Bob Adelmann is a graduate of Cornell University with two degrees, including a Masters of Business Administration with a concentration in economics and finance. Bob’s career path took him from insurance into estate planning, and then into investment and tax planning. After the stock market crash in October of 1987, Bob started his own investment management company that grew to over $15 million in less than 10 years. He then sold the company to his son in 1996 and now concentrates on writing for The New American.
Stephen E. Arnold: What Keeps Google Awake? Try the Near Death of Its Two Co-Founders
IO Impotency
What Keeps Google Awake? One Big Thing Overlooked
I read “What Keeps Google Awake at Night.” Five good points to be sure. My view is that one big sleep disturber was either overlooked or intentionally skipped. The Information Week article identifies Google’s revenue dependence, the revenue shift riding the mobile revolution, and several other obvious issues. What was skipped? Health. The hiring of synthetic biologists, the smoke screen of Glass, and the Calico play are not trivial actions. The founders are getting older. With age come some darned exciting health issues. My research suggests that the Google founders want to patch up flawed human systems and knock down the bugs and buglets that will cause drive read errors. One popular magazine ran a headline that asked can Googlers solve death? Big issue. Definitely one of the issues about which some Googlers think. See also http://moz.com/blog/what-scares-google
Stephen E Arnold, November 1, 2013
Marcus Aurelius: Gala for CINCSOC Brings Out Many Failures
07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Officers Call
Without comment. PBI should assign appropriate headline.
Washington’s Intelligence Community Comes Out For a Gala “Spy” Prom
The annual OSS Society Donovan Award dinner honored Adm. William H. McRaven
Washingtonian “Capital Comment,” 28 October 2013
No one in the ballroom came right out and shouted, “William McRaven for elected office!” but the idea hovered like a thought bubble over the OSS Society’s William J. Donovan Award Dinner Saturday night, where the commander of US Special Operations was honored—including by President Obama—and even sounded himself a bit like a candidate.
The annual celebration commemorating the World War II spy agency and predecessor of the CIA—for the intelligence and special operations communities, it’s the prom and the Oscars wrapped in one—is a time for reminiscing and gossiping for both the smooth-skinned, ramrod-spined young operatives and the retired spies and warriors with more medals than hair or teeth. But McRaven, the Navy admiral who oversaw the 2011 Navy SEAL mission that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden and who received the Donovan award, gave this year’s gathering a political edge.
President Obama addressed the audience and the honoree via taped video, his image filling three ceiling-high screens. He called McRaven “one of the finest special operators our nation has ever produced. Few Americans will ever see what you do, but every American is safer because of your service.” Also lauding him in taped messages were two other individuals who were directly involved in the bin Laden mission, former CIA director Leon Panetta and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
A third official who was a player in that historic episode, John Brennan, now director of Central Intelligence, relived the experience in his remarks. He said the deliberations to undertake the mission were “difficult and fraught with uncertainty.” He said there was “a key moment in those deliberations when President Obama seemed to move a step closer to his final decision. It was when Adm. McRaven looked at the President and said, ‘Sir, we can get this job done.’ You could hear a pin drop. It was at that time that everyone in that room knew the decision was made and we were going forward.”
Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Gala for CINCSOC Brings Out Many Failures”
4th Media: Global Power Project (Part I, II, & III)
03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Commercial Intelligence
Part I: Global Power Project: Exposing the Institute of International Finance
This is the first of a series of exposés focusing on the Institute of International Finance (IIF), the very “visible hand” of financial markets. It is a continuation of the Global Power Project produced by Occupy.com. Part 1 examines the origins of the IIF.
Founded in 1983, the Institute of International Finance (IIF) describes itself as “the world’s only global association of financial institutions” with a membership that includes “most of the world’s largest commercial banks and investment banks,” along with sovereign wealth funds, asset managers, hedge funds, insurance companies, law firms, multinational corporations, development banks, multilateral agencies, credit ratings agencies and an assortment of other global financial and economic organizations. In short, the Institute of International Finance is the very visible hand of the global financial markets.
As the IIF notes on its website, its “main activities” include providing so-called “impartial analysis and research” to its members in order to “shape regulatory, financial, and economic policy issues….influence the public debate on particular policy proposals….[and work] with policymakers, regulators, and multilateral organizations… with an emphasis on voluntary market-based approaches to crisis prevention and management.”
It is also there to “provide a network for members to exchange views and offer opportunities for effective dialogue among policymakers, regulators, and private sector financial institutions.” The IIF proclaims it “is committed to being the most influential global association of financial institutions,” seeking to “sustain and enhance…. our extensive relationships with policymakers and regulators.”
