Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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Journal: What is the Nature of the Shia-Sunni/Persian-Arab Confrontation?

08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, IO Sense-Making
Chuck Spinney Recommends....

Much ado is being made of the “revelation” in the Wikileaks data dump that some Sunni Arab leaders were quietly in favor of an American and/or Israeli strike on Iran to terminate Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program with extreme prejudice.  Implicit in this war-mongering hysteria is an acceptance of an implacable Shia-Sunni conflict threatening the stability of the Islamic world and perhaps the belief on the part of the neocon Judeo-Christian great gamesters that this divide offers an opportunity to exploit the divisions in Islam. The attached article by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is important in this regard, because he aims to debunk popular assertions about the nature of the Shia-Sunni conflict and/or the Arab-Persian conflict.  If Moghaddam is right, the game to remake the Islamic world in our image may be a little too complex for the neatly compartmented minds of the great-game wannabees in Versailles on the Potomac.

According to a bio in the Guardian, “Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is a lecturer in the comparative and international politics of western Asia at the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was born in the Taksim area of Istanbul to Iranian parents and raised in Hamburg/Germany. He studied at the University of Hamburg, American University and Cambridge. He is the author of The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy, Iran in World Politics: The question of the Islamic Republic and A metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations (forthcoming)”

This Sunni-Shia relations is an area I do not know much about, so I asked a friend of mine, a retired colonel, with extensive experience living and working in the Middle East, for his evaluation of Moghaddam's thesis.  My friend responded as follows:

Colonel's response:

Continue reading “Journal: What is the Nature of the Shia-Sunni/Persian-Arab Confrontation?”

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Worth a Look: The Transpartisan Upwising

Worth A Look

Transpartisan Website

Phi Beta Iota: This is a website, an effort to further a movement that has not been successful to date, and a very intelligent article by a very experienced agitator for change (and former Army Ranger who has also been homeless on multiple occasions, each time rising like a Phoenix).

Transpartisan Moment

by Steve Bhaerman on November 30th, 2010

Click on title above to read about the movement.
Now that its clear to all the “political system is broken”, please be discerning about the expert “solutions” you hear being put forth. Knowing what I know about the “game controllers” — having been a junior league game controller myself — bipartisanship (with a third party “outsider coalition” similar to the British system) will be the professional solution offered to our current crisis. Already you see nostaligc images of the truce between Gingrich and Clinton and other “party fathers” who were adult enough to “put aside their differences.”

Balance of the essay in full below the line.
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Reference: Crash Course on Reality

07 Other Atrocities, Blog Wisdom, Briefings (Core), Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, IO Sense-Making, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Movies, Officers Call, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Strategy, True Cost
Chris Martenson Home

Chris Martenson not only paid attention to all of the early warning signals, but acted upon them, leaving a Fortune 50 job, selling his Connecticut home, getting out of the stock market, and buying gold and silver.  Now he has produced the single best, down-to-earth, detailed free video (38 minutes), inexpensive video (208 minutes), forthcoming book, and a 50 hour week-end course for concerned citizens.  This is essential education for all–it also demonstrates the fraud, waste, and abuse inherent in the continued support by the two-party tyranny of Wall Street.  Wall Street STILL OWES twice the capital it actually has–the bail-out was a flim-flam to perpetuate the short-term bonuses and positions of the criminals who have looted America and the rest of the world.

Short Free Video

Amazon Page
  • Crash Course by Chris Martenson – 38 minute condensed version
  • DVD Release Date: March 5, 2009
  • Run Time: 203 minutes
Amazon Page
  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (March 22, 2011)

Phi Beta Iota: In a perfect demonstration of the Hacker Principle that for every piece of information you share, you get back 100 pieces of which 10 are priceless (10:1 noise to signal and 10:1 return on investment), the below was brought to our attention by Dr. James C. Spohrer, Director, IBM University Programs World-Wide (IBM UP), IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA 95120 USA.  We like IBM, we like it even more after seeing that this kind of thinking is well-understood by IBM.  Bottom line: a number of others have sounded the alarm, Chris Martenson does it better than everyone else, in the most concise non-partisan manner possible.  He is the Paul Revere of the Republic, the Commonwealth.

