Communities of Practice – Page 1411 – Public Intelligence Blog

Dr. Barack and Mr. Obama

The backlash is sharp as voters learn that Obama is not the man they thought he was.

By Victor Davis Hanson

National Review Online, September 18, 2009

No one imagined that Barack Obama, during his first nine months in office, would be falling in the polls even faster than George W. Bush did prior to 9/11. We all knew what Obama’s weaknesses were as he came into office — a lack of experience in foreign affairs, little knowledge of how private business works, and poor judgment concerning the extremist company he had kept in the past.

Instead, the real anger from independents arises over disappointment, false merchandising, and hypocrisy. It is real and deep — as is true of any animosity that arises from a sense of betrayal of former trust.

Continue reading “Journal: American Awakening”

2009/09/202009/09/20

Journal: CIA Ramps Up In Afghanistan While Public Intelligence About Empire as Usual Hard to Find

10 Security, Government, Reform

Full Story Online (Secret Side Only)

CIA expanding presence in Afghanistan: report

AFP Sat Sep 19

. . . . . . . .The Central Intelligence Agency is deploying teams of spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives on top of the nearly 700 employees it already has in the war-torn country in parallel with a military expansion that will see 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan by year's end. . . . . . . . The incoming spies are receiving a broad range of assignments, including working in tandem with special forces units hunting high-value targets, tracking public sentiment in regions seen as shifting support toward the Taliban and gathering intelligence on corruption in the Afghan government, the Times said.

Continue reading “Journal: CIA Ramps Up In Afghanistan While Public Intelligence About Empire as Usual Hard to Find”

2009/09/202009/09/20

Journal: Chuck Spinny Flags Glenn Beck, Populist Rage is Rampant and Rightly So…

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Reform

Chuck Spinney says: Even though OODA loops shaping nutty mass behaviour are becoming ever more disconnected from reality, Frank Rich shows this fact does not imply that the phenomenon of populist rage is not based on some real frustrations, grievances, anxieties, and fears. CS

The New York Times

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice a Day

FRANK RICH

Cartoonist:Barry Blit

Time put Beck on its cover this week. Man of the Year may not be far behind. Beck is not, as many liberals assume, merely the latest incarnation of Rush Limbaugh. He is something different. That’s why he is gaining on his antecedents — and gaining traction in the country’s angrier precincts.

Continue reading “Journal: Chuck Spinny Flags Glenn Beck, Populist Rage is Rampant and Rightly So…”

2009/09/192009/09/19

2008 Paul Ray The Political Compass (Updated)

Civil Society, Historic Contributions, Policy, Reform, True Cost

New research data released August 25, 2008 by Dr. Paul Ray depicts a New Political Compass which shows that politics in the United States is no longer along a horizontal left/right divide. There is now a much more complex political landscape shaped by the emergence of what Dr. Ray calls the “Political North,” which is shifting the political center of gravity in a progressive direction beyond left and right.

This polling indicates that creating an alliance between progressive values and green politics could be a winning strategy for this [and future] election(s).

Graphics Below the Fold

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2009/09/192009/09/19

Journal: Regulating Wall Street: Idiocy on Top of Illusion

03 Economy, Commerce, Ethics, True Cost

Full Story Online

A Las Vegas Illusion

Roger Martin is Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the
University of Toronto

Pre-order his forthcoming book

In response to the question: What does Wall Street have to change to produce better leaders, a different culture and a more long-term focus?

Forget about it. Don't even waste time thinking about it. The purpose
of Wall Street firms is to trade value for their own benefit not to
build value for the economy either short-term or long-term. While at
one point in its history, a non-trivial part of Wall Street's activity
involved financing the growth of American companies, that is now a
minor piece of its business. Wall Street is primarily engaged in
encouraging individuals and companies to trade value between one
another and tolling the parties for the service, and trading against
the outside economy for its own account.

Phi Beta Iota: This author not only gets it, he provides a solution. Wall Street, and the Fed, need to be creatively destroyed, and we need to restore bottom-up Human Scale locality-based business. Government “regulation” of financial crime is idiocy on top of illusion.

2009/09/192009/09/19

Journal: Spinney, Boyd, Green, Kuhn on “Can America Be Salvaged?–Public Intelligence Aspects”

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Policies, Reform, Threats

This lengthy piece is organized as follows:

1) Chuck Spinney on how our partisan “leaders” are disconnected from reality and leading us over a cliff, with reference to John Boyd.

2. An extract and link to the always brilliant CounterPunch where David Michael Green discusses the core issue: Can America be salvaged?

3. A Phi Beta Iota editorial commentary on Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), Robert Steele (Paradigms of Failure, Data Pathologies), and Howard Zinn (A Power Governments Cannot Repress).

CHUCK SPINNEY: The article in Counterpunch by David Michael Green, “Can America be Salvaged?” is an brilliant expository argument describing what are in effect the destructive outcomes of self-referencing/incestuously amplifying OODA loops that are becoming ever more disconnected from reality.

Continue reading “Journal: Spinney, Boyd, Green, Kuhn on “Can America Be Salvaged?–Public Intelligence Aspects””

2009/09/182009/09/20

Journal: Missile Defense as a Metaphor

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Policies, Threats

The Obama Administration means well, no question about it. They simply do not know what they do not know, and no one within the US Intelligence Community appears capable of speaking truth to power.

The truth that needs to be spoken is that Washington lacks both integrity and intelligence (as in thoughtful holistic decision-making). Washington lacks a strategic analytic model, it lacks a commitment to eradicating the ten high-level threats to humanity (terrorism is ninth, a traffic accident, nothing more), and it lacks a process for harmonizing budgets and behavior across twelve core policy domains as illustrated below.

Continue reading “Journal: Missile Defense as a Metaphor”