Category: Communities of Practice

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Marcus Aurelius: The Battle For The Military’s Future

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Military
Marcus Aurelius

Note the contradiction between the planned personnel cuts and the comments on the urgency of keeping the volunteer force intact and coherent.

The Battle For The Military's Future

Walter Pincus

The Washington Post, 13 June 2012

“The face of war, the face of how we do business, is changing.”

That’s retired Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sharing how he sees the military’s future at a National Press Club session for reporters Tuesday. Cartwright, who was known for his forward thinking while on active duty, has apparently decided to share his ideas through a series of public appearances.

One area that he sees changing in the military is what he calls “the platforms” — by which he means tanks, troop carriers, ships, aircraft, heavy guns and even rifles. They are becoming less important in Cartwright’s view than the new electronics, sensors and other gadgetry.

He recalls being with then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates in Georgia reviewing an Army unit ready to deploy to Central Asia with new systems that included iPads and droids for individual soldiers. Cartwright said Gates asked one sergeant during a barracks walkthrough, “What do you think of all this stuff?”

The sergeant replied, “I’d sooner leave this barracks without my rifle as to leave without these things.”

The lesson for Cartwright was that the new electronics, which the military calls information technology (IT), will replace in importance the current platforms — in which the side with the most modern guns, tanks and aircraft often won. Platforms, however, take time to develop.

Read full article.

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Event: 13-15 July NYC Hackers on Planet Earth

Advanced Cyber/IO, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Hacking, InfoOps (IO), Liberation Technology, Officers Call, Politics
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Call for Activities: workshops, artwork, collaborative spaces.  Submit your ideas.

HOPE Number Nine Call for Hackerspaces seeks participation

Keynote announced!  The Yes Men will talk about their approach to hacking corporations and saving the world.  See the press release at 2600.com.

About HOPE

HOPE Number Nine will be taking place on July 13, 14, and 15, 2012 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. H.O.P.E. stands for Hackers On Planet Earth, one of the most creative and diverse hacker events in the world that's been happening since 1994.

We're planning three full days and nights of activities, including more of the provocative and enlightening speakers that the HOPE conferences are known for. In addition, we have access to a massive amount of space to put together all sorts of hacker projects and assorted fun stuff. In the past we've had huge hackerspace villages, film festivals, Segway rides, lockpicking villages, a wide variety of vendors, art installations, live radio, vintage computers, robots, ham radio installations, electronics workshops, book signings, and the country's biggest supply of Club-Mate.

Now imagine all of that happening right in the middle of New York City, across the street from Penn Station and down the block from the Empire State Building. It seems impossible, but with the hard work and dedication of our huge volunteer staff, we're able to pull it off. You can also become part of the magic, whether by attending or volunteering to help run the event with us. We also encourage attendees to submit ideas for talks or to suggest projects that we may not have ever thought of before.

We'll be adding more information to the various sections of this site as it develops. Please explore and spread the word!

Phi Beta Iota: The least expensive most versatile mind-expanding event in the English-speaking world.

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DefDog: Vanishing Middle Class – Lost 38% Wealth in 3 Years

07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Corruption, Government
DefDog

Vanishing middle class…..

Wealth of US families tumbles

The wealth of American families plummeted by 38.8 per cent between 2007 and 2010, according to fresh data from the Federal Reserve, highlighting the deep damage inflicted by the housing crash, financial crisis and recession on the economic health of US households.

According to the Fed’s survey of consumer finances, which is released every three years, the median net worth of US families declined from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 two years ago, as millions of Americans witnessed a sharp drop in the value of their homes, in many cases their main investment.

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The fall in wealth due to the mortgage collapse more than offset the gains of the housing boom. In 2004, family median net worth as measured by the same survey was $107,200, while in 2001 it was $106,100, meaning even much of the benefit of the economic expansion of the 1990s was wiped away.

In its report, the Fed noted that families living in the west with a head of household between 35 and 44 years old bore the brunt of the hit to the net worth, since “housing was a larger share of their assets”.

