Key Players – Page 283 – Public Intelligence Blog

Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) — Brazil won the World Trade Organization’s approval to start retaliating against the U.S. because of subsidies paid to American cotton farmers.

The WTO gave Brazil permission in August to impose $294.7 million in sanctions against U.S. goods — the second-highest amount ever permitted by the Geneva-based trade arbiter — and Brazil’s government earlier this month released a list of 222 products that may be subject to increased duties. The list includes cotton and other agricultural and textile products as well as U.S. exports such as electronics, cosmetics, ketchup, cars, chewing gum, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals.

WTO judges found in September 2004 that as much as $4 billion in annual U.S. payments to cotton farmers violated global trade rules by encouraging excess production and driving down world prices. In June 2008, they upheld a finding that the U.S., the world’s largest exporter of the fiber, hadn’t done enough to scrap aid to its cotton producers.

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2009/12/012009/12/01

Journal: Why they hate us (II): How many Muslims has the U.S. killed in the past 30 years?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Academia, Civil Society, Ethics, Government, Military

Tom Friedman had an especially fatuous column in Sunday's New York Times, which is saying something given his well-established capacity for smug self-assurance. According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is “the Narrative” — his patronizing term for Muslim views about America's supposedly negative role in the region.

. . . . . . .

I heard a different take on this subject at a recent conference on U.S. relations with the Islamic world. In addition to hearing a diverse set of views from different Islamic countries, one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world,” he said, “it should stop killing Muslims.”

Phi Beta Iota: The chart is below the fold, or at the Full Story Online

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2009/12/012009/12/01

Journal: ClimateGate Ideology, Theology, Science

03 Environmental Degradation, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Geospatial, Key Players, Methods & Process

Chuck Spinney Sends: Viewed at the level of epistemology, the distinction be the search for truth in science and religion is stark:

In science the structure of the world view — i.e., the brain's interior model of reality — is evolved to match observations taken from the external world, whereas in religion, observations are evolved to match a fixed world view inserted into the brain by some kind of deity.

Miracles (anomalies that defy the model's definition of reality) might be explained by or at least rationalized within an unquestionable dogma of a religious model, whereas such anomalies in science trigger a search for tests that falsify the model. In terms of this typology, the recent scandal involving hacked emails of the UK's Climate Research Center at the University of East Anglia raises a basic question of whether global warming theory is being shaped by a predominantly scientific or religious mindset.

2009/12/01

Journal: Vermont Commons, Secession, & Collapse

05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Reform

Vermont Commons Home Page

Secession is Constitutional, Abraham Lincoln's unconstitutional pillaging and looting of the South not-with-standing. Few are sufficiently educated to actually know that Lincoln did not free the slaves of the north and west and did not have the Constitutional authority to suspend habeas corpus, conscript men of the north, borrow money to wage war on peacefully seceeeding members of the Union of STATES that voluntarily entered a compact, or to occupy the south by force of arms for twelve years. In Canada the Supreme Court has found for Quebec on the matter of secession, and the Yukon and Northwest Territories are both acutely aware of the options they have. Further North Greenland has declared independence from Denmark. Alaska remains a wild card–Sarah Palin could have been President of the North, but got sucked into the ideological maelstrom of an imploding Republican Party. All that by way to introduction to the Vermont Commons. Maine and Vermont are two of the states most likely to actually seceed from the Union if the US Government does not heal itself fairly soon. The only way to preserve the Union going into the next decade is to rapidly restore the legitimacy and efficacy of governance–this can only be done by getting a grip on reality and devising policies, programs, and budgets in harmony with reality.

Below are some Reviews that bear on the above subject.

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2009/12/012009/12/01

Journal: Spinning Afghanistan

05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Military, Peace Intelligence

Marcus Aurelius Recommends:

Karzai Aides, Tribal Leaders Say Surge Is Wrong Strategy

KABUL — Some powerful Afghan politicians and tribal leaders have expressed doubts that more U.S. troops can turn the tide of the war, as President Barack Obama prepares to unveil a new Afghanistan strategy Tuesday.

Army Researchers Warn Against Tribal War in Afghanistan

U.S. Army’s own specialists in Afghanistan’s culture and society are warning that relying on the tribes there may be a waste of time. “Most of Afghanistan has not been ‘tribal’ in the last few centuries,” notes a recent report from the Army’s Human Terrain System at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. “In fact, many scholars are reluctant to use the word ‘tribe’ at all for describing groups in Afghanistan.”

Clear, Hold And Duct Tape

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2009/11/30

Journal: Climate battle bill to top $300 billion–Guyana

Analysis, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Key Players, Policies, Threats

Full Story Online

PORT OF SPAIN — The true cost of fighting climate change will top 300 billion dollars and developed countries may balk at footing the bill, Guyana's Prime Minister Bharrat Jagdeo said Saturday.

Leading economists have calculated that “the cost of action and mitigation would be about one percent of the global economy,” he told journalists. “This is one percent of the GDP of a 30-trillion-dollar global economy,” he estimated.

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2009/11/302009/11/30

Worth a Look: Ushandi Open Source Crowd-Sourcing

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Geospatial, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Technologies, Threats, Worth A Look

The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.

This is a huge development, one that could lead to a more rapid creation of the World Brain with embedded EarthGame as a means of connecting all human minds with all information in all languages all the time.

See our briefing given in Denmark to think about how this might apply to the global harmonization of gifts from the one billion rich to needs of the five billion poor at the household and item level.