Journal: 2005 Seminal Work Ignored to This Day…

03 Economy, 05 Energy, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, 12 Water, Academia, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Research resources, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Book Page

DefDog Recommends...

Authors:
By Members of the 2005 “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” Committee; Prepared for the Presidents of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine
Authoring Organizations

Description:

In the face of so many daunting near-term challenges, U.S. government and industry are letting the crucial strategic issues of U.S. competitiveness slip below the surface. Five years ago, the National Academies prepared Rising Above the Gathering Storm, a book …
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Reviews:

“Five years ago, these authors provided foresight. Now, their vision answers a national imperative.”

– American Chemical Society President Joseph S. Francisco, Ph.D.

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Phi Beta Iota: This book was ignored by successive Administrations of both of the “top two” parties, just as Peak Oil, Peak Water, and Infectious Disease warnings were ignored by previous Administrations in the 1970's.  The title of the OSS conference, “National Security & National Competitiveness: Open Source Solutions,” sought to communicate both the objective and the method.    The US Government is uninformed and nearly comatose with respect to anything remotely associated with strategic objectives and intelligence-driven policy.

Journal: That Should Be Classified….

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, Cultural Intelligence, Government
DefDog

I continue to hear military and civilian IC folks belittle Open Source.  I passed this around to show them what can be done and all I get is the response, “this should be classified”.  They cannot believe it is from purely open source data…..link provided due to size of document…

The Haqqani Network: From Pakistan to Afghanistan

Key Findings

The Haqqani network, which has the backing of elements within the Pakistani security establishment, is one of Afghanistan’s most experienced and sophisticated insurgent organizations.

Although the Haqqani network is officially subsumed under the larger Taliban umbrella organization led by Mullah Omar and his Quetta Shura Taliban, the Haqqanis maintain distinct command and control, and lines of operations.

Siraj Haqqani, the son of the famous anti-Soviet fighter Jalaluddin Haqqani, is the current leader of the Haqqani network. Siraj is more extreme than his father and maintains closer ties to al-Qaeda and other foreign extremists in Pakistan.

The Haqqani network maintains a safe haven in North Waziristan, Pakistan, across Afghanistan’s southeastern border. The Pakistani Army has consistently refused to launch a military operation in North Waziristan despite the presence of al-Qaeda senior leadership.

Elements within the Pakistani security establishment continue to view the Haqqani network as a useful ally and proxy force to represent their interests in Afghanistan. To this end, Haqqani forces have repeatedly targeted Indian infrastructure and construction projects in Afghanistan.

The Haqqani Network Afghanistan Report #6 October 12, 2010 Jeffrey Dressler .  . Haqqani_Network.pdf

Phi Beta Iota: It is now known that Pakistan successfully fooled the most experienced CIA officers in the world, leading them to believe for decades that the Pakistani ISI elements dealing with the Taliban were “renegades” whose misbehavior was not sanctioned by the government.  We now know that every move, every word was sanctioned, and we now can calculate that at least half of the money from CIA intended for Afghanistan was siphoned off to fund Pakistani priorities and private bank accounts.  If CIA cannot figure this out while it is happening, why should we trust them to figure anything else out?  A major reason CIA did NOT know what it needed to know was because then and now it refuses to actually deal in depth with anyone lacking clearances or US citizenship.  The one decent initiative CIA had, apart from Project GEORGE, was the Global Futures Partnership.  Both died in infancy.  Nothing has changed.

See Also:

Journal: Terminator to Feds–“Can You Spell Nullify?”

10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Government
State Rights Emergent

Marijuana in California: Prop. 19 won't stop federal drug enforcement

Even if voters pass Proposition 19 on Nov. 2, which would legalize use of marijuana in California, the Justice Department will continue to enforce federal drug laws there, Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday.

Read full story….

Phi Beta Iota:  States have the right to secede from the Union–they also have the right to nullify federal regulations within the state.  Over in Virginia, suit has been filed against the mandatory purchase of health insurance.  What we are seeing is the coming end to both the Federal Reserve and the Federal Empire.  The federal government is supposed to be a service of common concern to the United STATES of America, but over time, the “top two” parties have conspired to exclude the other 63 parties and their members from both politics and governance, and to exclude the Governors and state from governance.   The world is changing.  The spectacle of an Attorney General who is obviously loosely-educated and has no clue that he is a servant of the people, not their master, more or less sums up the state of the federal government…..dead in the water and sinking fast.  IOHO.

