Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 1804 – Public Intelligence Blog

I sense a little bit of history repeating, and not the good kind. About ten years ago, I was deeply involved in the field of conflict early warning and response. Eventually, I realized that the systems we were designing and implementing excluded at-risk communities even though the rhetoric had me believe they were instrumented to protect them. The truth is that these information systems were purely extractive and ultimately did little else than fill the pockets of academics who were hired as consultants to develop these early warning systems.

The prevailing belief amongst these academics was (and still is) that large datasets and advanced quantitative methodologies can predict the escalation of political tensions and thus impede violence. To be sure, “these systems have been developed in advanced environments where the intention is to gather data so as to predict events in distant places. This leads to a division of labor between those who ‘predict’ and those ‘predicted’ upon” (Cited Meier 2008, PDF).

Those who predict assume their sophisticated remote sensing systems will enable them to forecast and thus prevent impending conflict. Those predicted upon don’t even know these systems exist. The sum result? Conflict early warning systems have failed miserably at forecasting anything, let alone catalyzing preventive action or empowering local communities to get out of harm’s way. Conflict prevention is inherently political, and “political will is not an icon on your computer screen” (Cited in Meier 2013).

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Yes, But Resilidence for Whom? Bottom Line: Technology-Based Forecasting Sucks”

2013/09/02

Rickard Falkvinge: More Thoughts On The Coming Swarm Economy

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

More Thoughts On The Coming Swarm Economy

Swarm Economy: The industrial model with lifetime single-employer careers is dying, and it is not coming back. The first sign was a change from lifetime-marriage employments into its serial-monogamy equivalent, where people change jobs every three years at the most. The next change, one which is already happening, is that most people have more than one employment — or employment-equivalent — at one time: this is an enormous change to society, where people are going to be juggling five to ten projects at a time, some for fun, some for breadwinning, some for both. I have called this the coming swarm economy.

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2013/09/02

Berto Jongman: Ahmed Kashid on Why, and What, You Should Know About Central Asia

03 Economy, 05 Energy, 12 Water, Civil Society, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government, IO Deeds of Peace, Peace Intelligence

EXTRACT:

China and Central Asia

None of the works under review provides the full answers to these questions, although Alexander Cooley’s book, Great Games, Local Rules, comes closest. They all agree on the unprecedented rise of China’s influence in Central Asia. Marlène Laruelle and Sébastien Peyrouse, scholars at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., demonstrate in The Chinese Question in Central Asia that China is already the dominant economic power in the region.

China has also taken care of one vital strategic interest since 1991: making sure that the Uighurs, China’s largest Muslim ethnic group who live in the western province of Xinjiang, do not seriously threaten to become independent and that the hundreds of thousands of Uighurs who live in Central Asia do not help them do so. During the 1950s large numbers of Uighurs fled the Maoist regime to seek shelter in Soviet Central Asia where they were relatively well treated.

After 1991 China put immense pressure on the three Central Asian states that border Xinjiang—Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan—to tightly restrict all Uighur political activity on their soil. China offered sweeteners such as resolving the border disputes that had plagued Chinese–Soviet relations in Central Asia for decades. Within a decade the borders between China and the Central Asian states were demarcated and settled, allowing for China’s rapid economic involvement in the region.

Still, Uighur nationalism and Islamic militancy have continued to mount in Xinjiang, as China has inundated the province with Han Chinese and severely repressed the Muslims. While the Uighur populations in Central Asia have been largely silenced, some Uighurs have been training and fighting with the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

During the past decade China has invested heavily in Central Asia. Laruelle and Peyrouse write that

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Ahmed Kashid on Why, and What, You Should Know About Central Asia”

2013/09/02

Owl: Google as Empire, Google as Front for Empire, the Nuances of Evil

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, Officers Call

“How the World Really Works”

Key takeaway from this item by Julian Assange, which came out in Australia August 24, 2013 (my emphasis):

“Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side: that they support what we at WikiLeaks are struggling for: justice, government transparency, and privacy for individuals. But that would be a false supposition. Their agenda was much more complex, and as we found out, was inextricable from that of the US State Department. The full transcript of our meeting is available online through the WikiLeaks website.

The pretext for their visit was that Schmidt was then researching a new book, a banal tome which has since come out as The New Digital Age. My less than enthusiastic review of this book was published in the New York Times in late May of this year. On the back of that book are a series of pre-publication endorsements: Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Michael Hayden (former head of the CIA and NSA) and Tony Blair. Inside the book Henry Kissinger appears once again, this time given pride of place in the acknowledgements.

