Iran-Syria: Iran rejected any Yemeni-like scenario in Syria, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Abdollahian who spoke to the press on 8 February at the Iranian Embassy in Damascus. Abdollahian added that Iranians recently kidnapped in Syria were released after Turkish mediation.
Comment: The visit by the Iranian Deputy Foreign Ministry corresponds to reports that the Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps-Qods Force Major General Sulemani had arrived in Damascus to assist in the defense of the Syrian Alawite government. At least one other news service reported — without good sourcing — that a large number of IRGC forces are present in Damascus.
Open sources are unable to confirm the reports about Sulemani's visit and the presence of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps soldiers in Damascus. The logic of the situation is that Iran needs to take action to prevent a strategic disaster. The unconfirmed reports suggest it has begun to do so.
However, the deployment of Persians to Syria does not seem a likely first option. On the other hand, Sulemani, in person, might have gone to Damascus to offer his expert advice on destroying subversive movements.
All news services suggest that the struggle to control Homs will determine the future of the anti-al-Asad uprising. If that prediction is accurate, then the Alawites should win, provided that Bashar al-Asad and his generals have the same strength of will that his father and his generals had in ordering the destruction of Hama in February 1982, when Sunni rebels, including the Muslim Brotherhood, held the town briefly.
If the Syrian Sunni uprising hinges on the fate of Homs, it will lose, not only because the Alawites will not hesitate to destroy rebel enclaves in the town, but also because many residents of Homs will side with the government to destroy the outlaw gangs, posing as rebels, according to sources in Homs.
A national security system that is mostly bloat and mission creep instead of real, honest to goodness, security
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Badly design social media monitoring tools that are sifting through billions of messages a day?
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FAILURE
Here's a simple example. A young British guy makes a tweet to his friends:
Easy to discern the tweet is about hard drinking/partying.
He flies to Los Angeles with a friend. He is promptly arrested. Held in cuffs/cell for 12 hours and deported.
Why? The Department of Homeland Security flagged his tweet as a possible threat to the US.
Huh?
Automated security at its finest.
Add lethal drones that kill people due to “terrorist” signature behaviors and we have a problem Houston.
Phi Beta Iota: Oddly enough, this is the exact unclassified parallel of the National Security Agency (NSA) that processes less than 1% of all traffic, and less than 5% of “high priority” traffic, according to various open source reports. At what point–in the midst of economic collapse–do serious people get to say “enough – let's get real about needs, capabilities, costs, outputs, and trade-offs?” Has anyone been able to find the “M” in OMB? This is what you get when “management” is non-existent, money is printed without pause, and very expensive executive merely channel dollars rather than actually thinking about what they buy, what the produce, and how we might better spend (or not spend at all) those dollars.
Syria: Special comment. Readers are rightly perplexed about conditions in Syria. Syrian press restrictions inhibit any neutral or balanced coverage. Everything reported from opposition sources and activists is biased and some reports of massacres include manufactured images, according to eyewitnesses.
International news descriptions of a worsening crisis receive no offsetting coverage of testimony from non-Sunni and non-opposition sources that little is occurring. The massacres are not taking place, occurring to sources that receive messages from Orthodox Christians living in Homs, for example. Life goes on in all of the towns and ports.
Skirmishes at checkpoints are the most common form of clash. That means four or five people fire a few rounds at four or five soldiers or policemen. Defectors are Sunni conscripts. The Syrian Army is about 60% conscript. Desertion is common in conscript armies. Defectors from the professional, full-time, non-conscript core of the force, most of whom are Alawites, have not been reported.
The point is that western media present one side of the struggle — that of the exiled Sunni politicians and activists with cell phones. Clips from social networking media are heavily one-sided and some are not authentic.
Limited communications from people caught in the middle, non-Muslims, suggest there is a lot less fighting and fewer deaths. Reports of carnage and massacres of hundreds do not seem to be accurate, except in opposition propaganda media.
“All governments and economic policies as we know them so far, are ‘mere artifacts of intellectual development so far'. Genetic imperative, meanwhile, drives the human life-form as a whole to ‘live as long as possible' – but the only way of doing that is through science and science alone. American free-enterprise, capitalist democracy, in other words, is doomed -like it or not”.
“Economics has evolved out of fundamentally natural mechanisms of human diasporation and eventual trade. For the greater part of history, these mechanisms were more or less satisfactory in the sense that it was not possible to foresee problematic consequences from underlying dynamics. Economics and economic theory, in this respect, have evolved as less concerned with consequences than with ‘invisible hand's, ‘economic growth' and abstract market properties more or less ignorantly conjured into ‘existence and importance'.
Critically missing therein is any reference to the biological nature of man and the nature of his influence on what is a closed-earth system -four considerations:
If you have any money and you want to understand the lies that “your” government tells you with statistics, subscribe to John Williams shadowstats.com.
John Williams is the best and utterly truthful statistician that we the people have.
The charts below come from John Williams Hyperinflation Report, January 25, 2012. The commentary is supplied by me.
Here is the chart of real average weekly earnings deflated by the US government’s own measure of inflation, which as I pointed out in my recent column, Economics Lesson 1, understates true inflation.
