11 Society – Page 346 – Public Intelligence Blog

2010/01/132010/01/13

Journal: Haiti–Ready for a Rapid-Response Open-Source-Intelligence-Driven Inter-Agency Multinational Multifunctional Stabilization & Reconstruction Mission…

01 Brazil, 01 Poverty, 02 Infectious Disease, 03 Environmental Degradation, 07 Other Atrocities, 07 Venezuela, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, 12 Water, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Methods & Process, Mobile, Real Time

photo haiti millions — Full Story Online

AP: Injured Haitians plead for help after quake

Haitians piled bodies along the devastated streets of their capital Wednesday after the strongest earthquake hit the poor Caribbean nation in more than 200 years crushed thousands of structures, from humble shacks to the National Palace and the U.N. peacekeeping headquarters. Untold numbers were still trapped.

Destroyed communications made it impossible to tell the extent of destruction from Tuesday afternoon's 7.0-magnitude tremor, or to estimate how many were dead among the collapsed buildings in Haiti's capital of about 2 million people.

France's foreign minister said the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission was apparently among the dead.

photo haiti devastation — Full Story Online

Phi Beta Iota: This is precisely what was briefed recently to the DIA Multinational Intelligence Fellows and earlier in Tampa to the Coalition Coordination Center (CCC) and unnoticed by DIA as well as declined by CENTCOM as a transition model toward a Multinational Decision Support Center. The US Government does well enough with little things that can be handled by one agency, or one thing that must be handled by multiple agencies, but it does not do well as all with many things that must be handled by many players on a no-notice basis. The reason: a C4I system that is high-side unilateral expensive and largely useless past one big contingency. The solution: a global grid that is unclassified (commercial-level security) and open to everyone. DIA has enormous potential as a hub for Multinational Engagement and defense-rooted open source exploitation that also impacts on the QDR and acquisition while providing Combatant Commanders with relevant unclassified intelligence for COIN and other challenges.

2010/01/092010/01/09

Journal: Iran, Sacred Nukes, & US Ignorance

05 Energy, 05 Iran, 08 Proliferation, 10 Security, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence

Full Story Online

When Nukes Become Sacred

The psychology behind Iranian support for the country's nuclear program

Newsweek, Sharon Bagley, 8 January 2010

With sacred values, this cost-benefit calculus is turned on its head, explains anthropologist Scott Atran of the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, who has studied Islamic terrorist groups. When Atran asked Palestinians if they would be willing to give up their claims to Jerusalem (a sacred value) in return for their own state, most said no, and—here is where the topsy-turvy thinking caused by sacred values came in—when he then asked if they would give up Jerusalem if the U.S. and Europe also gave every Palestinian family substantial financial assistance for a year, even fewer said yes. That is in sharp contrast to the rational-actor perspective that has long dominated diplomacy (and economics).

Continue reading “Journal: Iran, Sacred Nukes, & US Ignorance”

2010/01/092011/10/22

Journal: Tea Party Going National & Moving Money

01 Poverty, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Citizen-Centered, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Methods & Process, Reform

graphic convergence — Convergence Happens Here

Massive and astonishingly rapid Convergence is emergent in the USA, and the Tea Party–now morphing from numoerous dispart local organizations in to a national network of networks–is the center of the Perfect Storm.

To left is orginal art by Damien M. Jones, available for sale in print. Do check out his entire collection.

Here is a short list of the convergence elements we are seeing in motion:

Evolutionary Activism

Co-Evolution & Bio-Mimicry & Bio-Capital

Natural Capitalism & No Logo Buy-Cotts

Panarchy, Holistic Darwinism, & Non-Zero (Win-Win)

Open Source Software, Open Source Intelligence, Open Spectrum

Pedagogy of the Oppressed. All Rise (Politics of Dignity),

Wealth of Networks & Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Blessed Unrest, Voice of the People, Populism in America

Continue reading “Journal: Tea Party Going National & Moving Money”

2010/01/022010/01/02

Journal: Financial Intelligence for the Public

03 Economy, 11 Society, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Ethics

Stiglitz’s 5 Lessons from 2009

Thursday, 12/31/2009 – 12:01 pm by Joseph Stiglitz

New Deal 2.0

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster and Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz identifies five lessons we can take away from the financial crisis.

The best that can be said for 2009 is that it could have been worse, that we pulled back from the precipice on which we seemed to be perched in late 2008, and that 2010 will almost surely be better for most countries around the world. The world has also learned some valuable lessons, though at great cost both to current and future prosperity — costs that were unnecessarily high given that we should already have learned them.

The first lesson is that markets are not self-correcting. Indeed, without adequate regulation, they are prone to excess. In 2009, we again saw why Adam Smith’s invisible hand often appeared invisible: it is not there. The bankers’ pursuit of self-interest (greed) did not lead to the well-being of society; it did not even serve their shareholders and bondholders well. It certainly did not serve homeowners who are losing their homes, workers who have lost their jobs, retirees who have seen their retirement funds vanish, or taxpayers who paid hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks.

