Nick Eftimiades: New Course Intellience & National Security in the Undiscovered County

Academia, Ethics, Government
Professor Nick Eftimiades
Professor Nick Eftimiades

New King’s College Course on Intelligence and National Security

Posted by neftimiades on March 31, 2013

This is a new graduate course I will be teaching for King’s College War Studies Department beginning autumn, 2013.  The course is called Intelligence & National Security in the Undiscovered Country .  It will be a 20 credit Master’s Degree course on the future of intelligence and national security.  The course description is DRAFT.

Module Description:

Consider for a moment the words of William Shakespeare who characterized our fear of the future in Hamlet. “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of” Hamlet tells us that it is better to suffer the ills of the day than to travel to the Undiscovered Country.  What will the future bring for intelligence and national security and are we prepared for it?

The concept of a nation state is changing.  Globalization, regional alliances, global and regional environmental and economic issues, telecommunications, changing demographics, and integrating social value systems are altering the nation state.  The idea of what it means to “defend ourselves” decades from now will be dramatically different from what it is today.  New constructs for national security necessitate new intelligence and military capabilities.  Defending a nation may become an exercise in cyber warfare, global policing functions, nation building and support, small unit combat operations, and exerting diplomatic, political, and economic influence.  As the emphasis in national security capabilities changes so too will the intelligence functions supporting them.

Continue reading “Nick Eftimiades: New Course Intellience & National Security in the Undiscovered County”

John Maguire: Hackerspaces & Open-Source Creativity — Making Up for Educational Shortfalls

04 Education, Academia, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence

maguire“Inspired in part by the open source movement, public spaces are emerging where people congregate to share ideas, make cool projects, teach, and brainstorm with collaborators on everything from coding to cooking. With no leaders, they have one rule: “Be excellent to each other.” Take a tour of the hackerspace Noisebridge, located in the heart of San Francisco's Mission District, with co-founder Mitch Altman.”

With educational institutions failing to provide young-people with the information and skills they need to succeed in an ever-evolving planetary-landscape, the hackerspace movement is helping to fill the void. Kids are coming out of schools ignorant, disempowered, lost, and disinterested. Entrepreneurial spirit and constructive risk-taking are in their death-throws as a result. Alternative educational/cultural spaces are needed now more than ever to rejuvenate this untapped generation of human potential.

See Also:

HackerSpaces Wiki

Koko: De-Extinction of Extinct Species

Academia, Ethics
Koko
Koko

Diversity good.

What's De-extinction and Should Scientists be Dabbling in it?

De-extinction – reviving once extinct animals using technologies like cloning and genome sequencing – is sending scientist to either corners of the debate. Some are vehemently against it, saying its natural process, while others say we have an “obligation” to do it.

Stuart Pimm of Duke University argued in an opinion piece in National Geographic that these efforts would be a “colossal waste” if scientists don't know where to put revived species that had been driven off the planet because their habitats became unsafe.

“A resurrected Pyrenean ibex will need a safe home,” Pimm wrote. “Those of us who attempt to reintroduce zoo-bred species that have gone extinct in the wild have one question at the top of our list: Where do we put them? Hunters ate this wild goat to extinction. Reintroduce a resurrected ibex to the area where it belongs and it will become the most expensive cabrito ever eaten.”

de-extinctionMeanwhile Michael Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales who has championed de-extinction for years, stands firmly against this. “If we're talking about species we drove extinct, then I think we have an obligation to try to do this.” Some people say that scientists will be playing God if they go ahead with de-extinction. “I think we played God when we exterminated these animals.”

A public forum was held today at the National Geographic's Washington headquarters for the TEDxDeExtinction conference where speakers came to share their views on the matter.

De-extinction has been in the works for more than a decade, ever since Dolly the Sheep demonstrated in 1996 that mammals could be cloned from cells in a lab dish. Spanish and French scientists worked for years on an effort to bring the Pyrenean ibex back from extinction, according to the National Geographic, by cloning cells that had been preserved from the last known animal of the species. However, this did not succeed as she gave birth to a deformed kid who died 10 minutes after birth.

Read full article.

Chuck Spinney: Kelly Vlahos on the Militarization of Yale Neuroscience

Academia, Military
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

.. Or Escalating the Old Boot On Campus Game

Below is an important, excellent and scary report by Kelley Vlahos.  But the MICC's infiltration of elite campus's is even worse that Ms. Vlahos says, because it builds on deep historical roots and tradition.

