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.
Note: These letters were to be included as appendices to illuminate how those in power refuse to consider, much less embrace, radical constructive ideas, however essential they might be to the 99%. All four of these leaders – a Pope, the Secretary General of the United Nations, a sitting President of the United States of America, and a multi-billionaire with a flair for innovation – have probably not even seen these letters because they inhabit a CLOSED world. They are surrounded by courtiers who are threatened by new ideas, and who reject all that they do not understand.
In an OPEN world, each of these individual would hear from a million voices, asking them to read the letter addressed to them, and to hold a summit for public discussion of the letter.
This post is the full text online version for ease of automated translation. Links to the actual versions on letterhead are below the line with their full-text version.
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.
Most discussions of possible United States military operations in the Persian Gulf, should Iran try to prevent maritime traffic from going through the Strait of Hormuz, generally say that while it would not be a cakewalk, it would not be an enormously difficult task either.
But that conventional wisdom is wrong, according to a recent report issued by an independent, non-profit public policy research institute in Washington DC. The report found that the traditional post-Cold War US military ability to project power overseas with few serious challenges to its freedom of action may be rapidly drawing to a close.
. . . . . . .
It stressed that “a Strait of Hormuz closure could trigger a much larger price spike, including by limiting offsetting supplies from other producers in the region”.
Phi Beta Iota: Two themes are emerging in the open source world. First, the depth and breadth of Israel's clandestine agreements with its Arab neighbors is not clearly understood–a National Intelligence Estimate is required, but the collection, processing, and analysis capabilities are simply not there, and the management will to do this as a multinational task is not there either. Second, as the US loses its ability to actually project force, the finance of war is being replaced by the theater of war, such that oil prices can still be manipulated, but at a fraction of the blood, sweat, and tears previously mobilized – financial fraud on the cheap, as it were.
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.
No program better illustrates the pathologies of the weapons acquisition process as it is currently practiced by the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) than the entirely predictable, and in this case, predicted, problems dragging the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter into a dead man’s spiral.
The F-35 in on track to be the most expensive program in the history of the Defense Department, and it has repeated just about every mistake we invented since Robert McNamara concocted the multimission, multi-service TFX — a program conceived with the same kind of fanciful one-shoe fits all imaginings as the F-35.
For reflection. When I created the strategic generalizations in the first edition of the Expeditionary Factors study, that was responding to General Gray's guidance that we be relevant to USMC acquisition–that was actually his primary focus, we lost our integrity by the third generation of leadership and went into production for the sake of production, without a genuine understanding of either the craft of intelligence or the mission needs of the USMC. That was enabled by flag officers who have no clue what it means to integrate true cost economics with strategic generalizations to arrive at a force that has a very low logistics foot-print, a very high availability ratio, and a very low cost in relation to all the crap that the big three services sign for without thinking.
Economic imbalances and social inequality risk reversing the gains of globalization, warns the World Economic Forum in its report Global Risks 2012. These are the findings of a survey of 469 experts and industry leaders who worry that the world’s institutions are ill-equipped to cope with today’s interconnected, rapidly evolving risks. The findings of the survey fed into an analysis of three major risk cases: Seeds of Dystopia; Unsafe Safeguards and the Dark Side of Connectivity. Report also analyses the top 10 risks in five categories – economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological.
Phi Beta Iota: The report fails to address the absence of both intelligence and integrity among all “institutions” be they public or private. This is the entire point of the global Occupy movement. This is also the entire point of this website, which predates Occupy by some time.
Appendix: Game Changing Letters that Flopped
