Category: Key Players

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Journal: Latest Greatest on Sustainable Energy

03 Environmental Degradation, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Key Players, Policies
Author's PDF of Full Cover Story
Author's PDF of Full Cover Story
Author's Briefing
Author's Briefing

This article by two young scholars is a very good one, very provocative and persuasive.  It lacks reference to other giants that have gone before, but stands as the best effort we have seen since WIRED did its own cover story on alternative and renewable energies in 2001, coming out the very week that Dick Cheney was meeting secretly with Enron and Exxon to discuss the elective war on Iraq.  Also available from the lead author:

Online interactive version (link)

More detailed analysis (pdf)

E&ES article on ranking energy solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security (link)

Report on matching hourly and peak demand by combining different renewables (pdf)

October 30, 2009 Presentation (pdf)

Return to mark Jacobson's Home Page

Phi Beta Iota: We are often irritated by the young who represent their triumphant ideas as if arrived at by immaculate conception.  No discussion of this topic is credible without reference to, at a minimum, Buckminster Fuller, Herman Daly, and Paul Hawken, among many others.  Below are just three books among the many we have received pertaining to sustainable design, zero waste, and green to gold, and the most recent book to put all of this into proper perspective.

Review: Critical Path

Review: Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications

Review: Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution

Review: The Resilient Earth–Science, Global Warming and the Future of Humanity

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Journal: Illicit Money, Illegitimate Governments, and More…

03 Economy, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Law Enforcement

Subscription Access Online
Subscription Access Online

Volume 56, Number 19 · December 3, 2009

Illicit Money: Can It Be Stopped?

By Eva Joly, Raymond Baker

On May 4, the Obama administration announced a plan to crack down on offshore tax havens, which it said are costing the United States tens of billions of dollars each year. The President's proposals were primarily aimed at finding ways to increase revenue from wealthy companies and investors who use loopholes in the law and offshore subsidiaries to reduce their US taxes. But the administration is largely missing a far more devastating problem related to offshore finance: money gained from criminal and other illicit sources. With the use of tax havens and other elements of an increasingly complex ‘shadow' financial network, vast sums of illegal money are being shifted throughout the global economy virtually undetected.

Phi Beta Iota: The illicit global economy is at least two trillion dollars a year against a seven trillion dollar a year legitimate economy, and the latter is both full of legal crime and legal tax avoidance, as well as focused on the one billion rich rathyer than the five billion poor.  One of the many dirty not-so-little secrets about Wall Street is that it relies heavily on laundered drug money for its liquidity; another is that the banking community has been all too happy to manage the funds of dictators and war lords and others.  Below are just three of the many books we recommend in this area.

Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy (Hardcover)

Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (Paperback)

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Worth a Look: Key Leader Engagement

02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 10 Security, Analysis, DoD, Key Players, Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence, Worth A Look
Free Monograph Online
Free Monograph Online

Phi Beta Iota: Blessed commons sense from a Captain and intelligence professional in the U.S. Army.  When we first entered Iraq we were told to avoid the immams and tribal chiefs, and this wasted at least four years of key leader engagement.  Neither the secret world nor the military “Human Terrain Team” program have gotten a grip on cultural intelligence or a coherent holistic matrix for strategic, operational, and tactical exploitation of political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic Essential Elements of Information (EEI).  We still have not integrated provincial team civil reporting with military tactical reporting, and still have both hugh gaps and costly overlaps.  This monograph, this captain, are the tip of the spear not just in leadership engagement, but in reconcilation–there is a reason why “truth” is included “Truth & Reconciliation Commission.”  BRAVO ZULU.

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Journal: Chuck Spinny on Collapse of Reason

08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Communities of Practice, Ethics
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

Obama and the Triumph of the Will

The Afghan War Question

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

November 12, 2009

In the opening lines of the oldest treatise on the conduct of war, Sun Tzu said that the question of war is vital to the state, and therefore, it is imperative to study it.  This timeless advice has been been ignored repeatedly by the United States since the end of WWII. The inevitable result has been an insensible rise of war mongering, fueled by arrogance and ignorance, culminating in the chaotic spectacle now enveloping the Afghan War Question in Washington.

The intellectual content of the debate over whether or how much to escalate our forces in Afghanistan has degenerated into formless ranting by all sides.

Read the Complete Article at CounterPunch

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Reference: Information Operations (IO) Newsletters

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, DoD, Ethics, Key Players, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Threats, Topics (All Other)
IO Newsletter
IO Newsletter

This extraordinary resource is the personal initiative of Jeffrey S Harley,SMDC/ARSTRAT G39, Deputy, Information Operations.  As received, each new newsletter is posted to the Archives at the above permanent URL:

http://www.oss.net/IO

For many other references relevant to IO, see the original OSS page on IO.  See also our short Memorandum on Chinese Irregular Warfare.

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Journal: Vatican Conference on Extra-Terrestial Life

08 Wild Cards, Analysis, Civil Society, Earth Intelligence, Intelligence (Extra-Terrestrial)
Full Story Online
Full Story Online

by Nicholos Wethington

10 November 2009 [Happy Birthday, Marines]

Though it may seem an unlikely location to happen upon a conference on astrobiology, the Vatican recently held a “study week” of over 30 astronomers, biologists, geologists and religious leaders to discuss the question of the existence of extraterrestrials. This follows the statement made last year by the Pope's chief astronomer, Father Gabriel Funes, that the existence of extraterrestrials does not preclude a belief in God, and that it's a question to be explored by the Catholic Church. The event, put on by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, took place at the Casina Pio IV on the Vatican grounds from November 6-11.   . . . . . . .

“Just like there is an abundance of creatures on earth, there could also be other beings, even intelligent ones, that were created by God. That doesn't contradict our faith, because we cannot put boundaries to God's creative freedom. As saint Francis would say, when we consider the earthly creatures to be our “brothers and sisters”, why couldn't we also talk about a “extraterrestrial brother”? He would still be part of creation.”

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Journal: Bushes-Vulcans-Banks-Terrorism

03 Economy, 06 Russia, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Ethics, Government, Methods & Process, Reform
59-page indictment
59-page indictment

Phi Beta Iota: a 59 page memorandum is rocketing around the Internet, entitled Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001.  Read the report, which includes very specific details and charts with head and shoulder photos.  This material is substantiated not just by the sources cited in the endnotes, but by many other sources such as those reviewed at 9-11 Truth Books & DVDs (23) and (indirectly) at Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback (145).