by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch, 27 February 2012
(Note: This differs slightly from the original because I have corrected a few typos and grammatical errors and added one short clarifying string of words in [ ]'s.)
On 24 February, the Scientific American carried a revealing blog by John Horgan entitled, Should Global-Warming Activists Lie to Defend Their Cause? Horgan is the Director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He analyzes his question in the context of a discussion he held in a freshman humanities class. The subject was the morality of Dr. Peter Gleick’s use of identity theft to steal documents from the Heartland Institute. Horgan is a promoter of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), and he is clearly at pains to rationalize the implications of Gleick’s caper. Included in Gleick’s distribution was a forged document, although Gleick denies any connection to its fabrication. Of particular interest to this essay is Horgan’s last sentence, because it unintentionally places the politicization of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) debate into sharp relief.
This appears to be another piece of the larger trend toward the complete failure of all governments — the most sophisticated governments have now become the most inept and the most corrupt (in the holistic sense of the term). This does not bode well for humanity.
Security giant G4S is the second-largest private employer on earth
BusinessInsider, 26 February 2012
With more than 625,000 employees, this listed security giant is the second-largest private employer in the world(behind Wal-Mart). While some of its business is focused on routine bank, prison and airport security, G4S also plays an important role in crisis-zones right around the world.In 2008, G4S swallowed up Armorgroup, whose 9,000-strong army of guards has protected about one third of all non-military supply convoys in Iraq (it's also notorious for its wild parties and for having Afghan warlords on its payroll).
But the combined group has a security presence in more than 125 countries, including some of the most dangerous parts of Africa and Latin America, where it offers government agencies and private companies heavily-armed security forces, land-mine clearance, military intelligence and training.
By South Asia Intelligence Review: The crisis in India today is one of capacities, and this cannot be addressed by the reinvention of institutional forms. It doesn't matter if our responses are centralised or decentralised, as long as the executive agencies remain infirm, under-manned, under-trained and under-equipped.
Our principal problems lie, not in architecture, but in manpower, materials and execution. We have eviscerated our institutions over decades, and now believe that the solution lies in creating layer upon layer of meta-institutions to ‘monitor', ‘coordinate' and ‘oversee' this largely dysfunctional apparatus.
Counter-terrorism: The Architecture of Failure, November 24, 2011
The National Counter-terrorism Centre (NCTC) is an ill-conceived, redundant and derivative, vanity project, which aspires to imitate its namesake in the US, without the strength, the sinews, the resources or the constitutional context that would make such aspirations attainable.
Yet, instead of reducing or even just freezing levels of U.S. military aid to Israel, President Obama wants to provide Israel with $3.1 billion of U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons next year, an increase from $3.075 billion in 2012, making the State Department’s claim that this budget request “maintains last year’s record funding levels” for Israel both immodest and inaccurate. By comparison, of the nine other Near Eastern countries receiving U.S. military aid, the budget request for eight of them is unchanged from last year’s budget while the request for Tunisia declined.
The last time oil went in this direction, it caused a slowing in the global economy that led to a global financial panic.
What's causing it? Peak oil, Chinese growth and lots of potential oil disruption. Pretty much the same factors that caused it last time.
The pipeline disruption is a little different this time.
Israel
The headline player is Iran due to its nuclear program. But Iran isn't actually disrupting the production system, they are merely making threats.
If you unwind this a bit, it's pretty clear that the countries actually sending shockwaves of fear through the markets are Israel and the US. However, of the partners in this relationship, Israel is in the drivers seat. They are calling the shots on the timing of an attack on Iran and they will take the world along for a ride.
Mike Lofgren, Huffington Post, Posted: 02/21/2012 7:05 pm
Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l'attaque, il se defend. (This animal is very wicked; when you attack it, it defends itself) – French proverb
It is hard not to think of that Gallic witticism when observing recent international events. Aside from almost daily threats from the governments of Israel and the United States to attack Iran — a violation of the United Nations Charter — Iran has been subject to sabotage, violations of its airspace by military drones, and assassinations of its citizens. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising to hear news of attempted attacks on Israeli embassies in Georgia, India, and Thailand. Iran may very well be behind them.
Sun Tzu or Bismarck: Who will Prevail in the 21st Century?
[Note: this first appeared in Time's Battleland Blog (here)],
The first three chapters in Sun Tzu’s timeless classic “The Art of War” describe how to make net assessments by comparing your strengths and weaknesses and those of your adversary and how to formulate strategy. Near the end of Chapter 3, he sums up his advice, saying, “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle.”
The fundamental problem in the American military and foreign policy elite lies in an incestuously amplifying, self referencing orientation that makes it ignorant of both of Master Sun’s categories of knowledge. (I explain how incestuous amplification hijacks a decision cycle in this essay.) Briefly, the American policy elite’s self-referencing Orientation causes it to Observe what it wants to see.
This kind of one-way shaping isolates the decision-making mind from what is really going on in its external environment. As the American strategist Colonel John Boyd showed, Decisions flowing out of an Orientation that overwhelms Observations become disconnected from reality, and therefore, the Actions consequent to those decisions inevitably become irrelevant at best, and more often counterproductive, in that they amplify themselves to drive the collective decision cycle or Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) loops ever further away from reality.
Left uncorrected, the result is an inexorable descent into disorder, and eventually a magnification into chaos leading to overload and collapse. (Interested readers will find a short summary of Boyd’s theory in the last part of this essay. A more extended description of the man and his work can be found in Robert Coram’s excellent biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, now in its 7th printing. Boyd’s entire Discourse on Winning and Losing — his art of conflict — can be downloaded here.)
Self-referencing behavior is clearly evident with regard to ourselves, for example, in the entirely predicable — and predicted — chaos of the Pentagon’s uncontrollable long-range budget plan (which is grounded on a combination of inwardly focused power games as well as a deliberately corrupted accounting system — explained here, here, and here). Put bluntly — we know that we do not know ourselves — indeed the evidence I compiled during my 25+ years of research in the the Pentagon’s pathological decision making practices, while employed in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, suggests we do not want to know ourselves and will go to great lengths to avoid doing so (unclassified reports can be found here).
Not only does our elite not want to understand itself, it also does not know its adversaries. That was clearly the case in Vietnam and Iraq and currently in Afghanistan. Consider this farcical, were it not so serious, report in Sunday’s New York Times; it describes how the Taliban and impostors are scamming us in Afghanistan. Bear in mind, this report is just the tip of a huge iceberg of evidence describing the self-inflicted — dare I say incestuously delusional — ignorance: see, for example, like that described by Lieut. Colonel Daniel Davis in his 87 page report, “Dereliction of Duty II” (a summary by ace investigative journalist Gareth Porter can be found here).
But Sun Tzu is a voice from 500 B.C., and his musing may be irrelevant in the 21st Century. Perhaps that’s because, as Otto von Bismarck is alleged to have predicted, just before he died in 1898, there is a “special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.” As Francis Urquhart would say: “You might very well think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.”
