Category: Communities of Practice

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NIGHTWATCH Extract: Mexican Cartels Threaten Massacres

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, Government, Law Enforcement, Military, Officers Call

Mexico: For the record. Suspected members of the Sinaloa drug trafficking cartel warned that they would kill 135 people after security forces seized 134 tons of marijuana last week in Tijuana, Baja California state, Milenio reported today, 25 October. The warning was made over a police radio frequency late on 24 October reportedly minutes after gunmen killed 13 patients at a drug rehabilitation center in Tijuana.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: This kind of indiscriminate mass murder in retaliation for what are relatively minor interdictions suggests that on the one hand, both the US and Mexican government have not only lost all control of the territory for which they are responsible for providing good order and public safety and security; but also that neither government has an effective intelligence capability to guide operations in detail.  We are reminded of how long it took to hunt down one man in Colombia, Pablo Escobar.   A MAJOR obstacle is the recalcitrance of the US secret intelligence community with $75 billion or more being applied to produce “at best” 4% of what is needed, to reinvent itself and engage in M4IS2: multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making.  The El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) is a massive failure precisely because it embodies all of the handicaps of the past and none of the advantages of the present.

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Review: Killing Pablo–The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw

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Journal: “True Cost” Meme Gaining Ground

01 Agriculture, 02 Infectious Disease, 03 Economy, 04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

Chris ElamChris Elam

Program Director, Meatless Monday

Posted: October 25, 2010 10:13 AM

Short Film Reveals The Secret Life of Beef

Livestock today consume 5 times as much grain as the entire American population, the average meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to fork, and seven football fields' worth of land is bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals and the crops that feed them.

But it doesn't have to be all doom-and-gloom. We as consumers still have options, which, over time, can change our economy. It's this idea that drives INFORM — the educational and advocacy nonprofit that raises environmental consciousness for the general public through visual media. Its “Secret Life” film series, seen by over 2 million viewers in 80 countries, examines the lifecycle environmental impact of everyday objects we all consume.

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Read rest of article (includes link to YouTube short)

Go directly to YouTube short)

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Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Bio-Economics

Worth a Look: Book Reviews of Capitalism Reincarnated

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Civilization-Building

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Collective Intelligence

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Common Wealth

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Conscious, Evolutionary, Integral Activism & Goodness

"True Cost"
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Journal: 22% Real Unemployment, 1 in 34 Zip $ in 2009

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
GETTY Photo

New Figures Detail Depth Of Unemployment Misery, Lower Earnings For All But Super Wealthy

One out of every 34 Americans who earned wages in 2008 earned absolutely nothing — not one cent — in 2009.

The stunning figure was released earlier this month by the Social Security Administration, but apparently went unreported until it appeared today on Tax.com in a column by Pulitzer Prize-winning tax reporter David Cay Johnston.

It's not just every 34th earner whose financial situation has been upended by the financial crisis. Average wages, median wages, and total wages have all declined — except at the very top, where they leaped dramatically, increasing five-fold.

Read balance of article….

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2010 Reference: The Pentagon, Information Operations, and Media Development

02 Diplomacy, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Multinational, IO Secrets, Media, Media Reports, Military, Peace Intelligence, White Papers
Report Online

CIMA is pleased to release a new report, The Pentagon, Information Operations, and Media Development, by Peter Cary, a veteran journalist with extensive experience reporting about the U.S. military. As part of its post-9/11 strategy, the Department of Defense has launched a multi-front information war, both to support its troops on the ground and to counter the propaganda of radical Muslim extremists. The DoD’s global public relations war, however, has fostered criticism that the department has over-reached and tarred the efforts of non-DoD Americans doing media development work abroad.

While the DoD cannot be criticized for trying to protect the lives of its soldiers, it has spent vast amounts of money on media operations–which can tend to be conducted in secrecy and whose effectiveness often cannot be measured. This report examines the impact of DoD information operations on international media development efforts and offers recommendations – including that the DoD leave media activities that could be considered public diplomacy to the State Department.

Tip of the Hat to Niels Groeneveld at LinkedIn.

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Journal: Tea Party “Booboisie”

Civil Society, Government
Chuck Spinney Recommends

The Booboisie creates a fire from the ashes of the Bush Administration, proving once again the timeless dictum of H.L. Mencken: ‘No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American voter.'

