Non-Governmental – Page 20 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/03/16

Chuck Spinney: Investigating NATO’s War Crimes Against Libya

02 China, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, DoD, Government, Law Enforcement, Military, Non-Governmental, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

Investigations Around Libya

NATO’S Craven Coverup of Its Libyan Bombing

by VIJAY PRASHAD, Counterpunch, March 15, 2012

Ten days into the uprising in Benghazi, Libya, the United Nations’ Human Rights Council established the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya. The purpose of the Commission was to “investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law in Libya.” The broad agenda was to establish the facts of the violations and crimes and to take such actions as to hold the identified perpetrators accountable. On June 15, the Commission presented its first report to the Council. This report was provisional, since the conflict was still ongoing and access to the country was minimal. The June report was no more conclusive than the work of the human rights non-governmental organizations (such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch). In some instances, the work of investigators for these NGOs (such as Donatella Rovera of Amnesty) was of higher quality than that of the Commission.

Due to the uncompleted war and then the unsettled security state in the country in its aftermath, the Commission did not return to the field till October 2011, and did not begin any real investigation before December 2011. On March 2, 2012, the Commission finally produced a two hundred-page document that was presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. Little fanfare greeted this report’s publication, and the HRC’s deliberation on it was equally restrained.

Nonetheless, the report is fairly revelatory, making two important points:

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Investigating NATO's War Crimes Against Libya”

2012/03/152012/03/15

Robert Steele: True Cost Economics Combined with Monitoring Outputs and Outcomes

04 Education, Academia, Ethics, Government, Non-Governmental

steele formal high res — Robert David STEELE Vivas

True Cost Economics has been around for a while–Dr. Herman Daly of the University of Maryland merits much of the credit–but it now seems to be catching on.

Not quite catching on, but being discussed by individuals who already appreciate the urgency of teaching and researching true cost economics, is the need to switch from measuring inputs to measuring outputs and outcomes.

Although the US Intelligence Community has long been in need of this approach, to my great surprise I now find that some of the best minds in the university world are thinking along these lines.

In the university world this is called “assessment of learning.” That is, rather than focusing on inputs (number of hours in classes), universities are working to measure outputs — whether students are acquiring the capabilities that professors intend. Instead of learning to memorize and regurgitate, students are being asked to perform — to be a student of practice, applying knowledge in context.

In development agencies there is a gestating effort to shift from building schools to producing literate people — that means less focus on rote learning and credentialing, and more focus on memorable communication including education delivered one cell call at a time.

Note: Assessment of learning is an Epoch A approach, but a very positive development. Child-driven education is the Epoch B approach.

2009 25 Quick Formative Assessments for a Differentiated Classroom: Easy, Low-Prep Assessments That Help You Pinpoint Students' Needs and Reach All Learners

2009 Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning

2007 Checking for Understanding: Formative Assessment Techniques for Your Classroom

2003 Assessment for Learning: Putting it into Practice

2012/03/15

Berto Jongman: Humanitarian Aid & Forgotten Conflicts

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, IO Deeds of Peace, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Policies

Some important connections drawn between aid, corruption, and positive change; and also important omissions — conflicts out of the news where paying attention could make a difference.

Singling Out Forgotten Conflicts

The ISN Blog, 15 March 2012

A popular method for identifying which conflicts necessitate more attention from the international community is to estimate the difference between supply and demand of humanitarian assistance in these conflicts. Supply and demand, however, are very hard to measure in emergencies. This has led to the development of several indicators used to measure ‘forgotten conflicts’.

These indicators are often applied on an annual basis and are intended to generate media attention (to increase donations) and/or support donor operations (to comply with impartiality). Have these efforts been successful? Have they effectively singled out and buttressed forgotten conflicts? Looking back on the past decade, in this blog post I’ll assess which conflicts received the least (and most) attention from international actors.

