Category: Communities of Practice

Posted on

DefDog: Petraeus at CIA Strike Two

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency
DefDog Recommends....

Strike One was posted by Marcus Aurelius, on Petraeus and torture as an option.  Here is Strike Two.

East-Asia-Intel.com, July 6, 2011

CIA Director-designate Gen. David Petraeus told Congress last week that he is going to focus heavily on cyber threats to U.S. security, a focus that will likely mean greater intelligence-gathering efforts against China, among the most aggressive at conducting cyber attacks.

“As one of the CIA's enduring missions, I will focus on CIA's efforts to collect intelligence on foreign cyber threats,” Petraeus said in written answers to questions to the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said he plans to make cyber security a top priority at CIA, which has been reoriented in recent years as a human-intelligence gathering spy service.

Phi Beta Iota:  There are three parts to achieving cyber-security.  Part I is to build robust open source systems that have no bugs.  The US Government refuses to be responsible about Part I.  Part II is to build robust cyber-detection and response capabilities.  This is not possible without Part I, but the US Government is spending $12 billion a year on this with Cyber-Command.  Part III, which Petraeus is now alleging he will take on, is to achieve human penetration as well as close-in technical penetration of foreign-based cyber-war farms.  CIA has never been competent in this area, and the chances of its being able to achieve anything, especially against China (while ignoring Israel, Japan, France, and Germany), is laughable.  Petraeus is a smart man with no clue.  His CIA courtiers will lie to him, he will pass on those lies to Congress, and the lunacy will continue.  All of this is bad for business–real business concerned with real production.

See Also:

2010: OPINION–America’s Cyber Scam

2011 Cyber-Command or IO 21 + IO Roots

2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated

Journal: Israel, False-Flags, Dual-Citizens, & Smiles

Review: Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy–The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul

Review: Friendly Spies–How America’s Allies Are Using Economic Espionage to Steal Our Secrets

Posted on

Chuck Spinney: Perpetual War is a Protection Racket

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government, Military
Chuck Spinney

Null Hypothesis: Perpetual War protects the MICC against the buildup of political plaque threatening to  clog its money pipes.

Proof: The alternative hypothesis has been rejected by a sample of 336 vs. 87, and with the sample being the total population, the Null Hypothesis is accepted at the 100% confidence level. 

House boosts military budget in time of austerity

By DONNA CASSATA, Associated Press

Fri Jul 8, 4:47 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Money for the Pentagon and the nation's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is proving largely immune from the budget-cutting that's slamming other government agencies in the rush to bring down the deficit.

On a 336-87 vote Friday, the Republican-controlled House overwhelmingly backed a $649 billion defense spending bill that boosts the Defense Department budget by $17 billion. The strong bipartisan embrace of the measure came as White House and congressional negotiators face an Aug. 2 deadline on agreeing to trillions of dollars in federal spending cuts and raising the borrowing limit so the U.S. does not default on debt payments.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota:  The lack of intelligence and integrity in Washington is bad for business, bad for the economy, bad for society.  The US Chamber of Commerce would do well to realize that as long as they are silent, a small segment of industry will continue to undermine the economy–the Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC) is long over-due for being shut-down.

Posted on

DefDog: US Obliviousness to Afghan Tribal Realities

08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government
DefDog Recommends....

More in follow-up to Chuck Spinney: An Aghan’s Angst Over Corruption…

A fundamental understanding of the Pashtun would make evident the problem with election rigging in Afghanistan.  As a tribal group, nobody is elected to serve as a leader.  Thus, voting, regardless what the West thinks, is not something that most Pashtuns care about or partake in.  Thus, Karzai knew he had to rig the elections to win.  The Hazara understand politics and thus have energized their ethnic grouping to participate as government bureaucrats and advance through educational means (there are more and more private Hazara private schools coming into existence than any other grouping, to include government sponsored).  This was the crux of the problem with the last Parliamentary election, Hazaras won most of the seats from Ghazni Province, a primarily Pashtun area.  Very few Pashtun voted but almost every Hazara did.

The past presidents of Afghanistan have all come to power through the Coup method, not through the electoral process.

