Category: Collaboration Zones

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Journal: Vermont Takes First Step Toward Secession

Cultural Intelligence

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The Secessionist Campaign for the Republic of Vermont

By Christopher Ketacham, 31 January 2010

The President on Wednesday may have reassured Americans that the state of the Union is “strong,” but, just the week before, a group of Vermont secessionists declared their intention to seek political power in a quest to get their state to quit the Union altogether. On Jan. 15, in the state capital of Montpelier, nine candidates for statewide office gathered in a tiny room at the Capitol Plaza Hotel, to announce they wanted a divorce from the United States of America. “For the first time in over 150 years, secession and political independence from the U.S. will be front and center in a statewide New England political campaign,” said Thomas Naylor, 73, one of the leaders of the campaign.

A former Duke University economics professor, Naylor heads up the Second Vermont Republic, which he describes as “left-libertarian, anti-big government, anti-empire, antiwar, with small is beautiful as our guiding philosophy.”

Second Vermont Republic's gubernatorial candidate is Dennis Steele, 42, a hulking Carhartt-clad fifth generation Vermonter and entrepreneur. He owns Radio Free Vermont, an Internet radio station, and honchos an online venture called ChessManiac.com. Steele says that, if elected, his first act in office would be to bring home Vermont's National Guard from overseas deployments.

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Journal: DoD Mind-Set Time Lags Most Fascinating

10 Security, 11 Society, Government, Key Players, Law Enforcement, Military, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Strategy, Threats

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Pentagon Shifts Its Strategy To Small-Scale Warfare

By August Cole and Yochi J. Dreazen

Wall Street Journal  January 30, 2010  Pg. 4

The shift in strategy sets up potential conflicts with defense contractors and powerful lawmakers uneasy with the Pentagon's growing focus on smaller-scale, guerilla warfare.

In particular, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has come to think that the Pentagon's traditional belief that it needed to be able to fight two major wars at the same time was outdated and overly focused on conventional warfare. The new QDR moves away from that model, a mainstay of U.S. military thinking for more than two decades, in favor of an expanded focus on low-intensity conflict.

Phi Beta Iota: This is most fascinating; it is also not the last word.  Here is the timeline in short and long versions.  Short:  22 years from advance guard to leadership; 12 years from internal think tanks to leadership; probably further delay from leadership acceptance to bureaucratic implementation: another 20 years.

1988: Commandant of the Marine Corps Al Gray and the USMC Intelligence Center figure it out.  General Gray publishes “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's,” American Intelligence Journal (Winter 1989-1990).

1992: USMC seeks redirection of one-third of the National Intelligence Topics (NIT) to Third World.  Across the board stone-walling by other services and the US Intelligence Community.

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Journal: Haiti–A Special Forces Sergeant Major Reports Our National Crime Against Humanity in Haiti

08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence, Threats

Marcus Aurelius

From A Retired Special Forces Sgt Major:

To All,

I just returned from Haiti with Hebler. We flew in at 3 AM Sunday to the scene of such incredible destruction on one side, and enormous ineptitude and criminal neglect on the other.

Port o Prince is in ruins. The rest of the country is fairly intact. Our team was a rescue team and we carried special equipment that locates people buried under the rubble.

There are easily 200,000 dead, the city smells like a charnel house. The bloody UN was there for 5 years doing apparently nothing but wasting US Taxpayers money.

The ones I ran into were either incompetents or outright anti American. Most are French or french speakers, worthless every damn one of them.

While 1800 rescuers were ready willing and able to leave the airport and go do our jobs, the UN and USAID ( another organization full of little OBamites and communists that openly speak against Americana) [REDACTED].

These two organizations exemplified their parochialism by:

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Journal: US Intelligence, Israel, and the Street Clowns

Academia, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government
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Landrieu phone plot: Men arrested have links to intelligence community

WASHINGTON — Two of the three men arrested on Monday along with “ACORN pimp” James O'Keefe for “maliciously tampering” with Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-LA) phones in her New Orleans office have ties to the United States intelligence community.