The Institute of International Finance was formed at the beginning of the debt crisis of the 1980s, designed to establish a formal organization and representation for the interests of the world’s major banks and financial institutions. A meeting at Ditchley Park, England, was hosted by the National Planning Association (NPA) in May of 1982, which brought together senior representatives from major commercial banks in the industrialized Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries, as well as the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Jacques de Larosiere; other top IMF and World Bank officials; the Comptroller of the Currency of the U.S., C.T. Conover; and the Head of Banking Supervision at the Bank of England, Peter Cooke, among many others. [1]
Continue reading “4th Media: Global Power Project (Part I, II, & III)”
SchwartzReport: Lies & Truths That Matter
Cultural Intelligence
This is one of those stories that makes me think about giving up on SR because the human species is just too stupid collectivey to survive, so what's the point. I confess I do despair that we are literally killing ourselves. Our greed simply trumps all other considerations. This story just makes you want to weep.
Citizens United I believe will rank, along with the Dred Scott decision as one of the most egregiously obtuse and stupidest decisions ever made by the Supreme Court. Even the original judge who first ruled on it before it went to the Supreme Court has repudiated it. And it was followed by another truly awful decision by the conservative bloc on the Court, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
Delegates Frustrated as Talks to Create Huge Antarctic Marine Reserves Fail
OLIVER MILMAN – The Guardian (U.K.)
The 1858 Dred Scott decision played a role in the lead up to the Civil War. The two modern decisions have fundamentally changed American democracy — for the worse. It should have been obvious how bad these decisions were, so obvious in fact that one can only wonder whether these conservative activist justices don't have a political agenda. Here is an excellent assessment of what the Voting Rights Act decision has led to. The flood of money that preceded it, with Citiziens is already well-known.
The racial implications of the Voting Rights Act decision have gotten a lot of coverage. Much less discussed is the suppression of women voters, with Texas leading the way in ignominy.
Click through to see the useful map that accompanies this report.
Everything That’s Happened Since Supreme Court Ruled on Voting Rights Act
KARA BRANDEISKY and MIKE TIGAS – ProPublica
Here is a charming story to wipe the stench of stupidity that the other stories in today's edition have left in your mind. I wish I could find more good news, but we are who we are, and I deal in facts, not fantasies. Click through to see the video.
Scientists Decipher Dog-tail Wags
REBECCA MORELLE, Science Reporter – BBC News (U.K.)
Religion, racism, and guns, the hallmarks of the Theocratic Right. What were once just anecdotal reports has yielded to actual research data. Note the last paragraph's observation about the suppression of gun research by the government through non-funding. This in the face of the holocaust of gun deaths in the U.S.
Study Links Racism, Gun Ownership and Resistance to Gun Laws
DAVID FERGUSON – The Raw Story
Phi Betta Iota: Sometimes Brother Schwartz has a brain fart. Baseball bats kill more people than firearms do — firearms are no less than TENTH on the list of murderous weapons. It must also be said that governments are responsible for holocausts in which weapons play a role — not the individual “gun owners.”
See Also:
Parag Khanna: The End of the Nation-State?
Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Peace Intelligence
New York Times, 14 October 2013
Singapore — Every five years, the United States National Intelligence Council, which advises the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, publishes a report forecasting the long-term implications of global trends. Earlier this year it released its latest report, “Alternative Worlds,” which included scenarios for how the world would look a generation from now.
One scenario, “Nonstate World,” imagined a planet in which urbanization, technology and capital accumulation have brought about a landscape where governments give up on real reforms and subcontract many responsibilities to outside parties, which then set up enclaves operating under their own laws.
The imagined date for the report’s scenarios is 2030, but at least for “Nonstate World,” it might as well be 2010: though most of us might not realize it, “nonstate world” describes much of how global society already operates. This isn’t to say that states have disappeared, or will. But they are becoming just one form of governance among many.
A quick scan across the world reveals that where growth and innovation have been most successful, a hybrid public-private, domestic-foreign nexus lies beneath the miracle. These aren’t states; they’re “para-states” — or, in one common parlance, “special economic zones.”
Across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, hundreds of such zones have sprung up in recent decades. In 1980, Shenzhen became China’s first; now they blanket China, which has become the world’s second largest economy.
The Arab world has more than 300 of them, though more than half are concentrated in one city: Dubai. Beginning with Jebel Ali Free Zone, which is today one of the world’s largest and most efficient ports, and now encompasses finance, media, education, health care and logistics, Dubai is as much a dense set of internationally regulated commercial hubs as it is the most populous emirate of a sovereign Arab federation.
This complex layering of territorial, legal and commercial authority goes hand in hand with the second great political trend of the age: devolution.
Continue reading “Parag Khanna: The End of the Nation-State?”
Berto Jongman: Bits, Bytes, & Stuff
Cultural Intelligence
Analyzing Breaking Events (Stratfor)
Phi Beta Iota: Anyone who buys the Boston Bombing cover story may be eligible for employment at Stratfor.
Broadening Participation in Peace Processes – From “Why” to “How”
NSA Script Advised Officials To Inject 9/11 As Talking Point To Justify Mass Surveillance
