Communities of Practice – Page 953 – Public Intelligence Blog

yoda with light saber — Got Crowd? BE the Force!

QE For the People: What Else Could We Buy With $29 Trillion? (September 24, 2012)

Central banks could be helping communities instead of enriching predatory, parasitic “too big to fail” banks and financial feudalism.

In a system that depends on lies and the credulity of the citizenry, the greatest lie is that the Federal Reserve's “quantitative easing” bailouts of the banks somehow help our citizens and communities.

To clarify this, ask yourself this question: what else could we have bought with the $29 trillion the Fed loaned or backstopped to the banks?

If you enjoy quibbling about the total sum of Fed support, be my guest; the Levy Institute came up with $29 trillion after poring over all the data, while the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) tally topped $16 trillion. That's 100% of the nation's GDP and roughly 100% of the $16 trillion national debt.

Substance Medard — Click on Image to Enlarge

While we're asking about opportunity costs, let's ask what else we could have bought with the $10 trillion that the Federal government has borrowed and blown in the past 11.7 years. The national debt was $5.727 trillion when G.W. Bush was sworn into office on January 20, 2001. It had risen to $10.626 trillion when President Obama was sworn into office in January, 2009. It is now $16.016 trillion, an increase of $5 trillion in less than four years in “debt held by the public” (i.e. the Chinese central bank, the Japanese central bank, the Federal Reserve, etc.)

You can check the totals for any recent date on treasurydirect.gov.

From time to time I have suggested alternatives to “wars of choice” and bailing out the financial Plutocracy, for example Cost of Iraq War: $3 Trillion; Cost of Solar Plants to Power all 105 million U.S Households: $500 Billion (April 10, 2008) and We’re Dropping the Ball on Renewable Energy (June 25, 2011).

$500 billion is roughly 3% of $16 trillion. That is rather astounding, isn't it? We could have switched to a (largely) solar-powered electrical grid for a mere 3% of what the Fed squandered to save the “too big to fail” banks. Yes, yes, I know we need a massive energy storage system for any solar-powered grid; shall we throw $1.1 trillion at the problem? That would total a mere 10% of what the Fed has provided to “save” crony-capitalist financial feudalism.

Continue reading “Yoda: $16 Trillion Or So – Opportunity Costs & Integrity Lost”

2012/09/272012/09/27

Yoda: Ana Cristina Pratas – Digital Bridges for Learners

04 Education, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Liberation Technology

Digital Bridges for Learners

Ana Cristina Pratas

CristinaSkyBox, 27 September 2012

Although I have always tried to reach out individually to students, whether through their preferred learning style, topics which related to their social environment and interests, or with activities they enjoyed in class, never has there been a point in time when the emphasis of learning was so learner-centred as now. With the increasing implementation of mobile tech, learning is revolving around the student: with their iPads, they can work calmly through their iBooks or create their own book with materials which they choose and are relevant to both themselves and their course work.

In turn, this also has implications for the teacher – new roles in the classroom and often new approaches and patterns in teaching. However, with all the freedom of learning, there are hiccups which also occur. How willing are students to (initially) take on the responsibility for their learning, particularly when they have grown up in cultures where rote-learning was customary or where they were comfortable in shifting responsibility of their learning outcomes to teachers?

All freedom demands responsibility and accountability – characteristics which students are not always ready to take on board.

Freedom is also a learning process and bridges need to be built, put in place for both learners and teachers.

Full post and two graphics below the line.

Continue reading “Yoda: Ana Cristina Pratas – Digital Bridges for Learners”

2012/09/27

Chuck Spinney: USG Arrogant Ignorance on Syria

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency

Perhaps the most enduring feature of US foreign policy is a self-righteous sense of divine mission blinds the Orientations of its self-referencing practitioners to the real world consequences of their Decisions, and Actions. Their missionary zeal makes their outlooks impervious to the corrective effects negative feedback from the real world. Put simply, with a few exceptions, our foreign policy elites have evolved a long-term blockage in their Orientation that prevents them from LEARNING from their mistakes, regardless of whether those mistakes evolved out of conflating the impulses of nationalism with the pretensions of a global communist “threat” (e.g., Mossadegh in Iran,Vietnam, etc.) or with a world wide “threat” of Islamic militancy (e.g., using the war on terror to invade Iraq or wage war in Afghanistan and Pakistan by confusing the nationalism of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban with the global pretensions of a criminal gang of Sunni Salafi fanatics ), or by conflating the national interests of Israel with the national interests of the United States.

The U.S. alliance of convenience with Sunni Salafis eastern Libya to effect a regime change is only the latest case study of the blowback (re: in Mali and now the assassination of the US ambassador) that results when arrogance of ignorance* shapes a policy to meddle in the affairs of others.

So you might ask: Has our self-styled elite learned anything from its Libyan misadventure? One need only to look at Syrian civil war to answer to this question.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: USG Arrogant Ignorance on Syria”

2012/09/262012/09/26

Penguin: Israel Lobbyist Suggests False Flag Attack Needed to Get USA Into War with Iran

05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Commerce, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Officers Call

YouTube, 1:54, absolutely worth watching!