. . . . . . .

Dai has been an undergraduate fellow with the Washington-based national security think tank Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies (FDD), according to his College Leadership Program award biography at the Phillips Foundation — as Lindsay Beyerstein first reported.

FDD claims that it's partly funded by the US State Department. Its Leadership Council and Board of Advisers comprise many high-profile conservative politicians and public figures — including former House speaker Newt Gingrich, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), former Bush official Richard Perle and columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Dai traveled to Israel for two weeks in 2004 on an FDD-sponsored trip, the Daily Herald reported. “All expenses (room, board and travel) will be assumed by FDD,” FDD's Web site said of its Israel program.

Phi Beta Iota: A full reading is recommended, there are a number of links that make the article a starting point for deeper reading.

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Search: “global futures partnership” 2010

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice

Thank you for this search.  We select and respond to searches for two reasons:

1.  80% of the knowledge is not published, the searches allow us to provide some form of response.

2.  We discover other cool stuff while checking the larger web, and that helps us learn.

Global Futures Partnership (GFP) is now and will forever be centered on Carol Dumaine, one of two CIA employees still standing that we think the world of–the other is Andy Shepard.  There are no doubt a handful of others that merit special regard, but they have been locked in the closet with socks in their mouths so they are unknown to us.

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Journal: MILNET Selected Headlines 28 Jan 10

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Policies, Threats, Topics (All Other)

CIA Finds a Productive Employee

Capabilities Of U.S. Intelligence Agencies Questioned

Congressional critics have singled out the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), established as part of a sweeping intelligence overhaul after the September 11 attacks.

“I do not (have), nor do I believe the DNI as currently constructed has, all of the authorities to move all of the information in a way that will maximize the likelihood of detecting these plots,” NCTC Director Michael Leiter told the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee.

Phi Beta Iota: Of course the DNI does not have the authorities he needs.  That's the plan.  If intelligence were as effective as it is capable of being, we could cut the budget back to $25 billion or so, and redirect the savings to education and research, ultimately creating a Smart Nation and a World Brain.  See the last item, Fact Check: How State of Union Compares With Reality, and our comment there.

Indonesia Pulling Down Statue?

Obama in Free Fall

After Van Jones, Anita Dunn, the Skip Gates mess, the “tea-bagger” slurs, the attacks on Fox News, the Copenhagen dashes, the bowing, the apologizing, the reordering of creditors, the NEA obsequiousness, the lackluster overseas-contingency-operation front, the deer-in-the-headlights pause on Afghanistan, the pseudo-deadlines on Iran, Guantanamo, and healthcare, the transparency and bipartisanship fraud, and dozens of other things, Obama simply does not have the popularity to carry unpopular legislation forward. Indeed, he is reaching a point where he may poll more negatively than his agenda does. “Let me be perfectly clear” and “make no mistake about it” are now caricatures.

Phi Beta Iota: We are not in favor of bashing the President.  This paragraph is a tiny manifestation of the enormous anger across America as the 30% of the voters that elected Obama join with the 70% of the voters that did not vote for him (half of those did not vote at all) to realize that Dick Cheney was not the end of the line, Obama is.  The two-party system is not working.  It is not representative, it remains corrupt.  We coiuld free Obama, but like the lightbulb in the shrink joke, he has to want to be free.  Obama could be the George Washington of the 21st Century if he would pass Electoral Reform and lead the entire Nation

Reality in 2002--Little Change Since

Cut The Pentagon, Too: Why Obama's spending freeze should apply to (most of) the military

Like the budgets of all bureaucracies, but much more so, the Pentagon is stuffed with entrenched interests, parochial barons, and internecine rivalries.

There is no good reason to exempt the Pentagon's budget from this discipline.  Of course, there are plenty of good reasons to exempt parts of the defense budget from a strict spending freeze.

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