Accreditation Commission for Health Care
African American Health Council of Southeastern CT
Alaska Native Tribal Health Statewide Recruiting
Ambassadors for Sustained Health
American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living
2010 Reference: The Pentagon, Information Operations, and Media Development
02 Diplomacy, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Multinational, IO Secrets, Media, Media Reports, Military, Peace Intelligence, White Papers
CIMA is pleased to release a new report, The Pentagon, Information Operations, and Media Development, by Peter Cary, a veteran journalist with extensive experience reporting about the U.S. military. As part of its post-9/11 strategy, the Department of Defense has launched a multi-front information war, both to support its troops on the ground and to counter the propaganda of radical Muslim extremists. The DoD’s global public relations war, however, has fostered criticism that the department has over-reached and tarred the efforts of non-DoD Americans doing media development work abroad.
While the DoD cannot be criticized for trying to protect the lives of its soldiers, it has spent vast amounts of money on media operations–which can tend to be conducted in secrecy and whose effectiveness often cannot be measured. This report examines the impact of DoD information operations on international media development efforts and offers recommendations – including that the DoD leave media activities that could be considered public diplomacy to the State Department.
Tip of the Hat to Niels Groeneveld at LinkedIn.
Journal: Bees’ tiny brains beat computers
01 Agriculture, Collective Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, InfoOps (IO)
Bees' tiny brains beat computers, study finds
Bees can solve complex mathematical problems which keep computers busy for days, research has shown.
Bees can solve complex mathematical problems which keep computers busy for days, research has shown.
The insects learn to fly the shortest route between flowers discovered in random order, effectively solving the “travelling salesman problem” , said scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London
The conundrum involves finding the shortest route that allows a travelling salesman to call at all the locations he has to visit. Computers solve the problem by comparing the length of all possible routes and choosing the one that is shortest.
Bees manage to reach the same solution using a brain the size of a grass seed.
Phi Beta Iota: This is one reason why we continue to believe that Human Intelligence (HUMINT) is vastly superior to Signals “Intelligence” (SIGINT) which we have come to think of as grotesquely expensive out of control unprocessed noise of little intelligence value. Of course, HUMINT without intelligent management is not intelligent at all, but our going in proposition is that HUMINT and Open Source Source Intelligence (OSINT) allow intelligent management to do much more with much less in the way of dollars, time, and footprint.
See Also:
Graphic: Jim Bamford on the Human Brain
Fish Phone: SMS service to find health alerts on seafood
03 Environmental Degradation, 07 Health, MobileFishphone: Enter 30644 as the phone number. Text ‘fish' then a space, then the name of fish. You will receive health & enviro info as well as green to red alerts on the health status of seafood. The service is run by BlueOcean.org
Thanks to Edward Norton from his Twitter feed
America’s Next War: Southwest Border–Both Sides
03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Immigration, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Government, Law Enforcement, Peace Intelligence
Phi Beta Iota: Most of the weapons being used by the cartels do NOT come from US gun shops. They come from the Latin American militaries who have received large shipments of “older” weapons and ammunition from the US, and then turned around and sold them to the cartels. Just as the US is indirectly funding the Taliban in Afghanistan, it is indirectly enabling the cartels with weapons. Furthermore, to imagine that with the money they have the cartels cannot “order in” anything they wish from the Chinese, Israeli, or Russian arsenals, is naive in the extreme. As many or more are dying violent deaths every day in this region as in Iraq or Afghanistan. In our view, the current era of politicians (1981-date) is going to be held accountable for four major strategic blunders, all of them deliberate:
1. Elective invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq on top of irresponsible military cuts and acquisition pathologies
2. Willful acceptance from Bush Senior onwards of the willful destruction of the US economy for the benefit of a few led by Goldman Sachs, Citi-Bank, and Morgan
3. Ignoring the depth and extent of the Southwest Border instability and threat to local communities
4. Ignoring the imminent clean water crisis across the entire region as well as across America
On The Southwest Border (Photo Essay) (Latin America News Dispatch)
Posted by Molly OToole on Sep 15th, 2010
These photographs were taken on an 852-mile, 72-hour trip across the Southwest border, from San Diego, California to Arizona and back. Many citizens from the United States and Mexico have never seen the line that divides and defines their countries, marked by walls, barbed wire fences, U.S. Border Patrol checks and, increasingly, controversy.
