Collaboration Zones – Page 1467 – Public Intelligence Blog

The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims—plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish—evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State's Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.

ClimateGate as Rorschach Test

The other side, meanwhile, cries “Remember the Pentagon Papers!” while also positing that the C.R.U. “hack” may have in fact been the work of an internal whistleblower who was distraught that scientific fraud was being perpetrated.

Comedy Central Scoops Network News on Climate-Gate Scandal

“Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented. Oh, oh, the irony!” ….[Instead of reporting on ClimateGate, “the networks reported on pro-golfer Tiger Woods' ‘minor' car accident at least 37 times. They also found time to report on an orphaned Moose and the meal selection at the president’s State Dinner.”

Glenn Beck: What Separates Climate-Gate From Other Conspiracies?

BECK: Good. Tell me, Climate-gate: Give me the one thing that you — as you're looking into it, you go, “Wow, people should pay attention to this one thing.”

GOLDBERG: Well, you know, the news that so many people are scamming and conniving behind the scenes to exploit global warming hysteria is not shocking. It's the evidence. Very rarely do you have a conspiracy where there's actual evidence like this.

BECK: A hundred and forty-five trillion is what is going to cost, their solution, trillions of dollars at stake. So, somebody is making money off of this.

GOLDBERG: That's right and for years, anyone who criticized global warming was accused of being bought and paid for by the polluting industry and whatnot, while these enlightened, objective scientists, you know, were beyond reproach. It was like Bill Murray in “Ghostbusters” who says, “Back off, man. I'm a scientist.”

Phi Beta Iota: Copenhagen will either “cover up” the fraud and failure of the science put forward by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which we judge to be 60% likely, or–if Brazil, China, India, and other decide to adapt very rapidly to this opportunity, it could put the IPCC out of business and instead call on the United Nations to endorse, and private donors such as Sir Richard Branson to fund, a World Brain Institute with an embedded global brain. At the link below is a two-page point paper we drafted for speculative reflective purposes. It may be freely distributed under Creative Commons copyright. The truth at any cost lessens all other costs–this is not rocket science, just integrity.

UN World Brain Institute and Global Game Talking Points (2 pages)

2009/12/032009/12/03

Reference: Measuring Success and Failure in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism–US Government Metrics of the Global War on Terror (GWOT)

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Academia, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Government, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Peace Intelligence

Alex P. Schmid, one of a handful of trully expert scholars in the field of terrorism and counter-terrorism, and his colleague Rashmi Singh, have created a summary that is devasting on multiple fronts. The “Global War on Terror” or GWOT has lasted longer than World Wars I and II combined; the money expended (the authors do not include the military costs of occupying Afghanistan and Iraq) has been enormous, and in all that time, no one has defined the metrics by which to measure the endeavor. The chapter in included in After the War on Terror: Regional and Multilateral Perspectives on Counter-TerrorismStrategy

See also:

Search: Strategic Analytic Model

Search: QDR “four forces after next”

2009/12/03

Journal: PowerShift–Infrastructure Independence

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Policies

Power Shift: New battery could change world, one house at a time

The prize is the culmination of 10 years of research and testing — a new generation of deep-storage battery that's small enough, and safe enough, to sit in your basement and power your home.

It promises to nudge the world to a paradigm shift as big as the switch from centralized mainframe computers in the 1980s to personal laptops. But this time the mainframe is America's antiquated electrical grid; and the switch is to personal power stations in millions of individual homes.

Continue reading “Journal: PowerShift–Infrastructure Independence”

2009/12/032009/12/03

Journal: Weak Signals–Triple Crash?

03 Economy, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Key Players

George Green's Home Page

Phi Beta Iota: Reprinted in full to allow emphasis and easier reading. Original source at logo, “as is.” Recommended by our physical gold colleagues.

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Several financial events this week indicate something big is about to happen, something that may make the 2008 credit crisis seem rather benign. First, the IMF announced that it is liquidating its gold holdings, the world's 3rd largest stash after the US and Germany. Buyers included the governments of India, Sri Lanka and Mauritius. Do you think the IMF would be selling gold at a market bottom? Bubble #1 about to burst- Gold.