And besides, the rural Afghan population could care less about a Central Government.  This is more true among the Pashtun that do not look on Kabul as nothing more than a gathering point not a seat of power.

Posted on

Operation Mockingbird–Covert Action Against Americans

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency
Who, Me?

Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s.

The activities, extent and even the existence of the CIA project remain in dispute: the operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis' 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. Davis' book, detailing how the media had been recruited and infiltrated by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was controversial and not always accurate.

More evidence of Mockingbird's existence emerged in the 2007 memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, by convicted Watergate “plumber” E. Howard Hunt and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford (2008).

Learn More:

Informal Summary

Duck Duck Go

PrisonPlanet Summary

 

Posted on

Stuart Umpleby: Papers on Reflexivity, Soros Reviews

Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Articles & Chapters, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process, Policies, Strategy, Threats

2010

“From Complexity to Reflexivity: The Next Step in the Systems Sciences”

2009

with Emil Nedev, “A Reflexive view of a Transdisciplinary Field: The Case of Cybernetics”

2007

“Reflexivity in Social Systems: The Theories of George Soros”

1990

“A Preliminary Inventory of Theories Available to Guide the Reform of Socialist Societies”

Many Other Papers

See Also:

Dr. Russell Ackoff on IC and DoD + Design RECAP

From BRIC to BRICS–Sanya Declaration

George Soros Nails It: Intelligence with Integrity

Continue reading “Stuart Umpleby: Papers on Reflexivity, Soros Reviews”

Posted on

Michel Bauwens: Integrity & Regional/Global Change

Advanced Cyber/IO, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Policies, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Real Time, Serious Games, Strategy, Threats
Michel Bauwens

Integrity is becoming part of the global agenda.  I especially recommend Christian Arnsperger and Mark Whitaker for interesting takes on this.

Toward a Bioregional State (Online Summary)

Whitaker argues that the basis of environmental degradation is not capitalism or market relations. Environmental degradation is supremely caused by unrepresentative state elite decisions and how they manipulate markets to serve particular consolidated materials, so solutions should focus on additional formal checks and balances against these informal ‘ecological tyrannies', via more green constitutional engineering.

Toward a Bioregional State: A Series of Letters About Political Theory and Formal Institutional Design in the Era of Sustainability (Book)

Six Framework Conditions for Global Systemic Change

“The main framework conditions that I believe would be needed for a genuine transition to a sustainable pluri-economy to get off the ground:

(http://eco-transitions.blogspot.com/2011/06/what-transition-part-4-renewing_05.html)

Posted on

Winslow Wheeler: Congressional Fraud As Usual

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military
Winslow Wheeler

Weekend Edition
July 8 – 10, 2011

Pork, Dodges and Gimmickry

The Pentagon Remains Immune

By WINSLOW T. WHEELER, Counterpunch

The House of Representatives will soon be debating the new Department of Defense (DoD) appropriations bill. It's expensive – $649 billion, close to another post-World War II high. The bill covers almost all of DoD's expenses for fiscal year 2012 – both routine expenses, such as basic payroll, training and weapons acquisition (known as the “base” budget), and war spending – for Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

Pretending reform and frugality, members of the House Appropriations Committee – Democrats and Republicans alike – packed the bill with pork and gimmicks.

The bill would spend $17 billion more than last year. But House appropriators are calling this increase a cut because it's less than the original defense budget request President Obama sent to Congress in February. That request was made irrelevant by the president's subsequent decision to reduce long-term security spending by $400 billion.

In addition to pretending frugality, the committee apes reform. It explicitly denies the existence of earmarks in the bill, saying in its own committee report, “Neither the bill nor the report contains any congressional earmarks, limited tax benefits, or limited tariff benefits as defined in clause 9 of rule XXI.”

I found many earmarks.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota:  There is nothing wrong with the US Government–or the economy–that could not be corrected quickly if the public-private sector partnership restored integrity as a non-negotiable starting point.  This is what woke George Soros up–he finally realized that the degree of legalized corruption negated all reasonable operating assumptions for doing business.