Category: Communities of Practice

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Marcus Aurelius: Israel Plots to Cripple Iranian Cyber

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Computer/online security, Corruption, Cyberscams, malware, spam, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Technologies
Marcus Aurelius

(1) Wish the Israelis every success, but their chances are likely decreased thanks to leaks;

(2) Wonder if GEN Alexander of USCYBERCOM will seek to re-negotiate his deal IOT report directly to POTUS?

Israeli Military Reportedly Plotting to Cripple Iran in Cyberspace

Published August 07, 2011

EXTRACT:

“Israel has two principal targets in Iran’s cyberspace,” said a defense source with close knowledge of the cyber war preparations. “The first is its military nuclear program and its military establishment. The second is Iran’s civil infrastructure. Attacking both, we hope, will cripple the entire country’s cyberspace.”

Phi Beta Iota:  What Israel is saying, particularly with regard to its second target spread, is that it is waging undeclared unjust war against Iran and the people of Iran.  To blithely announce that the civil infrastructure of another country is “fair game” should call into question the sanity and legitimacy of the perpetrators.

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Fareed Zakaria: Why Defense Should be Cut BIG

03 Economy, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military

Why defense spending should be cut

By 

August 3, 2011

Fareed Zakaria: “the U.S. defense establishment is the world’s largest socialist economy”

Phi Beta Iota:  This talented individual has never left the “lane in the road” assigned to him.  He thrives on “civility” and not questioning what passes for conventional wisdom among the elites.   As much as all of us who have been saying this for decades are glad to hear him speak such common sense, what this really tells us is that Wall Street is now ready to sacrifice the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) and all their jobs, to save its own multi-million dollar bonuses.  Banks and Big Oil are the winners, the public continues to lose precisely because no one is actually representing the public interest.

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Koko: US Budget Math -1.5T, + 10T = 8.5T Debt INCREASE

03 Economy, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Government
Koko

Koko Signs:  One more time….

Debt “agreement” cuts $1.5 trillion over ten years, while leaving in place the existing budget that borrows 1 trillion a year for ten years.

The net debt INCREASE is 8.5 trillion.

The US Government at it is formed at present, and dominated by a two-party system that shuts out all common sense while embracing Big Oil, Wall Street, and the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC), is incapable of governing Of, By, and For We the People.

S&P got it right.  The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.

Any questions?

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DefDog: Leon Panetta AQ Fear-Mongering w/o a Clue

10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military, Threats
DefDog

It is obvious that this man has no clue.  We are developing fighters
(F-22/35) that have no threat that cannot be handled by the F-117 (which is the be all to end all) but we are dangerously close to imploding if more budget cuts come our way?  Strengthen the force, reduce the technology (which doesn't work in most cases) and let's put DoD on the right path, defense of the Nation (and not police force of the world)……

Leon Panetta Hypes al Qaeda to Ward Off More Defense Cuts

Steve Clemons

The Atlantic, 6 August 2011

EXTRACT:

It seems that one week, al Qaeda is on the run and “near collapse” and the next, al Qaeda remains the reason why the US needs to continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a Pentagon designed to fight the wrong wars.  This is irresponsible hyping of a threat to justify massive defense spending during a period of real fiscal stress.

Phi Beta Iota:  Daniel Ellsberg had it exactly right when he lectured Henry Kissinger in the 1970's on Viet-Nam:

The danger is, you’ll become like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information].

Panetta would be well-served by attending to what  Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York) has to say:

When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.

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Robert Young Pelton: America in Afghanistan 1951 –

01 Agriculture, 02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Commerce, Government, IO Deeds of Peace, IO Impotency, Peace Intelligence
Robert Young Pelton

A tale of two countries…

In Afghanistan, the rise and fall of ‘Little America’

By

Washington Post, 5 August 2011

Paul Jones arrived in a Chevy pickup, dust clouds billowing as he crossed the desert. He had set out soon after first light from his base in southern Afghanistan, an encampment that, thanks to his employer’s logistics savvy, had an ample supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Almost everything there had been sent by sea from California or Oregon, and then trucked up from Pakistan.

The 63-year-old, khaki-clad engineer came that February morning to observe a massive development project aimed at transforming the valley along the Helmand River into a modern society.

Irrigation canals would feed farms that would produce so much food that the country would export the surplus for profit. New schools, modern hospitals and recreation centers would rise from the sand. So, too, would factories, fed by electricity from a generator at a dam upriver. Jones had seen a similar transformation near his home on the outskirts of Sacramento, and he was certain it would materialize here, too. In the desert expanse, he saw “the beginning of a new civilization — a new way of life abounding in the riches of worthy endeavor.”

It was 1951.

Read full article….

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Steve Denning: Reinventing Education

04 Education, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Ethics
Steve Denning

Leadership

What’s Involved In Reinventing Education?

Steve Denning

Forbes ASAP 4 August 2011

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.

Albert Einstein

The US education system is in crisis, putting the long-term future of the economy in question. The evidence is well-known. A root cause of the crisis is the application of the factory model of management to education, where everything is arranged for the scalability and efficiency of “the system”, to which the students, the teachers and the parents have to adjust. “The system” grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and parents alike.

Read full article with new graphic….

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Jason Silva: Creativity, Marijuana, & Butterfly Effect

09 Justice, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence
Click on Image to Enlarge

On Creativity, Marijuana and “a Butterfly Effect in Thought”

Jason Silva

Reality Sandwich

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.” […] “…by some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.” — Pearl Buck, Winner of a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.

In a blog post last year entitled “Marijuana and Divergent Thinking”, Jonah Lehrer explains that many creative
tasks require the cultivation of an “expansive associative net, or what psychologists refer to as a “flat associative hierarchy.” What this essentially suggests is that creative people should be able to make far-reaching connections among all sorts of seemingly unrelated ideas, and to not dismiss one possible connection just because it seems far-fetched.

Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in whicwe perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.

The Imaginary Foundation says that “to understand is to perceive patterns” and this is exactly what all great thinkers have done throughout the ages: they have provided a larger, dot-connecting, aerial view of things that subsumes the previous paradigm. As Richard Metzger has written:

What great minds have done throughout history is provide an aerial view of things. A larger more encompassing view that often subsumes the previous paradigm and then surpasses it in completeness with the vividness of its metaphors. Consider now how the evolving notions of a flat earth, Copernican astronomy and Einsteinian physics have subsequently changed how mankind sees its place in the cosmos, continuously updating the past explanations with something superior.

Read more….