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2012/03/12

Chuck Spinney: Koch Brothers, Cato, Why Nations Fail

07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Non-Governmental

The Koch Brothers, The Cato Institute, And Why Nations Fail

Simon Johnson, Baseline Scenario, 8 March 2012

A dispute has broken out between the Cato Institute, a leading libertarian think tank, and two of its longtime backers – David and Charles Koch. The institute is not the usual form of nonprofit but actually a company with shares; the Koch brothers own two of the four shares and are arguing that they have the right to acquire additional shares and thus presumably exert more control. The institute and some of its senior staff are pushing back.

According to Edward H. Crane, the president and co-founder of Cato, “This is an effort by the Kochs to turn the Cato Institute into some sort of auxiliary for the G.O.P.” Bob Levy, chairman of the Cato board, told The Washington Post: “We would take closer marching orders. That’s totally contrary to what we perceive the function of Cato be.”

Far from being just an unseemly row between prominent personalities on the right, this showdown reflects a much deeper set of concerns for American politics and society. And it raises what I regard as the central question of an important book, “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty,” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson that will be published on March 20.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Koch Brothers, Cato, Why Nations Fail”

2012/02/17

Patrick Buchanan: Blacklisted, Censored, Silenced, Shunned

Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Media, Non-Governmental

The New Blacklist

Patrick J. Buchanan

EXTRACT:

Documented in the 488 pages and 1,500 footnotes of Suicide of a Superpower is my thesis that America is Balkanizing, breaking down along the lines of religion, race, ethnicity, culture and ideology, and that Western peoples are facing demographic death by century's end.

. . . . . .

Let error be tolerated, said Thomas Jefferson, “so long as reason is left free to combat it.” What Foxman and ADL are about in demanding that my voice be silenced is, in the Jeffersonian sense, intrinsically un-American.

Phi Beta Iota: Below the line is the complete essay by Buchanan with points that we find compelling. He is articulate, and however much some may dislike delivery, he represents a point of view — and a demographic — whose silence spells death to the Republic as we know it. What is really at issue here is the legitimacy of the two-party bi-opoly and the various levels of government — they have substituted ideology for intelligence, corruption for integrity. Under such a system, the Constitution has been trashed and the Republic dismembered.

– – – – – – –

My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.

After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.

The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

Continue reading “Patrick Buchanan: Blacklisted, Censored, Silenced, Shunned”

2012/02/072012/02/07

David Swanson: Betrayal of the Nobel Peace Prize

Corruption, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence

The Betrayal of the Nobel Peace Prize

Alfred Nobel's will, written in 1895, left funding for a prize to be awarded to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

The first such prize, awarded in 1901, went to Jean Henry Dunant and Frédéric Passy, two men who held and promoted peace congresses, two peace activists, two men who were not elected officials. Nor were they war makers who had exercised restraint in some instance or other. In 1902, again, the peace prize went to two peace activists. In 1903 the prize went to a member of the British Parliament, but one who had worked for peace and not for war. In 1904, the laureate was what we would now call an NGO, but one that had worked for peace and not for war. In 1905, a woman who had played a role in the creation of the prize, an author and a peace activist, someone who indeed held and promoted peace congresses, was the first female winner. And then came 1906.

In 1906, the Nobel prize for peace was awarded to a lover of war by the name of Theodore Roosevelt. He had up to that point done, and would continue until his death to do, more to promote war than peace. Was it possible that he had nonetheless done the most or the best work for international fraternity, demilitarization, and peace congresses? Frankly, no. He was prominent. He was a president of a rising empire. Those, and his negotiating a peace between two other nations, were not sufficient qualifications. A disastrous trend had begun in the very mixed history of the peace prize.

Continue reading “David Swanson: Betrayal of the Nobel Peace Prize”

2012/01/262012/01/28

Robert Steele: Slate and New America Foundation a Propaganda Front – Taking Money Under the Table?

