I will not replicate all that is at www.oss.net and to a much lesser extent, www.earth-intelligence.net, but do want to recognize a handful of extraordinary individuals by isolating their especially meritorious contributiions to the long-running debate about national intelligence reform and re-invention.
Nearly all of the 10,893 spent fuel assemblies at the Fukushima Daiichi plant sit in pools vulnerable to future earthquakes, with roughly 85 times more long-lived radioactivity than released at Chernobyl.
I offer here a framework for understanding what I might call “big” wholeness – a sensibility I have about wholeness that I can never articulate but which continually demands that I try. This framework attempts to embrace the manifestations of that inarticulable “wholeness” that I find myself sensing into and out of as my work emerges or as I evaluate each new idea, initiative, possibility, etc., that comes to my attention as I do my work.
In this model I am calling the overall categories of such manifestations “faces of wholeness”, as that is the way they present themselves – in the same sense that many mystical traditions see every person, thing, or phenomenon as “a face of God”. Beneath each overall category, I list “facets” or ways that wholeness manifests itself as parts or aspects of that larger face of wholeness.
Many faces and facets overlap, contextualize, include, and can even colonize some or all of the others. When I say “colonize”, I mean that certain holistic advocates may assert that a favorite face or facet is what wholeness is all about and that the other faces and facets are at best subsidiary phenomena. This is why I call wholeness that manifests through ALL the faces and facets “big wholeness”.
One of the future tasks in making this framework useful is to identify important applications of each face and facet. I sense that most if not all of people's efforts to make the world better – from art to politics, from education to medicine, from religion to science – are (or at least originally were) grounded in one or another aspect of wholeness. My co-intelligence work is definitely driven by a sense of wholeness and its potent, even sacred value.
So I offer this framework in my belief that the more we can understand about the nature of wholeness, the more able we will be in our work for the world. I especially hope it will help us co-create a world that works, as William McDonough says, for the children of all species for all time.
Of course, this framework is, itself, an example of the kind of wholeness it talks about. That is, it is only one tentative effort to weave diverse phenomena into a coherent whole which is inherently limited and will undoubtedly evolve. So feel free to do with it what you will.
Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and quantitative easing, the question has been before us: How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits? Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy. Without the artificially low interest rates, the debt service on the national debt would be so large that it would raise questions about the US Treasury’s credit rating and the viability of the dollar, and the trillions of dollars in Interest Rate Swaps and other derivatives would come unglued.
In other words, financial deregulation leading to Wall Street’s gambles, the US government’s decision to bail out the banks and to keep them afloat, and the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy have put the economic future of the US and its currency in an untenable and dangerous position. It will not be possible to continue to flood the bond markets with $1.5 trillion in new issues each year when the interest rate on the bonds is less than the rate of inflation. Everyone who purchases a Treasury bond is purchasing a depreciating asset. Moreover, the capital risk of investing in Treasuries is very high. The low interest rate means that the price paid for the bond is very high. A rise in interest rates, which must come sooner or later, will collapse the price of the bonds and inflict capital losses on bond holders, both domestic and foreign.
The question is: when is sooner or later? The purpose of this article is to examine that question.
From beginning, have not felt Petraeus as D/CIA was optimal for either man or institution. I see it as politically-driven POTUS strategic move to sideline potential political opponent who, right now, should be serving as Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff.
CIA Director David Petraeus spoke first at an April 19 memorial dinner for agency officers killed in action. He delivered well-scripted remarks and an evocation of the agency’s heroes. Then came Leon Panetta, his predecessor at the CIA and the evening’s main honoree, who delivered a stem-winding emotional speech to fervent applause.
The freewheeling Panetta, now secretary of defense, has been a tough act to follow at the CIA, especially for a former four-star Army general who thrived in the disciplined, resource-rich world of the military. And in his first year at the agency, Petraeus’s transition has sometimes been bumpy, as the CIA’s finicky workforce struggled to adapt to its new director.
“I hear the rumblings” from mid-level CIA officers, says one senior administration official. But he says Petraeus gets high marks from the White House, which took the unusual step of naming the prominent general to the post.
Read full article. Phi Beta Iota: Reading between the lines, Patraeus has accepted being sidelined, is making changes on the margins, not within the base, and may or may not emerge from this a wiser man. The clandestine service remains unrepentant and impotent–official cover, liaison hand-outs, legal traveler debriefings in the USA–while the analytic service remains childish, scatter-brained, and largely useless. Such “triumphs” as he achieves will handed to him by selected foreign services including the Israeli's with their broad false flag menu, or be in the science & technology arena, at great cost for marginally useful innovations. Nothing of import will be done on human intelligence, open source intelligence, all-source processing, whole of government decision support, or multinational clandestine, covert, and analytic operations.
