Retired Reader states “Identifying what he [Robert D. Steele] conceives as the ten major threats to humanity as the bases for designing a global intelligence system is exactly the way to begin.” I couldn’t agree more.
Given that, and as someone who greatly admires your ability to digest huge amounts of information in your pursuit of truth, I would like to bring “The Crash Course”, by Dr. Chris Martenson, to your attention. It is available free on-line..
I think Chris’s 5 year search for the truth -relating to interacting problems in the economy, energy, and environment- complements your search for larger truths, just starting from a different perspective. I also think the knowledge he conveys may contribute additional insights for your assessment of the top threats to humanity.
EXTRACT from Huffington Post (a great review) on the author's three core points:
“The first is that the next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years. Second, I believe that its possible that the pace and/or scope of change could overwhelm the ability of our key social and support institutions to adapt. Third, I believe we do not lack any technology or understanding necessary to build ourselves a better future.”
Roosevelt Institute Braintruster and Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz identifies five lessons we can take away from the financial crisis.
The best that can be said for 2009 is that it could have been worse, that we pulled back from the precipice on which we seemed to be perched in late 2008, and that 2010 will almost surely be better for most countries around the world. The world has also learned some valuable lessons, though at great cost both to current and future prosperity — costs that were unnecessarily high given that we should already have learned them.
The first lesson is that markets are not self-correcting. Indeed, without adequate regulation, they are prone to excess. In 2009, we again saw why Adam Smith’s invisible hand often appeared invisible: it is not there. The bankers’ pursuit of self-interest (greed) did not lead to the well-being of society; it did not even serve their shareholders and bondholders well. It certainly did not serve homeowners who are losing their homes, workers who have lost their jobs, retirees who have seen their retirement funds vanish, or taxpayers who paid hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks.
While so many of our institutions have failed, we can repair them. The first step is to take personal responsibility.
Maybe the most worrying trend the past 10 years can be found in this phrase: “They forgot the mission.” So many great American institutions—institutions that every day help hold us together—acted as if they had forgotten their mission, forgotten what they were about, what their role and purpose was, what they existed to do. You, as you read, can probably think of an institution that has forgotten its reason for being. Maybe it's the one you're part of.
Phi Beta Iota: The Op-Ed reads like Paradigms of Failure, and this ia good thing. The American public is awake now, and moderate right to mdoerate left, 43% of the eligible voters now Independent and most very angry with the failure of all of our institutions and most especially the two-party tyranny–if President Barack Obama does not break from his partisan colleagues and sponsor Electoral Reform in time for 2010, the Second American Revolution may just show itself in a massive housecleaning, a “pox” on both houses, both parties.
Phi Beta Iota: This is worth a look rather than a reference because we have not had time to evaluate it properly. It most certainly is worth a look. Israel is known to have attacked the USS Liberty, and similar to the USA being responsible for Abu Ghraib, such a crime against humanity cannot be forgotten.
We are especially troubled by the USS Cole allegation with respect to the Israeli's using a cruise missile. Unfortunately, the US Government has a track record of covering up “friendly” attacks (USS Liberty) as well as “enemy” attacks (USS Scorpion) so the bottom line is that we have no reliable source of information on any of this.
Christopher Bollyn, Independent Journalist "Without Frontier"
This material furthers our deep interest in strategic public counterintelligence. It is a certainty that no one is defending the USA from “white collar” domestic enemies, and we are generally doing more to incite foreign enemies than to contain them. We are increasingly seeing the discipline of counter-intelligence as one that demands that we know ourselves–that we look deeply into our soul, and that we find and eradicate all those commiting treason against the Republic, including those who collaborate in the murder of Americans for “higher purposes.”
Separately Christopher Boyllyn, a self-described journalist “without frontier” who has standing with Prison Planet and Mike Ruppert, former LAPD who wrote Crossing the Rubicon, has posted a number of items also worth a look.
To that end, we respectfully post these two links for public consideration.
The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face.
. . . . . . .
Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy — jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon — turns laxity into a governing philosophy.
Marcus Aurelius
Phi Beta Iota: The commentator, an extreme partisan from the right, confuses laxity with partisanship. Both parties are partisan extremists, and blinding America to the reality that it must acknowledge if it is to adapt to the unprecedented complexity that threatens us–many of the threats of our own making and many of the cost of our own volition, bad decisions made in the aftermath of what would otherwise be minor decisions. America lacks a non-partisan intelligence community able to get a grip on the Whole System; America lacks a Whole of Government capacity to balance means, ways, and ends; and America lacks above all any means of restoring comity and consensus in Congress, without which Congress will not fulfill its Article 1 Constitutional duty.
Heads set to roll as Obama goes on attack over security failures that allowed Christmas Day bomber on to plane
A senior aide said Obama would seek accountability at the highest levels for the failure, a remark some observers took to mean that heads would roll.
The terrorist plot to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 exposed a near-catastrophic failure at every level of our government,' the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, John Boehner, said in a statement.
Phi Beta Iota: This would be a good time for President Barack Obama, President in name only, to either be the President and introduce the Electoral Reform Act of 2010, or to resign in ackinowledgement of the fact that he simiply is not up to the job because we live in a two-party tyranny that makes decisions on the basis of nakedly amoral partisan interests, not the public interest. If he also introduced the Smart Nation – Safe Nation Act, with a nod of respect to Congressman Rob Simmons, then (R-CT-02) and today the challenger to Wall Street fixer Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), he would instantly restore the integrity of the Constitution, the Republic, and the US Government.
We do not lack for knowledge of what to do. HUNDREDS of authorities are on record with good ideas that have not been implemented (e.g. the Aspin-Brown Commission). We lack for INTEGRITY in acknowledging reality and getting a grip on all that we need to do that is markedly different from the past.
We predict that President Obama will do something really stupid, such as fire Blair (who is non-partisan) and promote partisan Panetta to his maximum level of incompetence, while ignoring the reality, as we pointed out in ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000), that firing the engineer does not change the train built to run on a single track between Moscow and DC into what we really need–10,000 open source bicyles, 1,000 open source motorcycles, and 100 assorted small-size secret cars, most of them with multinational passengers. What is new is that Homeland Security was built on the old train model, and is just as useless. The USA today is on the cusp of a historic era where we can stick with the simple-minded Weberian stove-pipes of the past, Epoch A command & control “central planning,” or we can ride the wave and embrace bottom-up Epoch B collective intelligence and distributed resilience. From where we sit, no one in Congress or the White House reads or thinks–they are all on auto-pilot, and their definition of progress is to take that next step over the cliff.
The truth at any cost reduces all other costs. We're not there.
I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism. . . .
Mr. Obama's economic thinking (or lack thereof) adds up to a kind of rudderless cowboyism combined with wishful thinking. You would think that in the two solid years of daily campaigning leading up to his election this nakedness would have been seen. . . .
On the foreign front he has been given much credit for his new policy on the Afghan war, and especially for the “rational” and “earnest” way he went about arriving at the decision to surge 30,000 new troops into battle. But here also were three months of presidential equivocation for all the world to see, only to end up essentially where he started out.
And here again was the lack of a larger framework of meaning. How is this surge of a piece with America's role in the world? . . .
I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world
With year one drawing to a close, the truth of the Obama presidency is laid bare: retrenchment abroad, and redistribution and the intrusive regulatory state at home. . . .
It is different today, there is a cold-bloodedness to American foreign policy. “Ideology is so yesterday,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed not long ago, giving voice to the new sentiment. . . .
History and its furies have their logic, and they have not bent to Mr. Obama's will.