This chart (below) shows the behavior of inflation as measured by “our” government’s official measure, CPI-U (bottom line) and John Williams measure which uses the official methodology of when I was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. The gap between the top and bottom lines represents the amount of money that was due to Social Security recipients and others whose income was indexed to inflation that was diverted by the government to wars, police state, and bankers’ bailouts.
This next chart shows the gains that gold and the Swiss franc have made against the US dollar. The Swiss franc is the top line and gold is the bottom. When gold and the Swiss franc rise, the dollar is falling. Notice that during President Reagan’s first term, when I was in the Treasury, gold and the Swiss franc dropped, that is, the dollar rose in purchasing power. Obviously, the supply-side policy that Reagan implemented strengthened the US dollar. It was only with the advent of the Bush policy of endless trillion dollar wars, reaffirmed by Obama, that the US dollar and economy collapsed relative to gold and hard currencies.
The recent drop in the Swiss franc is due to the Swiss government announcing that the country’s exports could not tolerate any further run up in the franc’s value, and that the Swiss central bank would print new francs to accommodate future inflows of dollars and euros. In other words, Switzerland was forced to import US inflation in order to protect its exports.
Here is nonfarm payroll employment. As you can see, the US economy has been in recession for four years despite the easiest monetary policy and largest government deficits in US history.
Here is consumer confidence. Do you see a recovery despite all the recovery hype from politicians and the financial media?
Here is housing starts. Do you see a recovery?
Here is real GDP deflated according to the methodology used when I was in the US Treasury.
Here is real retail sales deflated by the traditional, as contrasted with the current, substitution-based, measure of inflation.
These graphs courtesy of John Williams make it completely clear that there is no economic recovery. In place of recovery, we have hype from politicians, Wall Street, and the presstitute media. The “recovery” is no more real than Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” or Iranian “nukes” or the Obama regime’s phony story of assassinating last year an undefended Osama bin Laden, allegedly the mastermind of Islamic terrorism, left by al Qaeda to the mercy of a US Seal team, a man who was widely reported to have died from renal failure in December 2001, a man who denied any responsibility for 9/11.
A government and media that will deceive you about simple things such as inflation, unemployment, and GDP growth, will lie to you about everything.
Phi Beta Iota: Here is the paraphrase as reported previously, from Ellen Seidman, former member of the National Economic Council:
CIA reports only focus on foreign economic conditions. They don't do domestic economic conditions and so I cannot get a strategic analysis that compares and contrasts strengths and weaknesses of the industries I am responsible for. On the other hand, Treasury, Commerce, and the Fed are terrible at the business of intelligence — they don't know how to produce intelligence.[1]
When you add a lack of integrity across the board to basic incompetence on the part of both consumers and producers of intelligence, you end up with lies that neither patriotic nor helpful.
[1] Seidman was speaking to the Open Source Lunch Club on January 1, 1994. Her observations were subsequently reported in OSS Notices 94001 dated February 21, 1994
Gunboat diplomacy was the essence of military power projection for centuries. Want to coerce a country? Sail a aircraft carrier battle group into their national waters.
However, carrier battlegroups are hideously expensive, increasingly vulnerable to low cost attack, and less lethal than they appear (most of the weapons systems are used for self-defense).
What are nation-states replacing them with? Drones. You can already see it in action across the world as drone staging areas are replacing traditional military bases/entanglements. Further, drones already account for the vast majority of people killed by US forces.
Of course, the reason for this is clear. Drones are relatively cheap, don't require many people to deploy/operate, don't put personnel directly at risk, can be easily outsourced, can be micromanaged from Washington, and are very effective at blowing things up.
The final benefit of Drone Diplomacy: drones make it possible to apply coercion at the individual or small group level in a way that a blunt instrument like a carrier battle group can't.
What does this mean?
It allows truly scalable global coercion: the automation of comply or die.
Call up the target on his/her personal cell (it could even be automated as a robo-call to get real scalability — wouldn't that suck, to get killed completely through bot based automation).
Ask the person on the other end to do something or to stop doing something.
If they don't do what you ask, they die soon therafter due to drone strike (unless they go into deep hiding and disconnect from the global system).
With drone costs plummeting, we could see this drop to something less thanWhat can we look forward to?
The mid term future of a national security apparatus in secular ($$) decline?
Drones, drones, and more drones. Shrink the headcount. Cut training. Put manned weapons systems in life support mode. Cut mx.
All the money is on cyber intel (to generate targets based on “signatures”) and drones to kill them. When domestic unrest occurs in the US due to economic decline, these systems will be ready for domestic application.
1. You are creative.
2. Creative thinking is work.
3. You must go through the motions of being creative.
4. Your brain is not a computer.
5. There is no one right answer.
6. Never stop with your first good idea.
7. Expect the experts to be negative.
8. Trust your instincts.
9. There is no such thing as failure.
10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are.
11. Always approach a problem on its own terms.
12. Learn to think unconventionally.
1. Everything is connected.
2. Understanding true costs as a concept is fundamental.
3. Cultural lenses matter.
4. Understanding history is a strong foundation for shaping the future.
5. The best thinkers are not necessarily the best teachers or doers.
6. Trust is the fuel for all of the above – transparency & truth build trust.
