The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
By Christian A. DeHaemer | Thursday, December 30th, 2010
Energy & Capital
1. China real estate bubble pops.
2. Spain defaults
3. Decade of natural gas
4. Uranium companies surge
5. China clings to dollar, riots ensue
6. Farm land jumps in price
7. Dow has four 10% corrections in 2011, ends year up 9.7%
8. The year of the electric car
9. Dead tech revival (Intel, IBM, CISCO, Corning)
10. Fidel Castro dies
Read the substantive comments associated with each of the above….
TruthDig Posted on Dec 28, 2010
By Robert Scheer
Two years into the Obama presidency and the economic data is still looking grim. Don’t be fooled by the gyrations of the stock market, where optimism is mostly a reflection of the ability of financial corporations—thanks to massive government largesse—to survive the mess they created. The basics are dismal: Unemployment is unacceptably high, the December consumer confidence index is down and housing prices have fallen for four months in a row. The number of Americans living in poverty has never been higher, and a majority in a Washington Post poll said they were worried about making their next mortgage or rent payment.
In a parallel universe lives Peter Orszag, President Barack Obama’s former budget director and key adviser, who even faster than his mentor, Robert Rubin, has passed through that revolving platinum door linking the White House with Wall Street. The goal is to use your government position to advance the interests of your future employer, and Orszag and Rubin’s actions in the government and then at Citigroup provide stunning examples of the synergy between big government and high finance.
5 Overlooked Stories (CSM)
1. Stuxnet
2. TARP is Cheap
3. Common School Standards
4. Rise of Natural Gas
5. Twilight of the Desktop
20 Hopeful Stories (YES! Magazine)
1. Climate Crisis Response Takes a New Direction
2. Wikileaks Lifts the Veil
3. Momentum is Building for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons
4. Resilience is the New Watchword
5. Health Care—Still in Play
6. Corporate Power Challenged
7. A local economy movement is taking off
8. Cooperatives Make a Comeback.
9. A Turn Away from Homophobia
10. Social Movements Still Our Best Hope
Full details below the line
Continue reading “Tom Atlee Sends: 10 Hopeful, 5 Overlooked Stories”
David Albright, Paul Brannan, and Christina Walrond
22 December 2010, Preliminary Assessment
Did Stuxnet Take Out 1,000 Centrifuges at the Natanz Enrichment Plant?
10 pages
Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS)
Phi Beta Iota: US Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) computer systems are still on the Internet and still very vulnerable to internal and external interference, as well as the standard 50% “errors and omissions” that come with sloppy computer work so characteristic of US vendors. Many sounded the alarm in 1990 (Winn Schwartau, Peter Black) through 1994 (Robert Steele, various field grade officers at the Air War College) but no one wanted to listen. The US is as close to a complex melt-down (political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, natural-geographic) as we have witnessed in our lifetime.
1998 TAKEDOWN: Targets, Tools, & Technocracy
1995 Military Perspective on Information Warfare: Apocalypse Now
Although other papers have been written since then, the three “originals” in the author's view are Major Gerald R. Hust, “Taking Down Telecommunications”, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, 1993); Major Thomas E. Griffith, Jr., “Strategic Attack of National Electrical Systems”, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, 1994; and H. D. Arnold, J. Hukill, and A. Cameron of the Department of the Air Force, “Targeting Financial Systems as Centers of Gravity: ‘Low Intensity' to ‘No Intensity' Conflict”, in Defense Analysis (Volume 10 Number 2, pages 181-208), 1994.
I received this email from a close friend, a Republican of the old school:
“When 50+ years ago Engine Charlie Wilson said what's good for General Motors is good for America, he was mostly right. Now corporations have turned that aphorism on its head.”
Tuesday, Dec 28, 2010 08:03 ET
Where are the jobs? Overseas, of course
American consumers have little to do with the big profits many top American corporations are now racking up
By PALLAVI GOGOI, Associated Press
Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up. So why isn't anyone hiring?
Actually, many American companies are — just maybe not in your town. They're hiring overseas, where sales are surging and the pipeline of orders is fat.
EXTRACT: Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria worries that the trend could be dangerous. In an article in the November issue of the Harvard Business Review, he says that if U.S. businesses keep prospering while Americans are struggling, business leaders will lose legitimacy in society. He exhorted business leaders to find a way to link growth with job creation at home.
Other economists, like Columbia University's Sachs, say multinational corporations have no choice, especially now that the quality of the global work force has improved. Sachs points out that the U.S. is falling in most global rankings for higher education while others are rising.
“We are not fulfilling the educational needs of our young people,” says Sachs. “In a globalized world, there are serious consequences to that.”
Read complete article at Salon.com….
See Also:
Army invited attention to following article in this morning's daily “Stand-To” e-mail.
Special forces wary of ‘don't ask, don't tell' repeal
By Rowan Scarborough
The Washington Times
6:39 p.m., Monday, December 27, 2010
EXTRACT: The working group's report contained this observation: “These survey results reveal to us a misperception that a gay man does not ‘fit' the image of a good warfighter – a misperception that is almost completely erased when a gay service member is allowed to prove himself alongside fellow warfighters.
“Anecdotally, we heard much the same. As one special-operations force warfighter told us, ‘We have a gay guy [in the unit]. He's big, he's mean, and he kills lots of bad guys. No one cared that he was gay.' ”
Said Adm. Worthington: “It just depends on how they comport themselves. If they start breaking out the bows and the earrings in the barracks, that might cause a little trouble. That becomes a good order and discipline sort of thing. The services are going to have to tighten up on regulations.”
Seven years ago Tom Atlee, our mentor on collective intelligence and community self-organization for resilience and sustainability, began focusing on “ways of communicating.” Responding to a recent query from us about alternatives to partisan politics or dictatorships, he offered up the below links, each of which has many other links, as food for reflection.
1. Designing Multi-Process Public Participation Programs
2. A map of Community Intelligence and some of its important constituents
3. Approaches to Community Engagement and the Generation of Community Wisdom
The latter offers a 1-paragraph description of each of almost 50 processes).
And, of course, there is Tree Bressen et al
4. A Pattern Language for Group Process
Below is a general commentary he offered on “modalities” as a mixed bag.
Continue reading “Worth a Look: Communications, Communities, & Modalities”
