Category: Collaboration Zones

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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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US Goverment 2011 Revenue, Costs, & Debt–Two Party Tyranny Lies Straight Up, Media Goes Along

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy
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UPDATED 29 May 2011 to add top-level link:

Seven Promises to America–Who Will Do This?

Let's start with the state of inequality in the USA today–the concentration of wealth would make Hitler proud.  The middle class is the Jews, the blue collar class is the working Poles (the ones allowed to live), and Congress is the appeaser and co-conspirator.  The White House is the SS for Hitler (Goldman Sachs and Wall Street).

Source of Graphic (Mother Jones)

For the US media to be consumed with a less than $100 million budget cut at a time when the US Government is borrowing, WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION and WITHOUT CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY, one third of its operating budget, over a trillion dollars a year, is grounds for the impeachment of the President, every Senator, and every Member of Congress.  This is a Demo-Publican Co-Conspiracy of insane criminality.

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The fraud inherent in the government shut-down “confrontation” and the craven collaboration of the mass media, particularly the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Bloomberg, and CNN, is breathtaking.  The lunacy continues.

To the left is a simple chart of where the federal, state, and local governments get their revenue.  The fact that one third of the federal revenue is DEBT is itself breathtaking, and grounds for impeaching every Senator and Representative now serving.  Source Online

Below is more interesting.  This is a pie-chart that shows the current (tiny) slice of revenue sources in relation to the total economy and the much, much larger “pie” that has been ignored by the US Government because the US Government at the political level is CORRUPT and so is the corporate media that refuses to do holistic accurate reporting on what is and what could be.

Below the Line: APT Tax and Real Military Budget

Continue reading “US Goverment 2011 Revenue, Costs, & Debt–Two Party Tyranny Lies Straight Up, Media Goes Along”

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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….

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