Yale, a main focus of her report, has a long history of its alumae being being linked to espionage operations by the US government, dating back to the mists of the Revolutionary War.

Or, consider this entry in the wikipedia from former CIA director Richard Helms‘ bio.  It refers to a 1956 report written for President Eisenhower that criticized the out-of-control covert operations by the CIA, especially wrt to its overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mosasdegh in 1953:

The report “sharply denounc[ed] ‘King Making' by the CIA. It warned that all those bright young men being recruited by the CIA out of Yale were becoming freewheeling, well-financed buccaneers. Lovett and Bruce cautioned Eisenhower that the agency was out of control, that it needed formal oversight… .”[138]

Kelley makes it quite clear that new and even more dangerous skills  are being added to the old boots-on-campus game.  Too bad James Jesus Angleton, is not around to remind us of where this kind of inbred secret coziness leads.

Boots on Campus

Kelley B. Vlahos – Antiwar – 25/02/13

Have American university campuses become so inured to the militarization of policy, culture – our thought – that they can’t see the Trojan horse sitting in the quad, its occupants pouring out and passing out sweets and credits to all the Ivy Leaguers passing by with goggled eyes and open arms?

A caricature for sure, but is it so off base? How else does one explain the muted response to news that the Department of Defense may have been funding the “U.S. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) Center of Excellence for Operational Neuroscience,” at the Yale Medical School in New Haven? The proposed program, according to a report by ABC News last week, would teach special operations personnel the art of “conversational,” and “cross cultural” intelligence gathering, and pay volunteers from the community’s vast immigrant population (mainly poor Hispanics, Moroccans and Iraqis) to serve as the guinea pigs test subjects.

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John Maguire: John Taylor Gatto on 14 Educational Principles of the Elites

04 Education, 11 Society, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics

John Taylor Gatto, former school-teacher, outspoken reformer, and  author of Underground History of American Education, on what the Public Education System is neglecting to teach the majority of kids and why we continue to churn out generations of impotent and docile consumers.  THE POINT:  Taught in the elite private schools, NOT taught in the public schools.

01.  Understand human nature.

02.  Have a strong experience with the active literacies (writing and public speaking).

03.  Insight into the major institutional forms and how to pit them against one another.

04.  Repeated exercises in forms of good manners and politeness  —  civility as foundation.

05.  Independent work.  Teacher is NOT the primary learning channel.

06.  Energetic physical sports are required means of learning grace and handling pain.

07.  Complete theory of access to any workplace or person.

08.  Responsibility as an utterly essential part of the curriculum outside the classroom.

09.  Arrive at a personal code of standards for production, behavior, and morality.

10.  Familiarity with master creations across all of the arts — be at ease with the arts.

11.  Power of accurate observation and recording.  Drawing is a way to sharpen perception.

12.  Ability to deal with challenges of all sorts –Gatto's personal favorite.

13.  Habit of caution in reasoning to conclusions.

14.  Constant development and testing of judgment of discriminate value.


Also see
Various audio/video of John Taylor Gatto

Dolphin: Skull and Bones Welcomes Interrogation Facility and Medical Experiments on Immigrants at Yale — Been There, Done That…

07 Other Atrocities, Academia, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement, Military
YARC YARC
YARC YARC

An Interrogation Center at Yale? Proposed Pentagon Special Ops Training Facility Sparks Protests

43 minute video plus full transcript

EXTRACT:

Students and alumni at Yale University are organizing against a proposed campus center to train special operations forces in interview techniques. The center would be funded by a $1.8 million grant from the Pentagon and could open as early as April. Dubbed an “interrogation center” by critics, the facility would be housed at the Yale School of Medicine and led by Charles Morgan, a professor of psychiatry who previously conducted research on how to tell whether Arab and Muslim men are lying. We speak to two students at Yale who co-authored an editorial titled “DoD Plans are Shortsighted, Unethical,” and with Michael Siegel, professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health and a 1990 graduate of the Yale School of Medicine. “Yale has now crossed a line,” Siegel says. “Using the practice of medicine and medical research to help design advanced interrogation techniques, or even just regular civilian intelligence-gathering techniques, interviewing techniques, is not an appropriate use of medicine. The practice of medicine was designed to improve people’s health. And the school of medicine should not be taking part in either training or research that is primarily designed to enhance military objectives.” [includes rush transcript]

Continue reading “Dolphin: Skull and Bones Welcomes Interrogation Facility and Medical Experiments on Immigrants at Yale — Been There, Done That…”