Continue reading “Journal: Financial Intelligence for the Public”

2010/01/01

Reference: Afghanistan–The Other Side

05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Peace Intelligence, White Papers

FYI … I just found this interesting report. While the report focuses almost entirely on the political perspective to this conflict, note how he claims the Taleban increases its cohesion by organizing itself in a decentralized way the marries centralized intent with high degree of autonomy at lower levels. He thinks it is paradoxical that this type of organization improves cohesion, but it is right out of the maneuver warfare tradition, and it is hardly paradoxical that this kind of organization increases the variety, rapidity, and harmony of its OODA loops at all levels organization. Nor should it be surprising, given the sluggish, rigid OODA loops that result our highly centralized, techno-intensive approach to command & control, that the Taleban seized and maintains the initiative, as acknowledged by General McChrystal in his report to President Obama in August. Chuck

35-Page Report includes Executive Summary, Introduction, Roots & Causes, Induced & Internal Factors, Pakistan Factor, Who Are the Insurgents, Talks or Reconciliation, Conclusion, and Recommendations.

High points:

1. Many actors, no strategy

2. Cannot reconcile extremists with corrupt government

3. Time for the UN to be the UN again and lead a 360 “all stakeholders” non-military convergence.

2009/12/282009/12/28

Journal: Strong Signals–Las Vegas as Next 9/11

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process

photo las vegas — Ground Zero Las Vegas--Full Story Online

Monday, December 28, 2009

SPOOK'S JOURNAL

Nine of the ten largest hotels in the world are in Las Vegas. Four of them share one intersection: Las Vegas Boulevard (The Strip) and Tropicana Avenue. Together, these four corners comprise 12,953 rooms, most of which enjoy high occupancy year-round and are often full. Figure 25,000 people huddled on four corners.

The imagery is also appealing to terrorists: Occupying one corner is New York, New York, with a “skyline” that features the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Statue of Liberty.

This thought: It is no longer necessary for al-Qaeda terrorists to hijack two Beechcraft C99 planes out of Vegas, as easy as this would be. Instead, why not drive (three-and-a-half hours from Vegas) to Grand Canyon West Airport with a few vans filled with ammonium nitrate (fertilizer) and diesel fuel? Armed with a few baseball bats, one could take command of the airstrip in less than a minute. Then wait for the Beechcrafts to arrive. Loaded with ammonium nitrate (or a low grade chemical or biological agent), these vector weapons could then be dispatched back at Las Vegas, a mere 15 minutes away at full throttle, or Hoover Dam, half the distance.

Phi Beta Iota: This posting was brought to our attention by a patriotic citizen who finds a great deal of common sense on this web site, and none at all within the so-called Department of Homeland Security (DHS). We recollect the period 1990-1994 when Peter Black, Winn Schwartau, and Robert Steele, among others, tried to warn Congress and the Executive about the cyber-threat, to include substantive correspondence to the top National Information Infrastructure security officer, Marty Harris, sounding the alarm. We vividly recollect testifying on behalf of Hackers and trying to tell the Secret Service it should hire them, not torment them. Now we have a government spending hundreds of billions of dollars in the wrong way, and failing to LISTEN to common sense solutions from its citizens.

Journal: Weaponizing Web 2.0

Memorandum: Talking Points on Homeland Defense Intelligence

1999 Setting the Stage for Information-Sharing in the 21st Century: Three Issues of Common Concern to DoD and the Rest of the World

2009/12/282009/12/28

Journal: Evaluating the Gaza Confrontation

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

The American strategist and military reformer Colonel John Boyd argued that nations and groups should shape their domestic policies, foreign policies, and military strategies so that they:

pump up one's own resolve and increase one's own solidarity,
drain away the resolve of one's adversaries and weaken their internal cohesion,
reinforce the commitments of allies to one's own cause and make them empathetic to one's success
attract the uncommitted to our cause or makes them empathetic to one's success
end conflicts on favorable terms that do not sow the seeds for future conflicts

These criteria are the essence of grand strategy and can be thought of as guidelines for evaluating the wisdom of specific policies or actions. And while they make sense logically and intuitively, the difficulty of defining policies that simultaneously conform to and strengthen to all these criteria is equally obvious. The latter challenge is particularly difficult for the unilateral military strategies and the coercive foreign policies like those preferred by Israel or the United States. Military operations and political coercion are often destructive in the short term, and these destructive strategic effects can be in natural tension with the aims of grand strategy, which should be constructive over the long term.

Moreover, the more powerful a country, the harder it becomes to harmonize the often conflicting criteria for a sensible grand strategy. Overwhelming power breeds hubris and arrogance which, in turn, carry a temptation to use that power coercively and excessively. But lording over or dictating one's will to others breeds resentment. Thus, possession of overwhelming power increases the risk of going astray grand strategically.

That risk is particularly dangerous when aggressive external actions, policies, and rhetoric are designed to prop up or increase internal cohesion for domestic political reasons. Very often, the effects or military strategies or coercive foreign policies that are perceived as useful in terms of domestic political cohesion backfire at the grand-strategic level, because they strengthen our adversaries' will to resist, push our allies into a neutral or even an adversarial corner, or drive away the uncommitted … which together, can set the stage for continuing conflict.

With these general thoughts about grand strategy in mind, read the following article by Uri Avnery and ask yourself if Israel's most recent war in Gaza made sense at the tactical level of conflict?, the strategic level of conflict? … and most importantly, at the grand strategic level of conflict?

Chuck Spinney

Full Story Online

Cast Lead 2

by Uri Avnery

Antiwar.com

December 28, 2009

Did we win? Sunday marked the first anniversary of the Gaza War, alias Operation Cast Lead, and this question fills the public space.

Continue reading “Journal: Evaluating the Gaza Confrontation”