ALERT READER observes:

Thanks, also a note to your posting on States rights….look what is happening in the foreclosure world, 49 States are now looking into the legal issues while the feds say there is nothing wrong….

See Also:

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Leadership for Epoch B

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Self-Determination & Secession

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Diversity of Voices & Values (USA)

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Disinformation, Other Information Pathologies, & Repression

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit

Worth a Look: Impeachable Offenses, Modern & Historic

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Institutionalized Ineptitude

Journal: What to do with all this data?

Analysis, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Mobile, Real Time
Marjorie Hlava Taxodiary Home

October 15, 2010
Posted in Business strategy, News, indexing, metadata

October 15, 2010 – Large institutions have massive amounts of data in this modern age, the question is what to do with all of it. Extracting the right information can help avoid waste, delays, systems failures, even terrorist threats. A perfect example is Toyota’s customer support and repair data. If business intelligence had been applied and management had been looking, they would have noticed that something was going terribly wrong.

NewsBreak brought this to our attention in their article, “Search and Business Intelligence: The Humble Inverted Index Wins Again.” Business intelligence means mining through all that digital data—in legacy systems, databases, and even spreadsheets—and reporting what’s going on. Institutions with all that data know its value. When implemented well, business intelligence can be a huge success to all involved.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.

Phi Beta Iota: The two graphics below, one from the 1990's the other very recent, sum up all that governments and businesses simply do not get, do not practice, and do not leverage.  Dashboards, like Smart Phones, are fairly stupid.  Existing “data mining” systems do not adapt, scale, or make sense in relation to externalities.  It takes humans to do that, and not geek IT humans but rather all-source holistic analytics humans.  We have a ways to go.

Graphic: Four Quadrants J-2 High Cell SMS Low

Graphic: OSINT and Full-Spectrum HUMINT (Updated)

Journal: Financial War, Expropriation of Assets Next?

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government
Chuck Spinney Sounds Off

Economic historians have long recognized that one of the biggest mistakes deepening and prolonging the Great Depression was the establishment of beggar-thy-neighbour policy wars, like trying to protect domestic production by imposing protective tariffs.  But these tariffs hurt everyone, because the reduction in world trade depressed demand and  production to a greater extent than tariffs protected production.  The US contribution to this debacle was the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed by Congress and signed into law in June 1930.  Smoot-Hawley raised the already high tariffs of the US by an average tariff by 20%.  This prompted retaliatory — i.e., beggar-thy-neighbour — tariff increases in about two dozen other countries, thereby contributing materially to a collapse of world trade by two-thirds between 1930 and 1934 and materially worsening the global depression.  FDR began to reverse course by reducing tariffs in 1934, but the damage was done.  Some  historians have argued that nationalistic beggar-thy-neighbor policies in the Depression's early years contributed to the rise in political extremism in Europe and to a lesser extent in the US.

The information contained in the attached report by Professor Michael Hudson suggests beggar-thy-neighbor policies are again raising their ugly heads.  This time, they are taking the form of the predatory financial policies evolved by the US and its copycats in the Eurozone, who are trying to handoff the pain to each other and others in the world economy.  Whereas Smoot-Hawley related directly to the real economy of production and consumption, and in that sense was at least theoretically related to the well being of the working class, the predatory financing policies described below are both parasitic and speculative.  They benefit an already wealthy financial class that does not produce things.  Moreover, the pattern of speculation described below may be even more dangerous economically, because, it is being financed by the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing policy, which like TARP, has the effect of postponing inevitable asset revaluations (downward) and debt liquidations, thereby feeding a festering cancer that is threatening to metastasize into a full-blown global debt deflation — i.e., a collapse of demand and consumer confidence via a massive repudiation and/or liquidation of debts.

Ominously, like the 1930s, right-wing political extremism is again on the march, but this time that extremism is evolving more rapidly in the US than in Europe.

I urge you to read the attached report carefully and … fasten your seat belts.

October 11, 2010

A CounterPunch Special Report

“Who Needs an Army When You Can Obtain the Usual Objective (Monetary Wealth and Asset Appropriation) Simply by Financial Means?”

Why the U.S. has Launched a New Financial World War — And How the the Rest of the World Will Fight Back

By MICHAEL HUDSON, Counterpunch

Coming events cast their shadows forward.”

