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
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.

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.

See Also:

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Journal: $20M water desalination project in Iraq

12 Water
Full Story Online
Full Story Online

Adding to installations in Oman and Egypt, India’s Shivsu Canadian Clear says its new plant in Baghdad is expected to convert 20 million liters per day.

The company’s Vice President Satish Kumar told the Cleantech Group today that the Iraq installation uses reverse osmosis to convert seawater into potable water that has industrial and drinking water purposes. Kumar said the desalination technology builds on other installations the company has made around the world, with improved wall paneling inside the containerized system so that it can withstand different environments.

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Journal: True Cost Meme Marches On…

10 Transnational Crime, 12 Water, True Cost

US Retailers Face $191 Billion in Fraud Losses Each Year
NACS Online
lexisnexis True Cost of Fraud Study reveals that retail merchants experience 20 times higher total fraud losses than consumers. by RSS Feed by Email NEW

Time for change – Water saving – Ecademy
Identify the true cost of water. Do you know how much your business spends on water per annum or how much is water costing you? Check your water bills for the last 3 years and note the annual consumption and cost.

Related:
http://true-cost.re-configure.org

Journal: New Ocean, Lost Aquifers

12 Water

Full Story Online
Full Story Online

Giant Crack in Africa Will Create a New Ocean

A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.

The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.

A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region's future.

The same rift activity is slowly parting the Red Sea, too.

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Journal: Airplane Wings from Soy…Soon

03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 12 Water, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Technologies
Full Story
Full Story

Not New, But Improved

Allison Arieff

Meet Stella.

At first glance, this little yellow giraffe looks like a lot of other kids’ bath toys. But Stella is made from Renuva, a little-known material that could change for the better the way hundreds of things, from upholstery to airplane wings, are made.

The story of how Stella came to be made from this material, a soy-based alternative to polyurethane (which is typically petroleum-based), provides a model for how stuff can be better designed in the future.

Phi Beta Iota: While folks focus on the Al Gore show and the important but isolated challenge of reducing our carbon footprint, the avant guarde is way down the road with sustainable design, green chemistry, zero waste, and so on.  It's all connected, we need to get truth on the table, and we need to do the right things righter.  Stella is a poster child for a new paradigm of ecological economics, natural capitalism, and conscious evolution.  Learn more about Renuva from Dow below.

Learn More
Learn More

Journal: Chuck Spinney Sends–Katrina & Fear

03 Environmental Degradation, 08 Wild Cards, 12 Water, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

The Detritus of Katrina and the Paralysis of Fear:
A Metaphor for Contemporary Politics

The vast Mississippi Delta in Louisiana is sinking as sea water from the Gulf of Mexico seeps in to destroy its fresh water marshlands.  The Army's Corps of Engineers says it can not protect New Orleans from the inevitable storm surges caused by hurricanes (see the Guardian report attached below).

Some may dismiss this warning as alarmist hype, and the Army's Corps of Engineers certainly does not have an enviable track record in this regard.  That said, the Corps' warning does make evident the political-economic  detritus left over from Hurricane Katrina.  Inferentially, the warning also highlights the hollowness in the scare tactics used by global warming advocates to raise money for their far more costly ambitions, not to mention the paralyzing political-economic consequences posed by the politics of fear practiced by the Pentagon.

The reality of the Delta thus becomes a metaphor for the larger emptiness that now pervades American politics.

Below the Fold: Balance of Spinney Comment, Full Article with Highlight, Books
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Journal: Water, Science, Politics, & the Middle East

12 Water

BBC Full Story Online
BBC Full Story Online

Lack of Mid-East peace deepens water crisis

By Natalia Antelava, BBC News, Berui,  13 October 2009

For the last two years Iraq, Syria, Jordan and parts of Turkey and Lebanon, have suffered from the devastating effects of the worst drought that the Middle East has experienced in decades.

In addition to human suffering, the security implications of water scarcity are also becoming increasingly obvious.

Water wars is a term that was coined in the Middle East, but it's the existing conflicts that make the regions water crisis so much more difficult to solve.

Phi Beta Iota: Stories like this infuriate us for their lack of context.

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