Category: Ethics

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Allen Roland: The Moon is Down in Afghanistan – Agony, Cognitive Dissonance, & Here in the USA 18 Veteran Suicides, Day After Day After Day…

Corruption, Ethics, Government, Hacking, IO Deeds of War, Military
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The Moon is Down in Afghanistan, Flies Have Conquered Flypaper

The continuation of attacks on US soldiers by uniformed Afghan soldiers and policemen is an expression of popular hatred for the occupation regime and military invasion forces which brings to mind John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Moon Is Down. Steinbeck fully captures the inner agony, shame and moral guilt of the German occupying forces in Norway whereas the flies eventually conquer the flypaper ~ as they most assuredly will in Afghanistan

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EXTRACT

The flies are beginning to conquer the flypaper in Afghanistan , as they did in Vietnam and Martin makes the same analogy ~ “There is a stench of decomposition over the whole US-NATO enterprise in Afghanistan. US troops are being drawn down, US equipment removed, US subsidies cut back, and the US collaborators in the Karzai regime are packing their bags—usually stuffed with cash—and checking their passports. Kabul today increasingly recalls Saigon in the final months and weeks before the collapse of the US-backed puppet regime of South Vietnam.”

Read full post with photos and video.

Robert David STEELE Vivas

ROBERT STEELE:  I personally communicated to Jim Clapper, then Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, the importance of understanding “cognitive dissonance” within the minds and souls of our dedicated military and civilian personnel.  There is a great deal more to the craft of intelligence than going through the motions pumping money and being complacent about policy, acquisition, and operations decisions that are at best insane and at worst criminally treasonous.  Now that I have an SSBI completed by OPM on 15 March 2012  I have applied for multiple positions at the 13-15 level and I am actively seeking righteous employment in the HUMINT/CI arena.  It's time we got serious about bringing US Intelligence into the 21st Century.  General Mike Flynn will fail — I have seen the plans — in two years when he moves on there will be a legacy of paper and not much else.  DHS and SOCOM are off the rails (based on open sources–we can only imagine what a full audit would reveal).  We appear to have the makings of a very expensive global to local inter-agency cluster fuss such as I have not seen since my tour in Panama.  Have brain (and integrity), will travel.

PS  Please do not hold it against me that retired foreign intelligence chiefs like what I do.  I am no longer in touch with them and I  believe their good opinion should be considered a feature not a flaw, assuming my views on the urgency of M4IS2 are eventually accepted as the foundation for a vastly more effective US IC.

Steele book profile 2012 Low Footprint

CV Robert David Steele 17 August 2012

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Graphic: Public Governance in the 21st Century

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Balance, Capabilities-Force Structure, Citizen-Centered, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Ethics, Graphics, ICT-IT, Innovation, Key Players, Leadership-Integrity, Policies, Policies-Harmonization, Strategy-Holistic Coherence, Threats, True Cost
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Preliminary thoughts of Robert Steele in Response to

15 Nov 2012 Proposal Deadline 30-31 May 2013 San Francisco Public Administration Theory Network 2013

See Also:

2013 Public Governance in the 21st Century: New Rules, Hybrid Forms, One Constant – The Public [Work in Progress]

Journal: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP

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Michel Bauwens: Emerging Leader Labs

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Culture, Ethics, P2P / Panarchy
Michel Bauwens

In my opinion, a truly ground-breaking initiative, and a game changer.

Thanks Venessa Miemis, the Quakers, and the whole team, for bringing this about!!

Ask more details via @EmLeaders (twitter).

Excerpt:

“”The premise is pretty straightforward: There are plenty of passionate, driven people who want to make cool ideas and projects happen. Access to resources (especially, money) is often a large barrier to actualizing them. So why not create physical locations that don’t require money as a chief organizing energy source, where enthusiastic entrepreneurs, artists, designers and other creatives can come together and prototype their dreams?

The way I previously described the flavor of it was:

the superhero school. a center for disruptive innovation. continuous learning zone. collective intelligence. live/work startup incubator. community center. hackerspace. makerlab. autonomous zone. permaculture and sustainable food production. cooperatively owned communications infrastructure. resilience. r&d lab. a place for creative troublemakers.

The idea wants to happen, so without waiting for conditions to be ‘perfect’ to start, we’ve decided to just go ahead and help build it.

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Chuck Spinney: USGS Intelligence with Integrity on Climate Change

Academia, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Chuck Spinney

Below is a USGS press release describing some fascinating geological research into the effects of climate change — a huge drought — on the demise of Egypt's Middle Kingdom around 4200 years ago.  This is one extreme climate event occurred well before man contributed significant CO2 to the atmosphere.  It is also a interesting example of how one can meld science with contemporary/historical/archaeological accounts in the human record.  

This research may also be a good object lesson for that subset of paleoclimatologists who are more concerned with erasing the effects of the Medieval Warming Period (~1000 AD when temperatures may well have been as warm or warmer than today) followed by the  Little Ice Age (~1600 AD) from human memory, as a means to prove their theory that current temperature increases are unprecedented  and therefore due to mankind's generation of CO2. [see Tony Brown's marvelous essay, “The Long Slow Thaw”]

Histories, archives, and folklore have many contemporary accounts of events suggesting the existence both the MWP (settling of Greenland, growing grapes in Scotland) and the LIA (River Thames freezing).  The MWP/LIA sequence raises a cyclical possibility and suggests recent temperature increases (since somewhere between 1750 and 1850) may be a normal recovery from the LIA [e.g., see Professor's Akasofu's analysis here].