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, IO Deeds of War, Media, Non-Governmental

Warning: This Site Contains Conspiracy Theories

Does Google have a responsibility to help stop the spread of 9/11 denialism, anti-vaccine activism, and other fringe beliefs?

By Evgeny Morozov|Posted Monday, Jan. 23, 2012, at 7:43 AM ET

In its early days, the Web was often imagined as a global clearinghouse—a new type of library, with the sum total of human knowledge always at our fingertips. That much has happened—but with a twist: In addition to borrowing existing items from its vast collections, we, the patrons, could also deposit our own books, pamphlets and other scribbles—with no or little quality control.

Such democratization of information-gathering—when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements—has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them. Is it time for some kind of a quality control system?

Read full article.

Robert Steele: I am disengaged from Phi Beta Iota most of the time, but this piece was brought to my attention with the observation that it combines a claim to legitimacy involving Stanford University and Foreign Policy (no longer a serious rag, now a sub-set of secrecy & rendition apologist The Washington Post), and that it appears to be an early shot in a new national security propaganda theme aimed as neutralizing the use of the Internet for self-education. When Obama said in the State of the Union that it is known kids do better when they are forced to stay in school until graduation, I was sharply critical–the reality is that the best and the brightest leave school as soon as they can pass the GED, realizing that rote learning of old knowledge from poorly-paid burn-outs is not the way to “jack in.” What we have here is a very troubling indicator that the New America Foundation (wittingly) and Slate (perhaps unwittingly) are now part of the domestic propaganda arm of the military-industrial complex. The idiocy and illegitimacy of this piece should not have to be pointed out, but since Slate, which I thought had educated leadership, evidently saw nothing wrong with this piece, I will just point them to several books that will explain to them why collective intelligence, open source everything, and the three values of clarity, diversity, and integrity, are all essential to resilience and sustainability. Transparency, truth, and trust are the heart of the matter. This article is a disgrace to Slate and to Stanford, and confirms my growing disdain for the New America Foundation and Foreign Policy.

Robert David Steele, The Open Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, & Trust (Evolver Editions, 2012)

David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room (Basic, 2012)

Robert David Steele, Intelligence for Earth: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability (Earth Intelligence Network, 2010)

Mark Tovey (ed.), Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (Earth Intelligence Network, 2008)

David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Holt, 2008)

and then of course there are all the other books that in the aggregate would suggest to any intelligent reader that Slate has just published the biggest piece of crap in the recent history of digital journalism.

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)

2012-01-28 Berto Jongmanprovides link to:

Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories

Phi Beta Iota: The puported article is totally inept, using students and a very narrow range of information provided to the students to attempt to replicate a much more nuanced and comprehensive range of networks with access to vaster information resources. The article also does not provide for new sources coming into the public domain, with the inevitable result that the truth ultimately comes out, for example, on the JFK and MLK assassinations, the USS Liberty, and increasingly, 9/11 as a mix of let it happen, make it happen, and cover it up.

Lead Author Responds:

Thanks for your interest in the SPPS article. In response to your queries in the linked blog post, we didn't seek to inform people about particular theories in any great detail, to provide a model of the broader communities which advocates conspiracy as an explanation for world events, or to model opinion change as new information is presented. While those are interesting topics and we certainly hope to examine them in some detail in the future, they are beyond the scope of this rather small study, in which we attempted to extend previous work on correlations in beliefs between different conspiracy theories and examine the source of that correlation through multiple regression analysis of some novel data. As such we pass no judgement on the truth or falsity of any of the theories discussed; while the media may attempt to spin the study as “those crazy conspiracy theorists!”, be assured that this wasn't our intention, and in the paper itself we make the point that apparent contradictory belief is probably present in many different contexts, populations, and ideologies, rather than unique to people who hold particular opinions about geopolitics.

Yours,

Michael Wood

Ph.D. Candidate & Associate Lecturer, School of Psychology
Keynes College, University of Kent