.

Terrorism & Security

Pakistan demands drawdown of US drones, CIA agents

The disclosure comes after the head of Pakistani intelligence abruptly cut short a trip to Washington this week after meeting with CIA director Leon Panetta yesterday.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: We know that US intelligence is failing to provide more than 4% “at best” of what commander and policy makers need.  That makes $80-90 billion a year a hot prospect for cuts.  To have this fraud, waste, and domestic abuse compounded by its use–with the willful orders of the White House and the impeachable neglect of the Congress–within another sovereign country whose permission has NOT been secured, suggests that a total draw-down of inept and expensive and offensive US intelligence operations should join the closure of US military bases overseas as part of the total “first phase” of budget cuts.  What US secret intelligence does “in our name” dishonors the Republic, it does NOT secure anything.

Members of Waziristan Students Federation chant slogan during a rally to condemn US drone attacks in Waziristan tribal regions, on March 19, in Peshawar, Pakistan. Mohammad Sajjad/AP
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Global Conversation on Internet Freedom

Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

building-a-distributed-decentralized-internet@googlegroups.com

YAY Bucky Fuller!

Strangely enough, with all the nightmare scenario's currently playing out, their corollary, our best dreams are also playing out.

The stuff about being targeted and persecuted, shut-down etc. becomes irrelevant in the face of a few billion users who are able to leapfrog the existing infrastructure and communicate directly with one another. Meanwhile the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) would probably be happy to extend their wing for us to gather under.

The prolific depth of mobile phone access around the world, along with the radical decrease in cost of web capable devices, paints a picture of a planetary population about to demand an alternative method of communicating besides paying a monthly fee to some telco.

Cheap hardware plus electricity should equal communicative ability!

If we don't do it, some kid in Kinshasa will – well, she will, whether we do it or not.. maybe she already has.

There are also other discussions happening and the most relevant I see is this one:

Anon is having a brainstorming session on 14th April, all day, to discuss “a parallel internet”. You can find their IRC room at: irc.anonops.net #anonsec

In terms of sheer numbers of users and real world trial and error/lessons learned recently with the efforts to support Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, China using a variety of ‘darknet' and packet management techniques; there is a very compelling case for us all to attend.

This is a user community that would gravitate toward anything that worked ‘better' and are very capable of driving a meme into production.

In the end, everyone will gravitate to whatever works better. Slow and free with a prospect of getting much, much, faster is also qualified as being ‘better' by a growing population. Slow, free and available in the bush is also ‘better' for about four Billion people. Enough to start things off anyway. By the time it gets fast enough, Western consumers will gladly jump onboard.

Tip of the Hat to Om Goeckerman at Google Group Distributed Decentralized Internet.

Phi Beta Iota: Infinite free energy is close and will not be “locked up.”  That will enable local to global clouds.  Open Farm approach applied to Open Communications is going to take us the rest of the way, starting with OpenBTS (Range Networks).

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Seth Godin: Wasting the Digital Dividend

About the Idea, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency
Seth Godin Home

Wasting the digital dividend

The internet means that many time-consuming forms of white-collar drudgery have disappeared, or at least been offloaded to cheaper people who aren't you, permitting you to spend more time on things that are actually productive and highly leveraged.

No more standing in line at the copier, trudging to the Fedex box, waiting two weeks for a letter to be returned, leaving voice mails, searching for the right person to contact, waiting months to learn a skill or a fact, discovering that a project is hopelessly broken, and on and on.

It's a little like the bump we got after the Cold War ended. The peace dividend was there, just waiting for us to repurpose our military, our military budget and our military research. We didn't. We squandered the window, wasted the money and didn't rush to fill it with the sort of top-down industrial projects (like high speed rail and efficient new forms of energy) that could have changed everything.

So, what are you going to do with the digital dividend? Cruise Facebook?

Phi Beta Iota: The blatant dishonesty of the US Government is breath-taking in that it fails to inspire a public backlash.  Instead of spending $12 billion a year on Internet freedom, it spends it on corporate vapor-ware ostensibly to achieve cyber-security.  NEWS FLASH:  The current grid is impossible to defend and not worth defending; what we can steal is not worth the cost or time.  For the public to not realize that one third of the federal budget, over one trillion a year is borrowed, and to allow the “debate” to be about less than $100 million, suggests that the US public has the government it deserves: the stupid “led” by the unethical.

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Iranian regime’s ‘information fears’

04 Education, 05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Impotency

Freed journalist: Iranian regime's ‘information fears'

Maziar Bahari Maziar Bahari faces jail if he returns to Iran

Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari was held in a Tehran jail for 118 days in 2009. His arrest came as he worked for western media outlets, including BBC Panorama. In this analysis, Mr Bahari explains why the regime fears information, the internet and a free press.

“Information is a weapon, and in the wrong hands it is even more dangerous than a real gun!”

This was my torturer's message to me in the summer of 2009 after my arrest.

Read rest of article….

See Also:

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    Two Views of Obama’s Libya Speech

    04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Military
    Chuck Spinney Sounds Off....

    Relying on a UN Security Council Resolution, but without asking Congress or the American people, President Obama attacked Libya on 19 Mar 2011. He finally got around to explaining his actions on 28 March 2011 in a nationally televised speech given at the National Defense University. Attached below are two analyses of that speech:

    Story 1 by Ed Felien appeared in The Rag Blog on April 5, a spunky left-leaning website based in the hinterlands of Austen Texas.  It is harshly critical of the speech by comparing Obama's assertions to conditions in Libya and the tensions within Libya that have created a civil war.

    Story 2 by Anne Marie Slaughter appeared in the the New York Review of Books blog on 20 March 2011.  The New York Review of Books appeals to a far more high-falutin readership than The Rag Blog, and is a kind of a forum for the panjandrums in what's left of the American Left.  Dr. Slaughter gushes over Obama's speech, saying it made an “important contribution to the Libya debate.”  She bases her conclusion (“let us protect the Libya's civilians by any means necessary”) by analyzing (a word I use charitably) some impenetrable comparisons of interests versus interests to interests versus values, but curiously, she says nothing about actual conditions in Libya, or who is fighting whom, or why they are fighting.

    The contrast between information and puffery in these two essays is stunning and says a lot about what's wrong with the American Left.

    See Other Spinney Posts

    Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Slaughter means well, but has drunk the kool-aid.  No one in Washington appears capable of reconnecting with reality and using clarity, diversity, and integrity to actually understand how far the US Government has diverged from core values of the Republic, and the public interest.  The right/neo-conservatives have cost the US tens of trillions of dollars in fraud, waste, and abuse–Dick Cheney and the Iraq/Afghanistan faux wars on terror being the current classic–but so also has the left/Demopublicans so intent on keeping their own money flowing they have completely lost sight of basic principles of governance.  These are all good people trapped in a bad system–all it takes to fix this is ONE LEADER committed to transparency, the truth, and trust.   Barack Obama is clearly NOT that leader.