Tea Party Robber Barons

Posted on Oct 24, 2010

By Stanley Kutler

We are witnessing, we are told, a groundswell of anger from a spontaneous, grass-roots movement against the president, Congress, Democrats, socialists (are commies extinct?), the debt, higher taxes, the “takeover” of the health system, and on and on. But the tea party appears to be as bothered by the policies of Franklin Roosevelt as those of Barack Obama.

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The media repeatedly invoke grass roots and other code words to describe the tea party. Tell a lie often enough and it is believed. Our media wizards must realize that with the revelations of high-powered funding and the involvement of Republican operatives, the characterization of the tea party as a spontaneous, ground-up movement does not fit; nagging facts nevertheless must bow to pursuing the “colorful.”

Continue reading “Journal: Tea Party “Booboisie””

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America’s Next War: Southwest Border–Both Sides

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Immigration, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Government, Law Enforcement, Peace Intelligence

Phi Beta Iota: Most of the weapons being used by the cartels do NOT come from US gun shops.  They come from the Latin American militaries who have received large shipments of “older” weapons and ammunition from the US, and then turned around and sold them to the cartels.  Just as the US is indirectly funding the Taliban in Afghanistan, it is indirectly enabling the cartels with weapons.  Furthermore, to imagine that with the money they have the cartels cannot “order in” anything they wish from the Chinese, Israeli, or Russian arsenals, is naive in the extreme.  As many or more are dying violent deaths every day in this region as in Iraq or Afghanistan.  In our view, the current era of politicians (1981-date) is going to be held accountable for four major strategic blunders, all of them deliberate:

1.  Elective invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq on top of irresponsible military cuts and acquisition pathologies

2.  Willful acceptance from Bush Senior onwards of the willful destruction of the US economy for the benefit of a few led by Goldman Sachs, Citi-Bank, and Morgan

3.  Ignoring the depth and extent of the Southwest Border instability and threat to local communities

4.  Ignoring the imminent clean water crisis across the entire region as well as across America

On The Southwest Border (Photo Essay) (Latin America News Dispatch)

Posted by Molly OToole on Sep 15th, 2010

These photographs were taken on an 852-mile, 72-hour trip across the Southwest border, from San Diego, California to Arizona and back. Many citizens from the United States and Mexico have never seen the line that divides and defines their countries, marked by walls, barbed wire fences, U.S. Border Patrol checks and, increasingly, controversy.

2010 National Drug Threat Assessment: Southwest Border Smuggling and Violence

GAO: Border fence lagging, over budget, Home Security mismanaged project, report says (Washington Times, 24 October 2010)

Napolitano visits San Diego, says border is more secure from cartels (Los Angeles Times,October 18, 2010)

Time for U.S. to get serious about cartel threat (MySanAntonio, 16 October 2010)

Cartel Threat Grows, Illegal Numbers Drop (Homeland Security Today, 6 October 2010)

Pirate Lake: Mexican Bandits Terrorizing American Boaters on the Border (FOX.News, 4 October 2010)

Governor Perry Releases Statement on Border Violence (KRGV.com Texas, 2 October 2010)

SECURE BORDER INITIATIVE DHS Needs to Address Testing and Performance Limitations That Place Key Technology Program at Risk (GAO-10-158 January 2010)

Secure Border Initiative: SBInet Expenditure Plan Needs to Better Support Oversight and Accountability (GAO-07-309 February 15, 2007)

See Also:

Continue reading “America's Next War: Southwest Border–Both Sides”

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Reference: How Goldman Sachs Looted America

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Amazon Page

Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's ‘Griftopia'

Matt Taibbi's unsparing and authoritative reporting on the financial crisis has produced a series of memorable Rolling Stone features. He showed us how Goldman Sachs, that “great vampire squid,” played a central role in creating not only the housing bubble but four other big speculative booms that filled its coffers while wrecking the American economy. He explained how Wall Street banks cooked up schemes that helped decimate municipal budgets and cost countless jobs, and how Wall Street lobbying led to a financial reform bill that won't prevent another meltdown. Taibbi builds on that eye-opening work in his new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America , due out from Spiegel & Grau on November 2. In this exclusive excerpt, he describes how our cash-strapped country is auctioning off its highways, ports and even parking meters at fire sale prices — and finding eager buyers in the unregulated sovereign wealth funds of oil-rich Middle Eastern countries.

Read the exclusive Griftopia excerpt.