The stakes  of such an hypothesis are huge, because if the MWP/LIA hypothesis is correct, money spent on adaptation would be a far wiser strategy that a huge, and ultimatly futile effort, to reduce CO2 emissions. [1]  That is one reason why the study described below is important — it is an example of the benefits that arise from melding science and history and archaeology.

[1] Ironically, while the US is one of, if not, the largest CO2 emitters, its emissions have leveled off and show signs of declining according to data compiled by the Energy Information Administration. [source: here] The principle sources of CO2 growth since the mid 1990s are in the developing world, especially China and India, and CO2 growth is directly correlated with improvements in their standards of living (which is still very low by western standards). To get developing countries to cut back CO2 emissions is tantamount to asking them to reduce their future standard of living. [source: here]

Chuck Spinney
Gaeta, Italia

Climate and Drought Lessons from Ancient Egypt: Using Fossil Pollen to Augment Historical Records

Released:8/16/2012 10:00:00 AM

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Chuck Spinney: Smart Iranians, Neutral Americans, Fearful Jews, Idiot Zionists….

Corruption, Ethics, Government, Idiocy
Chuck Spinney

The hysteria coming out of Israel regarding the need to attack Iran raises a question  of whether or not Netanyahu is overplaying his hand.  Perhaps he is serious. Perhaps he is bluffing in the hope that he can squeeze a huge increase in the annual US aid budget to Israel; perhaps he thinks he can exert enough influence to tip the election in favor of  Romney.  But if he thinks he can force Obama and the United States into attacking Iran, he is playing a dangerous game that could easily backfire.  Mr. Obama is not rising to the bait.  Moreover, Netanyahu's odious attempt to manipulate the United States' election process borders on the obscene, and my guess is that Americans, especially independents, are beginning to notice.  Netanyahu may be setting himself (and Israel) up for a kind of blowback. Coincidentally or not, Romney's obsequious trip to Israel to harvest Jewish support at home was a public relations bust. Against this background, one wonders what the Iranians are making of this bluster and bombast.  Attached is an opinion piece written by an Iranian for the American Iranian Council, an organization dedicated to  improving US-Iranian relations.  CS

Will Israel attack Iran?

By Shahir ShahidSaless, American Iranian Council

By AIC News – Posted on August 17th, 2012

Israeli threats of an imminent attack against Iran make headlines almost daily. Israel’s media also reflect the latest developments in this respect in a significant fashion. According to Time, “the front pages of the four main Israeli dailies last Friday [August 10] reflected what appeared to be a concerted campaign to create the impression that Israel is preparing itself to start a hot war with Iran sometime over the next 12 weeks.” In an interview with Israeli TV, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevi also said if he were Iranian, he “would be very fearful of the next 12 weeks.”

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Smart Iranians, Neutral Americans, Fearful Jews, Idiot Zionists….”

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Marcus Aurelius: Venezuela Gearing Up to Repel US Invasion – Cover for Action for Cuba Invading US?

Ethics, Government, Military, Politics
Marcus Aurelius

Somehow, this sounds somewhat Noriega-esque.   Hugo's G-army, the territorial militias, could be a reprise of the pre-JUST CAUSE Panamanian ding-bats.) 

Venezuela plans a million strong ‘guerrilla army' against US invasion

Venezuela is training a “guerrilla army” aiming to be a million strong by 2013 to fight off a possible US invasion, an opposition MP has said.

“Plan Sucre” – apparently crafted with input from close ally and fellow US foe Cuba – covers the legal, logistical and other angles necessary to “transform a professional army into a guerrilla army,” Representative Maria Corina Machado told El Universal newspaper.

The former presidential candidate said she had obtained a copy of the plan, printed by an institution affiliated with the national army.

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Koko: Serial Entrepreneur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities”

Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
Koko

Koko:  A smart human.

Serial Entrepreneur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities”

Damon Horowitz, a philosophy professor and “serial entrepreneur,” recently joined Google as an In-House Philosopher/Director of Engineering. Prior to his work at Google, Horowitz co-founded Aardvark, Perspecta, and a number of other tech companies. In this talk at Stanford University’s 2011 BiblioTech conference on “Human Experience,”  Horowitz explains why he left a highly-paid tech career, in which he sought the keys to artificial intelligence, to pursue a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Stanford (the text of the talk is available here).

Horowitz offers fellow techies a formidable challenge, but a worthwhile one. In saying so, I must confess a bias: As a student and teacher of the humanities, I have watched with some dismay as the culture becomes increasingly dominated by technicians who often ignore or dismiss pressing philosophical and ethical problems in their quest to build a better world. It is gratifying to hear from someone who recognized this issue by (temporarily) giving up what he admits was a great deal of power and societal privilege and headed back to the classroom.

Horowitz describes his intellectual journey from “technologist” to philosopher with passion and candor, and concludes that as a result of his academic inquiry, he “no longer looks for machines to solve all of our problems for us,” and no longer assumes that he knows what’s best for his users. This kind of humility and intellectual flexibility is, ideally, the outcome of a higher degree in the humanities, and Horowitz uses his own trials to make a case for better critical thinking, for a “humanistic perspective,” in the tech sector and elsewhere. For examples, see Horowitz’s TED talks on a “moral operating system” and “philosophy in prison.” Complicating Google’s well-known, unofficial slogan “don’t be evil,” Horowitz, drawing on Hannah Arendt, believes that most of the evil in the world comes not from bad intentions but from “not thinking.”

Serial Entrepreneur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities”

in Education, Google, Philosophy, Technology | August 7th, 2012 14 Comments

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