We are reminded that much of this is precisely what the US Marine Corps tried to tell the Secretary of Defense in 1992. The Services — and OSD — are once again 20 years behind the planning and programming curve. Understandably absent from this document are all matters of mobility, communications, intelligence, and air support. The plain fact is that this document is devoid of value absent a Secretary of Defense able to demand and insert coherence across the whole. A huge part of the problem is that DoD does not have access to constructive coherent intelligence (decision-support) that is relevant to multi-service and multi-national strategy, policy, acquisition, and whole of government as well as eight tribe M4IS2 operations.
Many classical depictions of intelligence suggest that individual human intelligence is part of a greater transpersonal consciousness. The concept of this integrated intelligence has resurfaced in contemporary times in a number of fields. This paper presents the ideas of four thinkers whose works incorporate integrated intelligence – Broomfield, Dossey, Wilber and Zohar. Inayatullah's Causal Layered Analysis is used to deconstruct them. The four authors and their texts are compared and contrasted on some of their major themes. Finally, some of the most significant issues associated with integrated intelligence are introduced.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the best short summary of the documented works of four great minds that have explored alternative forms of knowing that are compellingly suggestive, as one of the four reviewed authors says, that “Classical science and history will not suffice as the methodologies of the twenty-first century. For these are the stories of colonialization, domination, and segmentation, and ‘Judeo-Christian millenarianism.'” [Bloomfield 1997: 172]. In combination (Phi Beta Iota again), traditional Chinese, traditional Indian, and Islmaic philosophies of balance and governance are going to be major forces in the 21st Century–and being ideational in nature as well as rooted in major demographics, there is absolutely nothing the USA can do about this EXCEPT become a Smart Nation that embraces diversity and the truth on their merits.
The unauthorized disclosure last week of a Justice Department White Paper on the legality of targeted killing of senior al Qaida operatives who are Americans had the collateral effect of strengthening congressional oversight of intelligence.
“The Department has determined that the document responsive to your request is appropriate for release as a matter of agency discretion,” wrote Melanie Ann Pustay, director of the Office of Information Policy at the Department of Justice.
This is a surprising statement, because as recently as two or three weeks earlier, the Department had said exactly the opposite.
Phi Beta Iota: While Brother Steven makes a lovely argument about the inter-related benefits of some leaks, decent investigative journalism, and Congressional oversight, we fear that he has lit a candle in a pitching sea of corruption. The Executive has told the Court in writing that it has the right to lie to the Court as it sees fit. Congressional oversight has never been effective with respect to secret intelligence, with the Government Accountability Organization (GAO) still blocked from doing what it does rather well. Speaking plainly, as long as the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence is led by an idiot who refers to “so-called Americans,” in striving to justify extrajudicial assassinations and confirm as director of the CIA the one person most responsible for the gross US disregard of the rule of law both at home and abroad, there will be no Congressional oversight, and no rule of law within secret intelligence renditions, torture, secret prisons, and not so secret video-game assassinations. The moral disengagement of the United States of America is most ably represented by one man: John Brannan. The FACT that he did not include in his prepared remarks — as he was advised to — an immediate cessation of CIA engagement in any and all drone attack operations (there is still an excellent place for stealth drone imagery and signals reconnaissance) — tells us all we need to know about the future of the CIA: it does not have a future — certainly not one that includes moral engagement, creative collection, or competent analytics.
Richard Dawkins and “new atheists” are the best example. They often make the claim that science has essentially proved that God does not exist. Of course they also equivocate and backtrack and claim they never claimed that. Then they start talking about low order probabilities that are so low that we can virtually know that God does not exist, which is nonsense, because measuring probability requires quantifiable data.
But these kinds of claims are examples of arguments from ignorance, the fallacy of claiming that because something is not known or not knowable, that it is therefore nonexistent or impossible. This has become a trap for many contemporary scientists. And to me it's very similar to superstition, because it involves clinging to something that is known and refusing to consider anything that can't be known with absolute certainty.
The “No child left behind” educational scheme imposed during the Bush Administration has been, every teacher I know has told me, a disaster. Here is an impassioned assessment. At the very moment when we face a world in which many other countries are developing technological prowess, we are left with an educational system that is falling over a cliff.
Phi Beta Iota: Focus on testable material has destroyed US education, and eliminating all teaching, practice, and testing of higher-order skills such as constructing hypotheses, testing them, and developing competing arguments for and against any given topic based on soundly discovered, discriminated, distilled, developed sources and methods.