2010 National Drug Threat Assessment: Southwest Border Smuggling and Violence
GAO: Border fence lagging, over budget, Home Security mismanaged project, report says (Washington Times, 24 October 2010)
Napolitano visits San Diego, says border is more secure from cartels (Los Angeles Times,October 18, 2010)
Time for U.S. to get serious about cartel threat (MySanAntonio, 16 October 2010)
Cartel Threat Grows, Illegal Numbers Drop (Homeland Security Today, 6 October 2010)
Pirate Lake: Mexican Bandits Terrorizing American Boaters on the Border (FOX.News, 4 October 2010)
Governor Perry Releases Statement on Border Violence (KRGV.com Texas, 2 October 2010)
SECURE BORDER INITIATIVE DHS Needs to Address Testing and Performance Limitations That Place Key Technology Program at Risk (GAO-10-158 January 2010)
Secure Border Initiative: SBInet Expenditure Plan Needs to Better Support Oversight and Accountability (GAO-07-309 February 15, 2007)
See Also:
Continue reading “America's Next War: Southwest Border–Both Sides”
Reference: How Goldman Sachs Looted America
03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's ‘Griftopia'
Matt Taibbi's unsparing and authoritative reporting on the financial crisis has produced a series of memorable Rolling Stone features. He showed us how Goldman Sachs, that “great vampire squid,” played a central role in creating not only the housing bubble but four other big speculative booms that filled its coffers while wrecking the American economy. He explained how Wall Street banks cooked up schemes that helped decimate municipal budgets and cost countless jobs, and how Wall Street lobbying led to a financial reform bill that won't prevent another meltdown. Taibbi builds on that eye-opening work in his new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America , due out from Spiegel & Grau on November 2. In this exclusive excerpt, he describes how our cash-strapped country is auctioning off its highways, ports and even parking meters at fire sale prices — and finding eager buyers in the unregulated sovereign wealth funds of oil-rich Middle Eastern countries.
Journal: Goldman Sachs Captures the White House
03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Corruption, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth
.. why Henry Kissinger may end up looking good.
Obama Hires a Hustler
Posted on Oct 19, 2010
By Robert Scheer
One day as Wall Street was crashing, President George W. Bush had the temerity to plaintively ask his treasury secretary, Henry Paulson: “How did this happen?” Paulson, who headed Goldman Sachs before taking the Treasury job, remarks in his memoir: “It was a humbling question for someone from the financial sector to be asked—after all, we were the ones responsible.”
That’s an honest enough admission about the culpability of the financial community in bundling the toxic derivatives packages still disastrously undermining the economic health of the nation. Even more startling was Paulson’s admission in his memoir that he, at the time he was advising the president, still did not know that home mortgages were at the heart of those troubling securities that his former company had marketed to others with such wild abandon.
Were President Barack Obama to ask that question about the origins of this crisis of Tom Donilon, one of his closest aides whom he recently appointed to the critical job of national security adviser, Donilon would find it even more awkward to invoke the defense of ignorance. As the chief lobbyist for Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2005, he was far more intimately involved than Paulson in the manufacturing of this crisis. He successfully pressured Congress to give Fannie Mae the green light to speed past any sound regulation. Indeed, had Congress endorsed the barest semblance of regulation of the Fannie Mae-led housing scam, it would have been stillborn instead of being a very much alive Frankenstein creation.
Phi Beta Iota: Henry Kissinger was and remains a de facto war criminal (see The Trial of Henry Kissinger) but he never actively cheated the entire US public or was party to the deliberate–with malice aforethought–destruction of the entire US economy in the intimate manner of the new “National Security Advisor,” one Tom Donilon. Perhaps his title should be changed to Goldman Sachs Security Advisor. Kissinger did assure the death of another 20,000 US soldiers by cravenly undermining the Paris Peace Talks the first time around, and he did approve of NATO/CIA “dirty tricks” that killed people in Europe, so perhaps it is a toss-up. Relevant book: Politics Lost–How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You’re Stupid (Hardcover).
