I fear that everyone is losing the perfect opportunity to demand electoral reform. Here is what I have done on this with zero traction. Based on discussions in NYC I have dropped the Coalition Cabinet for now and am focusing only on Electoral Reform, but if we really are to change this system, an Independent candidate with a Coalition Cabinet has to defeat BOTH Obama AND the Republican challenger. I don't see that emergent at this point.
My Interpretation of the Emerging Message:
CORRUPTION is the common enemy, both in government and in the private sector.
Phi Beta Iota: This report, while responsible (unlike the current food fight a year later), does not go far enough. It allows the borrowing of one trillion a year to continue, while observing that interest on the debt could reach one trillion a year by 2020. The principle recommendations, all sound but insufficient, are listed in the Overview section.
This book remains the single definitive reference on the Smart Nation Act as developed by Robert Steele in support of Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02). As pointed out in Hamilton Bean's recently published book, No More Secrets: Open Source Information and the Reshaping of US Intelligence the Open Source Agency (OSA) has become the subject of competing visions–on one side, those who favor accountability, effectiveness, transparency, and respect for the public…..on the other, those who favor corruption, profitable waste, secrecy, and the exclusion of the public.
Most recently, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability provides the strategic, operational, tactical, and technical contexts for leveraging both Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) in order to create a prosperous world at peace–and at one third the cost of what the USA spends on war today.
If an OSA is created–it can only be a success under diplomatic auspices as OMB has twice agreed (provided the Secretary of State asks for it as a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), it could–it should–host the Multinational Decision Support Centre (MDSC) as proposed to DoD and implicitly called for in several Defense Science Board (DSB) reports. The MDSC could be located in Tampa, Florida, as the Coalition Coordination Centre has been, but staffed by intelligence professionals instead of logistics professionals.
Put most simply, an OSA restores intelligence and integrity to the entirety of the US Government, and changes everything about how we do policy, acquisitions, and operations. It restores the Republic.
is a cut-and-paste accumulation of a variety of outlooks. Most are based on analyses or accumulated wisdom, but some appear based on hunches, ideologies, etc. Taken together, however, they paint a horrifying picture of the American political economy and our prospects for the future. Moreover, that picture does not change materially if you throw half of the pastings away. While the implications of fraud, per se, are clear, the horrifying picture of what is happening emerges when one tries to generalize on the description.
The anonymous guest author is telling us, in effect, that the neural network of our political-economy — i.e., the information system that provides the wherewithal for implicit and explicit homeostatic guidance and control – – has become so corrupted by fraud and disinformation that a pervasive atmosphere of confusion, menace, fear, mistrust, and alienation is breaking down the system into non-co-operative activities, thereby creating a kind of paralysis of will that, left unchecked, will prolong and deepen our economic crisis. <
One psychologist insightfully likened the situation to trauma and post traumatic stress disorder on a national scale.
Any student of Colonel Boyd's theory [1] of competition and conflict (Patterns of Conflict) and his idea of the OODA loop will immediately recognize the symptoms of confusion, menace, fear, mistrust, and alienation, expressed below. These are the emergent properties of decision cycles, or Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) Loops, that have been folded back inside themselves and have become focused inward and are disconnected from their environments, but connected to some kind of internal dynamic that feeds on itself. Of course, Boyd was discussing military strategy and the art of winning by wrecking his adversary's OODA loops to undermine his adversary's organic cohesion, while preventing his adversary from doing the same thing to him.
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss his ideas as applying only to the art of war. That is because Boyd's aim was to describe in a generalized sense how the human mind works in any conflict involving a clash of independent wills, what the mind's strengths and weaknesses are, and how these strengths and weaknesses play out in the competition that is the essence of life.