As their wealth plummeted, many Americans also suffered a steep drop in median income, with unemployment and underemployment rising. According to the Fed study, median income fell 7.7 per cent between 2007 and 2010, a sharp acceleration from a small decline in the previous three years.

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DefDog: War Study – Troops Had Bad Intel, Worse Spin

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Military
DefDog

This has been true since Vietnam (from my personal experience) and for all the money and technology that has been thrown at the IC, the return is dismal at best, criminal at worst….see my previous identifying your tribal summary as better than 99% of the intel I saw in Afghanistan.

War Study: Troops Had Bad Intel, Worse Spin

EXTRACT:

Ten years of war have given the U.S. military more than its share of frustrations. According to an internal Pentagon study, two of them were as fundamental as they were related: Troops had terrible intelligence about Iraq and Afghanistan, and they told their own stories just as badly.

Those are some preliminary conclusions from an ongoing Pentagon study into the lessons of a decade of combat, authorized by Gen. Martin Dempsey, the multi-tour Iraq veteran and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The study doesn’t single out any sensor or spy platform for criticism.  Instead, it finds that U.S. troops didn’t understand the basic realities of society, culture and power structures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and couldn’t explain what they were doing to skeptical populations.

. . . . . . . .

The study Dempsey ordered is ongoing and will have several volumes, each with multiple iterations, before the military produces a definitive assessment of what went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is just the first volume. But it helps identify a series of problems that the military thinks it needs to fix to win the wars of the future.

That future military needs to “leverag[e] technology and social media” in order to consider “all relevant actors’ instruments of power; cultural, religious, and other demographic factors; and employs innovative, non-traditional methods and sources.” In other words, spin harder — and know what you’re talking about.

Read full article.

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Chuck Spinney: Drones — Of Idiots, By Idiots, For Idiots + Meta-RECAP

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call
Chuck Spinney

Attached is a really first rate assessment of the real benefits and costs of the American infatuation with drone warfare.  The writer, Patrick Cockburn, is one of the very best reporters now covering the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Chuck Spinney
Cap Ferat, France

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America is deluded by its drone-warfare propaganda

World View: The use of unmanned aircraft to assassinate its enemies is guaranteed to backfire on Washington

Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, Sunday, 10 June 2012

As the US and its allies ponder what to do about Syria, one suggestion advanced by the protagonists of armed intervention is to use unmanned drones to attack Syrian government targets. The proposal is a measure of the extraordinary success of the White House, CIA and Defense Department in selling the drone as a wonder weapon despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The attraction of the drone for President Obama and his administration five months before the presidential election is self-evident.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Drones — Of Idiots, By Idiots, For Idiots + Meta-RECAP”

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Owl: A New Civilization Emergent? Twilight of the Psycopathic OverWorld

07 Other Atrocities, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Officers Call, Policies
Who? Who?

“A Civilization of, by and for the Normal Human Being”

While many articles on psychopaths have appeared in the last few years, few have anything interesting to say about psychopaths in politics and the military, except clichés and overly broad generalizations. This article, published in an obscure source in Idaho of all places, is one of the best I have ever seen on psychopaths, and it focuses on psychopaths in power and the military. The most profound segment in the article has compelled me to change my views on what constitutes the most fundamental human conflict, which before I thought was between rich and poor, and represented in great power struggles and conspiracies of the former against the latter, with the latter usually losing. This segment from the article makes me think the dichotomy is more fundamental:

“So-called conspiracy theorists, some of whom deserve the pejorative connotation of that much-abused term, often imagine that secret societies of Jews, Jesuits, bankers, communists, Bilderbergers, Muslim extremists, papists, and so on, are secretly controlling history, doing dastardly deeds, and/or threatening to take over the world. As a leading “conspiracy theorist” according to Wikipedia, I feel eminently qualified to offer an alternative conspiracy theory which, like the alternative conspiracy theory of 9/11, is both simpler and more accurate than the prevailing wisdom: The only conspiracy that matters is the conspiracy of the psychopaths against the rest of us.”

The author mentions a useful concept, what he calls the “criminal overworld” expressed in political/military psychopaths and their cliques:

Continue reading “Owl: A New Civilization Emergent? Twilight of the Psycopathic OverWorld”

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