Journal: Questions on AF & PK, The Larger Question

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Civil Society, Ethics, Government, Media, Military, Peace Intelligence

General Stanley McChrystal
General Stanley McChrystal

What Congress Should Ask McChrystal

Phi Beta Iota: WIRED Magazine has put together a number of questions that ably illustrate the confusion in the public mind over why we are in Afghanistan and what that has to do with Pakistan.  Based on the history of the Cold War, which appears to have been a Fity Year Wound, In Search of Enemies, or as General Smedley Butler, USMC (Ret) put it, War is a Racket, we have to wonder.  When one combines the scandals associated with health care (50% waste according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers), the economy (a fraudulent Federal Reserve and phantom wealth leveraged by Wall Street to the detriment of the commonwealth), and all of the other pressing problems facing America, the larger question is not really about Afghanistan or Pakistan but rather about process.  Is America a democracy?  Is our policy process reasoned and informed?  Is the public interest being served? Does the White House really understand  The True Cost of Conflict/Seven Recent Wars and Their Effects on Society?

Worth a Look: Corruption Chronicles

09 Justice, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Law Enforcement, Worth A Look
Home Page
Home Page

Corruption Chronicles is a labor of love by one citizen, and is replicated tens of thousands of times around the world.  Goggle does not provide the needed architecture for being able to aggregate and then de-aggregate this kind of information by name, place, event, and so on, but the day is coming when the public will be able to amass and share better information about anyone in public service than the government bureacracies are now able to amass on indviduals.  It's the difference between Weberian cetralization with its knowledge cubbies, and open decentralization with its infinite linkages.  To understand this concept, start with David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous–The Power of the New Digital Disorder.

Journal: Citizen Cyber-Detectives on the March

10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Mobile, Peace Intelligence, Real Time

Video 9:40 Min
Video 9:40 Min

The Internet Detective – Switzerland

There is a new breed of super-sleuth emerging in the virtual world of the web. For both petty criminals and major terrorist groups, internet detectives are fast becoming a force to be reckoned with.  Making it his business to track down criminal activity through the web, Guido Rudolphi, the Sherlock Holmes of the cyber world, considers himself a legal hacker. “So much more information can be accessed, quite legally, than the individual user would ever imagine.” Rudolphi has taken advantage of this new free-flow of online information to catch paedophiles, fraudsters, and even unearth international cells of Al-Quaeda. He demonstrates how it takes less than twenty minutes to establish a persons credentials, locate them and hand them over to the police. “People seem to think theyre anonymous online, that nothing can happen to them there thats very naive.”

Journal: BBC Dishonest on ClimateGate

01 Poverty, 02 Infectious Disease, 03 Environmental Degradation, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Media

Copenhagen summit urged to take climate change action

The arguments made by climate change sceptics

European media on climate summit

Phi Beta Iota: BBC reporting on Copenhagen and Climate Change has been consistently dishonest.  We have urgent questions about how BBC is funded and how it does quality assurance.  The core failing of Copenhagen, apart from its being based on fraudulent politicized science that is beneath contempt, is the fact that there is no Strategic Analytic Model and there is no attention being paid to the much wiser and more useful findings of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenge, & Change.  Poverty causes more environmental damange than corporations–poverty and infectious disease are both more important than Environmental Degradation BUT Envrionmental Degradation in ALL its forms is more important than everything else.  It's time for a massive audit of the BBC, they are not serving the British or global public as well as they could or should.

Journal: US Navy Right Idea Wrong Level

Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Key Players, Peace Intelligence

Full Story Online
Full Story Online

The U.S. Navy Builds An MMOG

December 6, 2009: The U.S. Navy is looking for a game development company to bid on a project to help create a multiplayer game for training and brainstorming. What they want initially is a feasibility study on the creation of a ” Massive Multiplayer Online War Game Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI).” The proposals are due by December 28th.

Phi Beta Iota: This is exactly the right idea but at the wrong level.  This should be sponsored by the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (USDI) in full partnership with the Director of Intelligence (DNI) and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).   It should be multinational and multifunctional in design from day one, with a multinational board of advisors including at a minimum Brazil, China, Indonesia, Russia, Malaysia, South Africa, and Turkey. Earth Intelligence Network knows how to do this for only $4 million a year, but of course the contract will be awarded to a beltway bandit whose sole priority will be to create a close proprietary system that locks the client in and shuts out everyone else.

Journal: US Public on Auditing the Fed

03 Economy, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Government

Eight of Ten Americans Want to Audit the Fed

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke on Thursday voiced his opposition to legislation calling for regular audits of the Fed’s monetary policies, but 79% of Americans think auditing the Fed is a good idea.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just seven percent (7%) of adults oppose auditing the Federal Reserve and making those results available to the public. Fourteen percent (14%) are not sure.

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Journal: Withdrawal? We Don’t Need No Stinking Withdrawal…

08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Government
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

Clinton And Gates: No Deadline On Afghan Withdrawal — We Swear!

Chuck Spinney Sends….

In today's cameos [summary attached below] on the Sunday talk show circuit, Defense Secretary Gates (no doubt the Surge's wily deus ex machina) and Secretary of State Clinton (Gates' transparent accomplice) stated again that there is no deadline for a withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan.  This proves again, as if any more proof were needed after their appearances before Congress last week, the whole Surge-and-Withdrawal Strategy enunciated by President Obama in his West Point speech last Tuesday was a Bait-and-Switch Strategy to sucker the anti-war base of the Democratic Party, while locking in the long-term budgetary benefits of the Long War on Terror for the cash-bloated MICC.  Which begs the question: Is Mr. Obama the real decision maker or an empty suit carrying the water for an emergent National Security Regency chaired by Secretary Gates, with Secretary, CJCS Admiral Mullen, and General McChrystal as the senior voting members?  Unfortunately, the postmortem purporting to analyze Obama's “decision” process in today's New York Times does little to clarify this important question.

Continue reading “Journal: Withdrawal? We Don't Need No Stinking Withdrawal…”