Continue reading “Journal: Weak Signals–Triple Crash?”

2009/12/022009/12/02

Journal: Flawed Analogies Bush the President?

08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

Chuck Spinney Sends….

Last night President Obama crossed the Rubicon and made the Afghan War his war. Will this decision come back to haunt him? Juan Cole argues that this is likely to be the case, because Obama's escalation decision is based on a flawed analogy.

Reasoning by analogy is powerful albeit particularly dangerous form of thinking. A valid analogy can unleash the creative mind to see new connections that were previously not seen, but a false analogy can capture the imagination and cause one to see and believe visions of things as they are not. False analogies are perhaps the most powerful mental engine for taking an otherwise rational decision maker off the cliff. Nevertheless, The courtiers in the Court of Versailles on the Potomac, addicted as they are to snappy sound bytes, love analogies, the more simple minded the snapping sound, the better.

Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan

Full Story Online

author of widely read blog Informed Comment explains how Obama has been taken to the cleaners and induced to bet his Presidency by buying into the fatally flawed Beltway Consensus that (1) the Iraq Surge was an unambiguous success and (2) its corollary, namely the analogy to Afghanistan that posits a similar kind of surge will produce a similar “success” in Afghanistan. Cole makes his argument by using the simple technique of describing and comparing likenesses and differences, something Obama and his advisors should have done.

Phi Beta Iota: The Salon story is complemented by the below blog from the same author.

Top Ten things that Could Derail Obama's Afghanistan Plan

10. The biggest threat of derailment comes from an American public facing 17 percent true unemployment and a collapsing economy who are being told we need to spend an extra $30 billion to fight less than 100 al-Qaeda guys in the mountains of Afghanistan, even after the National Security Adviser admitted that they are not a security threat to the US.

Continue reading “Journal: Flawed Analogies Bush the President?”

2009/12/022009/12/02

Journal: Brazil Whacks US via WTO on Cotton

01 Agriculture, 01 Brazil, 02 China, 03 India, 06 Russia, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Government

Brazil Wins WTO Approval to Sanction U.S. Over Cotton (Update2)

Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) — Brazil won the World Trade Organization’s approval to start retaliating against the U.S. because of subsidies paid to American cotton farmers.

The WTO gave Brazil permission in August to impose $294.7 million in sanctions against U.S. goods — the second-highest amount ever permitted by the Geneva-based trade arbiter — and Brazil’s government earlier this month released a list of 222 products that may be subject to increased duties. The list includes cotton and other agricultural and textile products as well as U.S. exports such as electronics, cosmetics, ketchup, cars, chewing gum, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals.

WTO judges found in September 2004 that as much as $4 billion in annual U.S. payments to cotton farmers violated global trade rules by encouraging excess production and driving down world prices. In June 2008, they upheld a finding that the U.S., the world’s largest exporter of the fiber, hadn’t done enough to scrap aid to its cotton producers.

Continue reading “Journal: Brazil Whacks US via WTO on Cotton”

2009/12/012009/12/01

Journal: ClimateGate Ideology, Theology, Science

03 Environmental Degradation, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Geospatial, Key Players, Methods & Process

Chuck Spinney Sends: Viewed at the level of epistemology, the distinction be the search for truth in science and religion is stark:

In science the structure of the world view — i.e., the brain's interior model of reality — is evolved to match observations taken from the external world, whereas in religion, observations are evolved to match a fixed world view inserted into the brain by some kind of deity.

Miracles (anomalies that defy the model's definition of reality) might be explained by or at least rationalized within an unquestionable dogma of a religious model, whereas such anomalies in science trigger a search for tests that falsify the model. In terms of this typology, the recent scandal involving hacked emails of the UK's Climate Research Center at the University of East Anglia raises a basic question of whether global warming theory is being shaped by a predominantly scientific or religious mindset.

Category: Collaboration Zones

Journal: ClimateGate, Copenhagen, Integrity