– Goethe

What is to stop U.S. banks and their customers from creating $1 trillion, $10 trillion or even $50 trillion on their computer keyboards to buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage spreads by debt leveraging at less than 1 per cent interest cost? This is the game that is being played today.

Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you can obtain the usual objective (monetary wealth and asset appropriation) simply by financial means? All that is required is for central banks to accept dollar credit of depreciating international value in payment for local assets. Victory promises to go to whatever economy’s banking system can create the most credit, using an army of computer keyboards to appropriate the world’s resources. The key is to persuade foreign central banks to accept this electronic credit.

Read Entire Article Online….

Phi Beta Iota: The obvious global response could be–should be–the immediate nationalization and expropriation of all US corporate “assets” derived from a history of predatory capitalism in the context of virtual colonialism and unilateral militarism.  This means that the US stock market will crash again.  It could mean that domestically the US could begin to see local movement expropriating land from absentee landlords such as the mega-agriculture companies that have destroyed agriculture, communities, and the land.  These are interesting times.  Washington is operating on 2% of the relevant information, lacks integrity, and has zero focus on “the public interest.”

See Also:

Journal: Five Myths Debunked–Treasury Run by Crooks

Journal: Debka (IL)–US Terror Scare Backfires

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, Government

US Terror Scare Misfires

New US Tactics in Afghanistan Unrelated to Europe Terror Alert

A strong strategic rationale actuated Washington's blanket terror warning to Europe of Sunday, Oct. 3. But the way it evolved reflected the current interplay among the leading American personalities who devised it.

Phi Beta Iota: We do not normally point to anything that requires registration or payment, but in this instance, since it specifically supports our own skepticism about the recent terror alert (see Journal: US Travel Alert–Political and Fraudulent?, we agree with our contributor who suggested the pointer.  Below are a few of the headlines internal to the Debka article, and three key sentences.

Angry Pakistani reaction was no surprise

Now to build a cover story

In North Waziristan, Petraeus said, smashing Taliban and local allied forces on the Pakistan side of the border is the key to success in Afghanistan, particularly in the south which has a common border with North Waziristan.

The imprecise, unspecific US terror scare did not impress Europe

Brennan's personal ambition gingered up the publicity

While Petraeus and Panetta kept their uncertainties under their hats and cooperated with one another, John Brennan went off on an aggressive tangent.  He issued a welter of leaks to the media without coordinating them with either partner.

France settles scores with Britain

Two days later, France exhibited its fine sense of irony by issuing a travel advisory warning French citizens to be vigilant for terrorists while traveling in… London.

Debka “Premium” Content

Phi Beta Iota: Just after this story, which has rich detail on Brennan and Panetta lusting for Jones' job, the vacancy was announced and filled.  This may be one of the weakest national security teams since the end of WWII.

Journal: Nato’s Secret Armies (It’s Not Terror if CIA Pays and Locals Do the Dirty….)

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, IO Sense-Making, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence
Full Poting Online

Nato's Secret Armies

By Stephen Lendman (about the author) Page 1 of 7 page(s)

In his book, “NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe,” Daniele Ganser described their clandestine Cold War operations, run by European secret services, collaborating with NATO, the CIA and Britain's MI6 and Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) against a possible Soviet invasion, internal communist takeovers, or others on the political left gaining power.

EXTRACT:

In Italy, against both communist and socialist parties, it was claimed they wanted to weaken NATO “from within,” Italian judge, Felice Casson, learning that right-wing terrorists carried out bombings against civilians, blamed them on the left, neo-fascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra explaining the scheme as follows:

“The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”

In 2000, the Italian Senate was more explicit, saying:

“Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as had been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence,” meaning CIA mainly.

Former director William Colby admitted in his memoirs that covert western armies were a major CIA initiative, begun post-WW II, and restricted “to the smallest possible coterie of the most reliable people, in Washington (and) NATO” to keep the initiative secret.

Phi Beta Iota: CIA's importation of 100 Nazis a year after WWII (and probably many more, it has always considered itself above the law, both domestic and foreign) fueled a truly psychopathic perception of communism that led to policies and programs that today are clearly seen to be crimes against humanity, but back in the day were seen as “collateral damage” essential to contain communism while maintaining “control” over key governments.

See Also:

Continue reading “Journal: Nato's Secret Armies (It's Not Terror if CIA Pays and Locals Do the Dirty….)”