Today’s nominee for the Larry Silverstein Award for Chutzpah Beyond the Call of Duty: Israel lobbyist Patrick Clawson, who is openly calling for the mass murder of Americans, along the lines of the USS Maine, Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, USS Liberty, and (by implication) 9/11 orchestrated war-trigger events.

Tip of the Hat to Kevin Barrett at Veterans Today.

WATCH THE SHORT VIDEO

Phi Beta Iota: The Israel lobbyist ably recounts false flags from WWI and WWII to Viet-Nam, neglects to mention 9/11 and the 935 now-documented lies led by Dick Cheney that took the USA into wars that restored Afghanistan as the world's #1 supplier of opium (and Pakistan as the #1 producer of heroin) while destabilizing the entire Middle East.

2012/09/252012/09/26

Mini-Me: CIA Loses Official Cover Site in Benghazi — No Plan B + RECAP

Corruption, Government

Huh?

Deadly Attack in Libya Was Major Blow to C.I.A. Efforts

By ERIC SCHMITT, HELENE COOPER and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

WASHINGTON — The attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans has dealt the Central Intelligence Agency a major setback in its intelligence-gathering efforts at a time of increasing instability in the North African nation.

Among the more than two dozen American personnel evacuated from the city after the assault on the American mission and a nearby annex were about a dozen C.I.A. operatives and contractors, who played a crucial role in conducting surveillance and collecting information on an array of armed militant groups in and around the city.

“It’s a catastrophic intelligence loss,” said one American official who has served in Libya and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the F.B.I. is still investigating the attack. “We got our eyes poked out.”

Read rest of article.

Phi Beta Iota: We can only shake our heads in sadness. There are a few extraordinary Non-Official Cover (NOC) officers, but they are the exception rather than the rule. CIA is incompetent at clandestine and covert operations. This has been known since at least 1992, but has only become more and more evident since 9/11. CIA is not only addicted to official cover as a simple bureaucratic solution totally at odds with its mission, it is demonstrably incapable of learning how to do non-official cover. Of the 21 companies it created when it was flush with money (so flush it now pays domestic housing allowances and reportedly also gives SES bonuses on a quartely basis), it has been forced to close 20 of them. Our internal view is that CIA was taken out as a Mossad initiative, and more CIA stations will be rolled in the Middle East in the next few months, always via false flag attacks. CIA has no Plan B. DIA is incapable of being Plan C, and SOCOM's “push ups done silently” are frightening in their naivete. CIA, DIA, and SOCOM still do not “get it.”

2012/09/252012/09/25

Penguin: Bandi Mbubi at TED – Demand a Fair Trade Cell Phone

02 Diplomacy, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Liberation Technology

Your mobile phone, computer and game console have a bloody past — tied to tantalum mining, which funds the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Drawing on his personal story, activist and refugee Bandi Mbubi gives a stirring call to action. (Filmed at TEDxExeter.) Bandi Mbubi would like to make sure that you are using a fair trade cell phone.

Bandi Mbubi grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, experiencing first hand the political unrest and oppression which have since worsened there. As a student activist, Bandi suffered persecution and fled the country, seeking political asylum in the U.K. But Mbubi has kept his home country on his radar, noting how the mining of tantalum — a mineral used in cell phones and computers — has fueled the ongoing war there in which 5 million have died.

While Mbubi sees the cell phone as an instrument of oppression for this reason, he knows that phones can also bring great freedom. And so he has formed CongoCalling.org, a campaign to inspire both the public and companies that make electronics to pay attention to how tantalum used in consumer electronics is mined and traded.

Mbubi is also the Director of the Manna Society, a center for the homeless in South London, and a Trustee of Church Action on Poverty.

TED Video (9:22)

2012/09/252012/09/25

Eagle: Oil Lies, Oil Spills – Technology Sucks, Human Intelligence Rules

05 Energy, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government

1) All stakeholders in the Keystone Pipeline are lying to the public. There are THREE sucking chest wounds in the Keystone Pipeline proposal: a) Canada cannot afford to use clean water it is running out of, to flush tar sands no one needs; and the USA does not need any more oil. b) The pipeline will NOT create jobs and it will be a curse to every community anywhere near it, externalizing costs to everyone along the way. c) The legacy refineries are lying in order to get the public to pay the cost of delivering very dirty crude that they will refine for EXPORT.

2) Technology does NOT work as claimed.

3) Human intelligence rules again. What is LACKING is integrity at all points of the compass.

Few Oil Pipeline Spills Detected by Much-Touted Technology

InsideClimate News analysis of a decade of federal data shows general public detected far more spills than leak detection technology.

EXTRACT:

Between 2002 and July 2012, remote sensors detected only 5 percent of the nation's pipeline spills, according to data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).

The general public reported 22 percent of the spills during that period. Pipeline company employees at the scenes of accidents reported 62 percent.

Anthony Swift, an attorney who has spent years researching pipeline safety for the Natural Resources Defense Council, was taken aback by the findings. Swift's organization opposes the Keystone XL, and he said he had always known that leak detection systems didn't catch most of the spills. But “the fact that 19 out of 20 leaks aren't caught is surprising, and certainly runs counter to a lot of rhetoric we hear from the industry,” he said.

Read full article.