Information Operations (IO) – Page 710 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/04/15

Harvard “Boys” Crash, Burn, No Apology

04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Academia, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Impotency

economicprincipals.com

March 27, 2011, David Warsh, Proprietor

A Recent Exercise in Nation-Building by Some Harvard Boys

It was worth a smile at breakfast that morning in February 2006, a scrap of social currency to take out into the world. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School management guru, had grown famous offering competitive strategies to firms, regions, whole nations. Earlier he had taken on the problems of inner cities, health care and climate change. Now he was about to tackle perhaps the hardest problem of all (that is, after the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq).

He had become adviser to Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya.

Phi Beta Iota: Harvard is now the poster child for all that is wrong with education–no intelligence, no ethics, and grotesquely expensive. Yale can now claim the mantle in the East.

Read full original….

Safety copy below the line.

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2011/04/15

Seth Godin on Education Bubble & Alternative

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

Buying an education or buying a brand?

It's reported that student debt in the USA is approaching a trillion dollars, five times what it was ten years ago.

Are those in debt buying more education or are they seeking better branding in the form of coveted diplomas?

Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper but no less rigorous self-generated approach assembled from less famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources?

If not, then the money is actually being spent on the value of the degree, on the doors it will open and the jobs it will snag. If this marketing strategy works big, it pays for itself in no time.

A marketing tactic might move the dial, but that doesn't mean it's always worth the money.

The question is whether a trillion dollars is the right amount for individuals to spend marketing themselves. What would happen if people spent it building up a work history instead? On becoming smarter, more flexible, more self-sufficient and yes, able to take more risk because they owe less money…

There's no doubt that we need smarter and more motivated people in our organizations. I'm not sure we need them to be better labeled or more accredited.

Phi Beta Iota: This is why we feel very strongly that a Vice President for Education, Intelligence, & Research is needed; the corollary of this is that Cyber/IO should be about EDUCATION, not about corporate vapor-ware pretending to do attack and defend of systems that are in the proverbial Stone Age.

2011/04/14

USA Has Become Deaf, Dumb, and Blind

04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, Advanced Cyber/IO, Budgets & Funding, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Waste (materials, food, etc)

Published on Monday, April 11, 2011 by TruthDig.com

Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

by Chris Hedges

Note: Truthdig server overwhelmed. This is the Common Dreams reprint.

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Finish reading at CommonDreams

2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated

2009 Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A Twenty-Year Restrospective

1995 GIQ 13/2 Creating a Smart Nation: Strategy, Policy, Intelligence, and Information

1992 E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & intelligence (An Alternative Paradigm)

Complete Safety Copy Below the Line

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2011/04/142011/04/14

Seth Godin: Chicken Movies for Better Chicken

IO Sense-Making

Seth Godin Home

Why you might choose to be in favor of transparency

Thousands of doctors have signed up for a service that, among other things, they can use to try to prohibit patients from posting reviews. You can read a bit about it here.

In Iowa, in a surprisingly similar move, the state government is moving ahead with a law that will make it a crime to take or possess videotapes of factory farming that might harm the commercial interests of the farmer.

In both cases, an organization is trying to maintain power by hiding information from the public. Can you imagine being arrested for possession of a photo of a pig?

It's easy to argue that from the public's point of view, laws like this are a bad idea. The public certainly benefits from the outing of bad doctors and from the improved hygeine of factory farms. In that sense, it's unethical for doctors and legislators to subvert their responsibilities by ordering the unempowered to shut up.

I think it's interesting to think about from the doc's point of view (and the chicken farmer), as well. The temptation is for those in charge to defend the status quo by fighting transparency. This ignores a simple truth:

When book reviews are posted, book sales go up.

Yes, the argument of fairness matters. The patients have no choice, the chickens certainly have no choice and the consumers don't have much choice either. There's an argument that goes beyond choice, though… it turns out that transparency increases profitability.

If every chicken coop has a video camera in it, quality will obviously go up. Confidence in the product will go up. Employee behavior will improve as well, because it's hard to torture a chicken if you know you're going to get caught.

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2011/04/142011/04/14

From BRIC to BRICS–Sanya Declaration

01 Brazil, 02 China, 03 Economy, 03 India, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 07 Venezuela, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Earth Intelligence, Government, IO Multinational, Reform, Strategy

Full text of Sanya Declaration of the BRICS Leaders Meeting

Xinhuanet.com English.news.cn 2011-04-14 21:58:57

SANYA, Hainan, April 14 (Xinhua) — Leaders of five BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, released on Thursday a joint document, Sanya Declaration, at the BRICS Leaders Meeting in south China's resort city of Sanya.

The following is the full text of the document.

Sanya Declaration

(BRICS Leaders Meeting, Sanya, Hainan, China, 14 April 2011)

Read full text (nine screens)–videos and photos in sidebar.

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2011/04/142011/04/14

US Intelligence: Militarized to Lowest Common Denominator

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call

Phi Beta Iota: Posted with permission. We strongly recommend the Intelligence Online offerings. We have received a number of commentaries around this topic, and they boil down to the situation being much, much worse than depicted here:

1. Budget weenies without substantive experience running entire agencies (e.g. NRO)

2. Nose-dive to the lowest common denominator, completely destroying regional and country expertise and having no linguistic capabilities or grasp of history and culture (CIA, DIA)

3. Completely out of control procurement, rotten requirements definition, no full life-cycle planning (e.g. buy collection, do not buy processing), and generally disconnected from reality (NSA/Cyber-Command)

4. We are reminded that there are 1,200 distinct “organizations” wasting money and going through the motions on counter-terrorism–meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security gropes little girls, confiscates aftershave, and is generally on the underside of institutionalized tyrannical idiocy.

2011/04/14

Reference: Emergent Democracy

11 Society, About the Idea, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process

EXTRACT from Google Group Next Net:

That made me think of the Emergent Democracy paper that Joi Ito authored collaboratively (2001-2003) with several other folks (including Ross Mayfield and I) a few years ago. Digging into my files I found the attached marked up version… it aligns pretty well with some of the discussions here.

There's been a lot of interesting thought about the Internet and the web as platform for enhanced social activity. That idea of “finding our tribes and ourselves” was a core aspect of FringeWare, the company/community that Paco Nathan and I started in 1991. We realized that like-minded fringe thinkers and doers were scattered everywhere, and the Internet gave us a platform where they could find each other and form community. All it took was an email list and a compelling concept (“fringeware”) to catalyze that community.

“Declaration of Interdependence” sounded familiar… I did some searching…

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html – Barlow wrote this, and I think he referred to it (earlier or later, not sure which) as a declaration of interdependence).

http://notanmba.com/blog/2008/03/a-declaration-of-interdependence – This notes that the Whole Foods mission statement is called “declaration of interdependence” – http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/company/declaration.php. This also refers to the Barlow document and our 2008 EFF-Austin party.

Interestingly, Will Durant made a “declaration of interdependence” in 1945. http://www.willdurant.com/interdependence.htm

Review: Evolutionary Activism by Tom Atlee

Review: Philosophy and the Social Problem–The Annotated Edition

Seth Godin Home Why you might choose to be in favor of transparency

Seth Godin Home

Why you might choose to be in favor of transparency