So, it should not be surprising that many politicians, businessmen, and scholars have recognized that Boyd's general ideas can be tailored to any kind of competition or game (just google “OODA loop”) and have sought gain by exploiting these ideas against others. Most people, however, instinctively evolve similar if less well defined ideas, because if Boyd's synthesis of the OODA loop is correct, these dynamics are innate in the evolved wiring of left and right hemispheres of our brains [2], and therefore will exhibit their outward manifestations in repetitive patterns in conflicts over time — which brings back to the tapestry of confusion, menace, fear, mistrust, and alienation and the counter weights that are necessary to overcome them.
Viewed through the lens of Boyd's theory of competition and conflict, the attached blog clarifies one question about the players in the economic game in particular: The information assembled below clearly shows who is the hoser and who is the hosee.
One final point, history has shown that once an nation's political-economic OODA loops become infected by the virus of corrupted information it is very very hard to clean it out. The hosing will continue unless ruthless action roots it out, otherwise, we will experience continued disintegration ending in a sudden collapse, like what happened to Rome on a grand time scale or to France's Third Republic [3] on a more tangible time scale.
With this background in mind, now read the attached blog and draw you own conclusions about what is needed to re-oreint the corrupted political-economic OODA loops that are leading America to ruin.
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NOTES:
[1] A short bio of Boyd and his theories as well as the briefing slides he used to explain his theories can be found in the Boyd folder here. Robert Coram's excellent biography of Boyd and his theories can be found here.
[2] See, for example, my analysis of how Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton and John McCain here.
[3] William L. Shirer's Collapse of the Third Republic, is a case study in how the dry rot of inward focus in the 1930s set France up for its sudden collapse in during the German invasion of May 1940. His description of how the flow information among the military and political leaders became corrupted during the invasion is a microcosm of how inwardly focused OODA loops, lubricate by menace, mistrust, and fear result inevitably in the breakdown of cohesion, paralysis, chaos, and collapse.
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ATTACHED BELOW THE LINE IN FULL for Information AvailabilityAssurance Into the Future
Failing to Prosecute Wall Street Fraud Is Extending Our Economic Problems
Posted By Guest Author On December 15, 2010 @ 8:30 am In Think Tank
EDIT of 9 Jan 10: Note seven comments from retired senior officers.
Critique of the CT Summary for the White House
This is a negligent piece of work that fails to include all that is known merely from open sources of information, but more importantly its judgments are misdirected. This incident remains incompletely investigated until the person who video-taped events on the airplane comes forward and is identified.
Where we differ:
1. It was passengers who restrained the individual, not the flight crew, as is stated in the first paragraph.
1) Does not identify the primary error. The Embassy officer (or CIA officer) who interviewed the father did not elevate the matter. The same kind of mistake occurred when the Taliban walked in and offered us Bin Laden in hand-cuffs.
2) The absence of a machine-speed cross-walk among US and UK visa denials is noted, but the weakest link is overlooked. The Department of State either didn’t check their visa files or, as has been remarked, may have failed to get a match because of misspelling. The necessary software is missing. State continues to be the runt in the litter (we have more military musicians than we have diplomats) and until the President gets a grip on the Program 50 budget, State will remain a dead man walking.
3) Another point glossed over: the intelligence community, and CIA in particular, did not increase analytic resources against the threat. Reminds us of George Tenet “declaring war” on terrorism and then being ignored by mandarins who really run the place.
4) “The watchlisting system is not broken” (page 2 bottom bold). Of course it is broken, in any normal meaning of the word “system”. John Brennan is responsible for the watchlisting mess, and this self-serving statement is evidence in favor of his removal. If we are at war, we cannot have gerbils in critical positions (quoting Madeline Albright).
5) “A reorganization of the intelligence or broader counterterrorism coummunity is not required…” at the bottom of page 2. Reorganization, in the sense of moving around blocks on a chart, may not be required, but the entire system is broken and does need both principled redesign and new people the President can trust with the combination of balls and brains and budget authority to get it right. Thirteen years after Aspin-Brown we still have not implemented most of their suggestions; the U.S. intelligence community is still grotesquely out of balance; and the Whole of Government budget is still radically misdirected at the same time that our policies in the Middle East are counterproductive.