Schmidt’s book is not about communicating with the public. He is worth $6.1 billion and does not need to sell books. Rather, this book is a mechanism by which Google seeks to project itself into Washington. It shows Washington that Google can be its partner, its geopolitical visionary, who will help Washington see further about America’s interests. And by tying itself to the US state, Google thereby cements its own security, at the expense of all competitors.

Continue reading “Owl: Google as Empire, Google as Front for Empire, the Nuances of Evil”

2013/09/02

Lee Camp: Mind-Blowing Truth About War with Syria

08 Wild Cards, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, Offbeat Fun, Officers Call

The Mind-Blowing Truth About War With Syria–

http://youtu.be/N3qrR1AVMNU

2013/09/02

Chuck Spinney: Thoughts on Obama’s March to Folly in Syria

03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, Media, Military, Peace Intelligence

President Obama's Syria nightmare is becoming increasingly bizarre. The man who claimed he could distinguish dumb from smart wars is marching headlong into the dumbest one yet, with allies jumping ship left and right. Consider, please, the following:

(1) NBC just released a poll saying a majority of the American people are opposed to another war in Syria, and 80% are opposed to a war without Congressional authorization.

(2) But Congress is out of session. Nevertheless Mr. Obama is under pressure to attack before Congress returns from its Labor Day vacation. Moreover, despite the fact that at least 188 members of Congress have called for a debate and vote on the war question; thus far, Mr. Obama has not indicated he will call Congress into an emergency session. Yet six years ago, Senator (candidate) Obama told interviewer Charlie Savage on December 20, 2007: “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

(3) The nearest counterpart to our Congress, the British Parliament, just voted to pull the plug on Prime Minister David Cameron's warmongering — and in so doing, the unwritten British Constitution has made a mockery of the written, legalistic US Constitution. Bottom line: the checks and balances in the UK are working to ensure our closest ally will not partake in our adventure, while those in the United States are being bypassed.

(4) The UN and the Security Council also pulled the plug on approving and supporting a US strike; ditto for the Arab League and Jordan, and our coup-leading friends in Egypt.

(5) The secretary general of NATO, Anders Rasmussen, said NATO will not be part of a strike on Syria.

So who is left in Obama's increasingly isolated coalition of the willing: France and Israel — two countries with a lot of sordid baggage loading down the Syria Question. Some readers may never have heard of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, but your can bet most Syrians have.

A reasonable person might ask how an obviously intelligent Mr. Obama could land himself in such a mess?

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Thoughts on Obama's March to Folly in Syria”

2013/09/02

Jim Dean: Western Allies Prepare 3rd WMD Attack on Syria

03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, Corruption, Government, Military

Western Allies prepare their 3rd WMD attack on Syria

“Deep within every one of us lies a natural understanding of good and evil. That is why one man can tell the truth convincingly…but it takes the entire apparatus of the state to peddle a lie, and propagate that lie to new generations.”…Gandhi

… by Jim W. Dean, VT Editor and New Eastern Outlook, Moscow

– First Published August 30th, 2013 –

While the world watches to see when and how the ‘punishment attack’ will be launched on Syria, I read reports all day trying to see if anyone would lay out what really has been going on. They did not.

The US and its allies, to their eternal shame, have already used WMD on the Syrian people, but initially in a non traditional form. They changed their game plan for future regime changes to avoid using their own troops and as little cash as possible. How?

They went rogue. They went over to terrorism. They went over to al-Qaeda, that’s how. Using the Gulf State proxies has fooled no one here.

They dusted off Ziggy Brzezinski’s old destabilization plan for starting Muslim holy wars against the Russians in the Caucasus. The strategy was to keep them tied up in the tried and true, ‘death by a thousand cuts’ insurgent wars.

Ziggy has no regrets over the 150,000 dead in the Chechen war. His justification was “Would you have rather seen them marching into Europe?” There was a little problem with that. They never could have marched into Europe as both ‘assured mutual destruction’ and tactical nuclear weapons served as an effective bear trap.

We move on now to how earlier in Afghanistan where Saudi money and CIA logistics cranked up the first major ‘use the locals for cannon fodder’ war in that region. And yes, the Madrasa schools to indoctrinate children to be an endless supply of holy warriors…yes…we and the Saudis did that.

Read full article with graphics and links.