10 Security – Page 100 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/02/182011/02/18

Turkey to USA: This is where you get off….+ RECAP

02 Diplomacy, 05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Peace Intelligence, Strategy

Very heavy interview with Turkey's Foreign minister : Beginning at 9:40, the issue of Israeli intransigence on negotiations. No “mainstream” pick-up anywhere I can find.

Turkey's line in the sand. Cannot be walked back. I believe this to be a notice to US in the face of the wikileaks palestinian docs which revealed the US duplicity, in which EVERY nation under the influence of the US vis-a-vis negotiations was made to look like stooges. None, more so than Turkey. I believe that this interview ends that subordination.

Ahmet Davutoglu on Al Jazeera

As the Middle East undergoes historic transformation and upheaval one country is quietly enjoying levels of prosperity and stability that can only be envied by its neighbours – Turkey. And, in its ninth year of rule by the AK Party, the country is perceived as having successfully combined democracy and Islam.

But under the AKP Turkey has done more than improve its system of governance. It has also reached out to the Middle East in a way that no previous Turkish government has.

But as Western governments can tell you, getting involved in the Middle East is not always easy. One man more than any other is responsible for Turkey's drive to engage: Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister.

He talks to Al Jazeera's Anita McNaught about the recent developments in the Middle East and explains why he is hopeful that change and stability will work together in Egypt and serve as a positive example for other countries in the region.

This episode of Talk to Jazeera aired from Monday, February 14, 2011.

Phi Beta Iota: Turkey and Iran are both inevitable leaders in their region and across their considerable diasphoras. There is NOTHING the US can do about it because the US is financially, morally, and practically bankrupt. It is going to take a quarter century to recover from the craven criminality that has chracterized the two-party tyranny and their Wall Street and corporate masters. The world is not stupid–they understand the inherent goodness of the American people and of America the Beautiful, but they also wonder why a public once famed for its independent intelligence can now be confused with a herd of sheep.

2011/02/13

DARPA as Poster Child for Out of Control Budget

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Corruption, Government, Military, Officers Call, Waste (materials, food, etc)

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Sounds Off...

From the inventors of McNamara's electronic line (which failed spectacularly in Vietnam) comes the Electronic Coup/Revolution Predictor (EC/RP)! This is explained below in the attached Wired report.

The EC/RP is merely the latest effort in DARPA's continuing campaign to overthrow Boyd's Law* (i.e., Machines don't fight war wars, people do, and they use their minds) by taking the mind out of the military's Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) loop, and hardwiring what little is left of it with a automated predict-decide-act computer algorithm — the goal, apparently, being to make stupid decisions faster.

This particular DARPA boondoggle is bizarre even by DARPA's tolerant standards for lunacy. That is because the EC/RP is aimed predicting discontinuities in order to remove uncertainty from the future.

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2011/02/082011/02/08

Why Boeing is Imploding–Spinney, Sprey, & Reality vs Political Engineering & Government Spec Cost Plus

10 Security, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military

Below are three separate contributions: Spinney on Sprey; Sprey on Boeing; and Seattle Times on Boeing.

CHUCK SPINNEY SOUNDS OFF

President Obama says that restoring America’s competitiveness is one of his top priorities. Yet under his watch, deindustrialization, financialization, and globalization continue without interruption. Many advocates of defense spending argue that spinoffs from the Pentagon's R&D and high tech engineering practices are keys to reinvigorating America’s manufacturing economy. For whatever reasons, Mr. Obama shows no intention of reining in defense spending by anything more than a cosmetic amount, even though the defense budget is higher now that at any time since the end of WWII (after removing the cumulative effect of 60 years of inflation), and despite the fact that the United States is spending about as much on defense as the rest of the world combined.

Continue reading “Why Boeing is Imploding–Spinney, Sprey, & Reality vs Political Engineering & Government Spec Cost Plus”

2011/02/06

Half a Trillion a Year for Contractors–Poor Oversight

05 Energy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption

Economic Recovery on Edge

Lack of Contract Oversight Puts Billions At Risk

Laurel Adams February 6th 2011
Center for Public Integrity

EXTRACT: The GAO singled out the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as agencies with risky contractor oversight. The GAO also said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services failed to review contractor rates and identified $90 million in questionable costs.

Phi Beta Iota: Government–and society–are comprehensive design problems–advanced intelligence (decision-support). The US Government is archaic in its design, and lacks integrity (holistic accurate feed-back loops) at all levels across all mission areas. It is a useful challenge for 2012 and beyond.

2011/02/062011/02/06

Terror at Fort Hood? Or Terror from America?

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Military

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius Recommends

We Could Have Stopped The Terror At Fort Hood

Washington Post February 6, 2011 Pg. B1

By Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman and Susan M. Collins

Maj. Nidal Hasan, accused in the murders of 13 people and the attempted murders of 32 others in the shooting spree at Fort Hood, Tex., in November 2009, appears to be the toughest kind of terrorist to spot: a lone wolf who plots without the overt support of domestic cells or foreign sponsors.

Still, the attack did not come as a complete surprise to some in the Army and the FBI, and that makes this incident all the more tragic. Our Senate committee's 14-month investigation of the Fort Hood killings has concluded that the Department of Defense and the FBI “collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan's radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it.”

The deaths at Fort Hood could and should have been prevented. The Defense Department's failure to acknowledge the threat of violent Islamist extremism within its ranks, coupled with organizational and communication flaws in the FBI's counterterrorism operations, contributed to the tragedy.

Full Op-Ed….

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2011/02/03

James Madison: US Security Budget a Nightmare

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Military

Madison's Nightmare: How Much Should We Spend for National Insecurity?

Chuck Spinney, FEB 3, 2011

The Atlantic (for James Fallows)

Read entire reference piece….

Brother Chuck makes three key points:

1. He quotes Madison, as we have, on the importance of public knowledge as the basis for the Republic keeping the government accountable and in check.

2. He points out that the defense budget has never been audited, cannot be audited, and is both totally “out of control” and irresponsibly chaotic and grotesquely excessive.

3. He proposes regular persistent cuts in the defense budget until such time as it can actually pass an audit.

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2011/02/022011/02/02

AFIO Selected Headlines: Google, Woolsey, Hayden

10 Security, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government

Google Comes Under Fire for ‘Secret' Relationship with NSA. Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group largely focused in recent years on Google's privacy practices, has called on a congressional investigation into the Internet giant's “cozy” relationship with U.S. President Barack Obama's administration. In a letter sent Monday, Consumer Watchdog asked Representative Darrell Issa, the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, to investigate the relationship between Google and several government agencies. Read more….

Phi Beta Iota: Google is to modern cyber-space as Standard Oil & ATT were to previous monopolies. It is doing great evil, no least because it enables violations of the Constitution at the same time that it fails to contribute to an educated citizenry (sense-making). Its computational mathematics are out of this world and neither understood nor regulated–Google can sell the right to show any searcher what the sponsor wants them to see, not what is relevant.

Journal: Consumer Group Calls for Hearings on Google Relations with NSA and CIA, Google’s Global Street-Level Survey of Wi-Fi Packet Interceptability
Event Report CORRECTED LINKS: Responding to Real Time Information, Open Systems and the Obama IT Vision [Google-Microsoft Meld]
Journal: Google Wave–Good, Bad, & Ugly
2009 Arnold Google: The Digital Gutenberg

Woolsey-Pollard and Hayden-Integrity Below the Line…

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