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Search: revolution theory preconditions

Searches

The results were surprisingly bad.  <preconditions of revolution> is a little better but still not great.  Here is the meat you were looking for plus some. The bottom line on revolution is that it results from scarcity compounded by corruption.  The USA is in a pre-revolutionary situation today, with all the preconditions present, lacking just a precipitant.

Graphic: Pre-Conditions of Revolution

1992 MCU Thinking About Revolution

1976 Thesis: Theory, Risk Assessment, and Internal War: A Framework for the Observation of Revolutionary Potential

Review: Theory, risk assessment, and internal war–A framework for the observation of revolutionary potential

Review: Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements

Search: davies j 1969 curve

Search: rm maciver the web of government summary

Search: smart nation intelligence reform electoral reform national security reform

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Search: naquin washington times

Searches
The Washington Times Online Edition

CIA mines ‘rich' content from blogs

11:01 p.m., Tuesday, April 18, 2006

President Bush and U.S. policy-makers are receiving more intelligence from open sources such as Internet blogs and foreign newspapers than they previously did, senior intelligence officials said.

The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.

Continue reading “Search: naquin washington times”

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Journal: ONE Party–the Wall Street Party–“Owns” USA

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corporations, Corruption, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Jock Gill

The documentary film “Inside Job” makes it perfectly clear that there is only one party in DC:  The Wall Street Party.  With five Wall Street minders for every elected official in DC, why are we surprised?  There are of course a few exceptions, but their legislative record suggest they are essentially ineffective.

The Wall Street Party has constructed a circular tautology that incorporates 1] Wall Street; 2] Government; 3] Academia, and 4] The Press — the American Gang of Four.

It is no surprise that the Wall Street Party has a principle goal of privatizing wealth via tax cuts for themselves, while socializing the pain and suffering by slashing public spending for security in employment, health and education.

Tautologies, such as the ones that prop up the Wall Street Party, are constructed for the sole purpose of being unarguably true and are by design incapable of disproof.  A prime example of the Wall Street Party's abuse of reality is their hijacking and distortion of the works of Adam Smith.

Of course tautologies are false reality distortion bubbles.  They can only paper over the diversion from reality just so long. Then they fail in a big way.  A prime example of this would be the former USSR.

The best way to deal with this is most likely an open source refutation [refudiation?] of the claims of the Wall Street Party.

Phi Beta Iota: Reprinted from Facebook with permission of the author.

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Reference: CRS 2010 Intelligence Issues for Congress

Congressional Research Service

29 Pages Online

Tip of the Hat to Gary Price at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: This is of passing interest as an overview of what people are thinking about at the shallowest possible level in relation to the Wall Street/Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC).

STRIKE ONE: The document still does not understand that overt Human Intelligence (HUMINT) is 90% of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), or that OSINT is a discipline in its own right as well as an interactive element of any properly-managed classified discipline (none are).

STRIKE TWO: The document fails to represent the near-total failure of the US Intelligence Community to meet the needs of all consumers below the level of President, and does not appear to recognize the sharp negative assessments of General Tony Tiny (4% “at best”) or General Mike Flynn (“irrelevant”).

STRIKE THREE: The document fails to present Congress with the deeply documented alternatives to unilateral top-down very expensive technical-collection driven secret intelligence, and it especially fails to outline the immediate possibilities of the Open Source Agency (OSA) as called for in the 9-11 Commission Report on pages 23 and 423 (but under diplomatic auspices), or the integrated elements of that agency, the Strategy Center advocated by General Tony Zinni and the Multinational Decision Support Centre proposed by comprehensive architect Robert Steele.

noble gold