Many people in the United States purchase one or fewer books every year.
Many of those people have seen every single episode of American Idol. There is clearly a correlation here.
Access to knowledge, for the first time in history, is largely unimpeded for the middle class. Without effort or expense, it's possible to become informed if you choose. For less than your cable TV bill, you can buy and read an important book every week. Share the buying with six friends and it costs far less than coffee.
Or you can watch TV.
The thing is, watching TV has its benefits. It excuses you from the responsibility of having an informed opinion about things that matter. It gives you shallow opinions or false ‘facts' that you can easily parrot to others that watch what you watch. It rarely unsettles our carefully self-induced calm and isolation from the world.
I got a note from someone the other day, in which she made it clear that she doesn't read non-fiction books or blogs related to her industry. And she seemed proud of this.
I was roped into an argument with someone who was sure that ear candling was a useful treatment. Had he read any medical articles on the topic? No. But he knew. Or said he did.
You see a lot of ostensibly smart people in airports, and it always surprises me how few of them use this downtime to actually become more informed. It's clearly a deliberate act–in our infoculture, it takes work not to expose yourself to interesting ideas, facts, news and points of view. Hal Varian at Google reports that the average person online spends seventy seconds a day reading online news. Ouch.
Not all books are correct or useful. Not all accepted science is correct. The conventional wisdom might just be wrong. But ignoring all of it because the truth is now fashionably situational and in the eye of the beholder is a lame alternative.
I know this rant is nothing new. In fact, people have been complaining about widespread willful ignorance since Brutus or Caesar or whoever invented the salad… the difference now is this: more people than ever are creators. More people than ever go to work to use their minds, not just their hands. And more people than ever have a platform to share their point of view. I think that raises the bar for our understanding of how the world works.
Let's assert for the moment that you get paid to create, manipulate or spread ideas. That you don't get paid to lift bricks or hammer steel. If you're in the idea business, what's going to improve your career, get you a better job, more respect or a happier day? Forgive me for suggesting (to those not curious enough to read this blog and others) that it might be reading blogs, books or even watching TED talks.
As for the deliberately uninformed, we can ignore them or we can reach out to them and hopefully start a pattern of people thinking for themselves…
Phi Beta Iota: One of the reasons we published 1995 GIQ 13/2 Creating a Smart Nation: Strategy, Policy, Intelligence, and Information was our early emerging sense that US “intelligence” did not know what the Nation needed to know, and neither did the Nation (in the Stephen Colbert sense of word: “Nation, you are stupid!”). America is at a turning point in which most of the foundation jobs have been exported and the menial jobs given over, deliberately, to illegal aliens; the schools have hit bottom, the government is out of control, and Wall Street, while in charge, has looted the Treasury and imploded the economy. The federal government mutters darkly about “federalizing” state and local police and “disarming” the public. What we really need–Thomas Jefferson understood this–is a fully armed, fully educated public that is attentive to its civic duty and will not tolerate corruption among its officials. This is going to be a long struggle. The good news: Obama activated the Davies J-Curve. America expected him to make positive change, he did not, now the myth is exposed. States (we are the United STATES of America) are finally starting to exercise their Constitutional authority to see to their own defenses, and a MAJORITY of the voting public now sees the two-party tyranny for what it is: a corrupt cesspool….one bird, two wings, same shit.
India-Pakistan: According to a 109 page Indian interrogation report of the Pakistani-American jihadist, David Headley, officers through senior field grade ranks in Pakistan's intelligence services were involved directly in the 2008 Mumbai militant attacks and intended to control a further split in Kashmir-based militant groups by providing them with a victory, The Guardian reported yesterday, 18 October.
Headley, a Pakistani American originally named Daood Gilani, undertook surveillance missions of the LeT targets in the 2008 Mumbai operation, He said he regularly reported to the ISI, but the Indian interrogation report suggests that supervision of the terrorists by the ISI was often chaotic. Headley also opined that the senior officers of the agency were unaware of the Mumbai operation beforehand.
According to the Indian interrogation report and The Guardian, Headley said he met once with a Pakistan Army “Colonel Kamran” and had a series of meetings with two majors named “Sameer Ali” and “Iqbal” from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). A fellow terrorist met with Colonel Shah.” At least one of eight surveillance missions in India as paid for by the ISI, who paid him $25,000.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: The Guardian does not admit that the Indian interrogation report might have been leaked deliberately. In any event, the publication of key excerpts will help justify to the international community the grounds for Indian suspicions and caution in dealing with Pakistan.
Headley might have told the truth, but the Pakistanis he dealt with certainly did not use their real names or affiliations. Headley's confession of involvement in the Mumbai attacks is sufficient to convince India that Pakistanis and Pakistan itself bear ultimate responsibility for the more than 160 dead in Mumbai in 2008.
The most plausible statement by Headley is that he was told the reason for the Mumbai attacks was to unite Kashmiri militant factions that were splintering and to move militant activity out of Pakistan and against India. Otherwise, Headley has a bit for Pakistan and a bit for India.
His allegations, as reported, will reinforce India's conviction that Pakistani officials continue to support the anti-Indian Islamic terrorists. On the other hand, Pakistanis will see other comments as exonerating the Pakistani government from blame by perpetuating the notion of rogue operations within the Pakistani intelligence service.
Any long time student of the Pakistani military hierarchy knows that rogue operations by serving senior field grade officers are all but impossible. Headley told his interrogators what they wanted to hear and hardened viewpoints already set in stone.
Phi Beta Iota: Pakistan is not Israel, India is not the USA, and Mumbai is not the USS Liberty. All signs point to a major decisive Indian attack on Pakistan. As our esteemed colleague notes, there is no such thing as a “rogue” element among Pakistani military officers. They got used to fooling the Americans working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), ripping the USA off of billions intended for Afghanistan, and got cocky about fooling India. Right about now, we hope someone in India is planning the complete eradication of the ISI Headquarters building, in a replay of the successful and measured attack by the USA on the Libyan intelligence headquarters. If Pakistan has a brain, it will eat this one and stand down. At the same time, India needs to be smarter about a regional water authority–Kashmir is about water, not about ethnic anything.
U.S. intelligence agencies have wasted many billions of dollars by mismanaging secret, high-technology programs, the deputy chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence says.
“The American public would be outraged if they knew,” Sen. Christopher S. Bond, Missouri Republican, told The Washington Times. “Billions and billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted.”
Mr. Bond said he was unable to provide details or exact figures because the programs are classified. “I wish I could, but I can't,” he said, adding that “many billions of dollars” were wasted on “just one program” that had been canceled recently.
Phi Beta Iota: It is actually tens of billions. If you take General Tony Zinni's estimate that secret intelligence provided him with, “at best” 4% of what he needed as commanding general of the US Central Command (USCENTCOM), then engaged in two wars and several “expeditions,” and you take $75 billion a year as the now public amount, what you end up with is a range: $72 billion wasted at the high end, or our personal estimate, $66 billion wasted at the low end. This is reprehensible. It is also misleading to suggest that the new reviews of over-spending on new initiatives will cut waste. The waste is in the “base” and it is the base that needs to be churned by cutting 20% a year for each of five years running (yes, that does add up to 100%). For a still valid detailed review that had inputs from the top two guys for national security and C4I at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) at the time, see 2000 ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World.
WASHINGTON — Three weeks before a Jordanian double agent set off a bomb at a remote Central Intelligence Agency base in eastern Afghanistan last December, a C.I.A. officer in Jordan received warnings that the man might be working for Al Qaeda, according to an investigation into the deadly attack.
But the C.I.A. officer did not tell his bosses of the suspicions — brought to the Americans by a Jordanian intelligence officer — that the man might try to lure Americans into a trap, according to the recently completed investigation by the agency.
The internal investigation documents a litany of breakdowns leading up to the attack at the Khost base that killed seven C.I.A. employees, the deadliest day for the spy agency since the 1983 bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut. Besides the failure to pass on warnings about the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the C.I.A. investigation chronicled major security lapses at the base in Afghanistan, a lack of war zone experience among the agency’s personnel at the base, insufficient vetting of the Jordanian, and a murky chain of command with different branches of the intelligence agency competing for control over the operation.
PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan—The Taliban's influence in northern Afghanistan has expanded in recent months from a few hotspots to much of the region, as insurgents respond to the U.S.-led coalition's surge in the south by seizing new ground in areas once considered secure.
Taliban militants stop traffic nightly at checkpoints on the road from Kabul to Uzbekistan, just outside Baghlan province's capital city of Pul-e-Khumri, frequently blowing up fuel convoys and seizing travelers who work with the government or the international community.
Deja Vu Back Centuries
In many areas here and the rest of the north, the Taliban have effectively supplanted the official authorities, running local administrations and courts, and conscripting recruits.
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The Taliban have consolidated their war gains by tapping into broad disillusionment with the incompetence and venality of Afghan government officials.
“People don't love the Taliban—but if they compare them to the government, they see the Taliban as the lesser evil,” said Baghlan Gov. Munshi Abdul Majid, an appointee of President Hamid Karzai.
Phi Beta Iota: Based on what we now know about Viet-Nam, we predict that the military-industrial complex will declare victory in November 2012, and inform the new President that the US military has been entirely “used up” in Afghanistan and Iraq, and therefore we need to increase the Pentagon budget to rebuy the military from scratch.
The purveyor of the “suicide vest” story should be named and questioned about what he hoped or expected to achieve by his lie.
Linda Norgrove (RIP)
Phi Beta Iota: It is with such sadness that we contemplate the demise of the US Government and US Armed Forces as effective vehicles for prosperity at home and peace abroad. A careful reading of all of the stories make it clear that “the system” failed at every level from the utterly stupid operational helicopter raids hampering elder negotiations down to the man that threw the grenade that killed the hostage. The death of Linda Norgrove and the lie that was immediately concocted are a fitting epitaph to Empire. We pray that 2012 brings us a restored US Congress and an honest President who can pick honest Cabinet officials who can actually act in the public interest. This is not about individual honor or intent–INTEGRITY is much more complex than that. This is about restoring the Constitutional integrity of the United STATES of America, and ending the inherent corruption at every level of the US Government (and Wall Street) in which humans don't matter and profits take precedence over potency.
Phi Beta Iota: The FBI has two walk-ins on 9/11 in advance of the event, one in Newark, NJ and the other in Orlando, FL. In both instances, because the FBI did not recognize any of the names being reported, it blew off the walk-in. Something similar appears to have happened here, BUT there is also yet another instance of a US person being in the employ of the US Government (similar to the botched car bomb attack on the World Trade Center) and their activities being a) sanctioned by one US agency and b) not being reported to other US agencies or to allies. The US secret world is HOSED strategically, operationally, tactically, and technically….. it is cultural “unfit for duty.” We continue to believe that an Open Source Agency and a Multinational Decision-Support Centre with reach-back to at least 90 countries is the way to kick-off 21st Century Intelligence. See the Virtual Cabinet series at the Huffington Post for the larger context within which we believe US intelligence must be reinvented.
