Category: References

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.

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Steve Denning: Itemization of How We Blew Up the World

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, Analysis, Blog Wisdom, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Policy, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Steve Denning

Lest We Forget: Why We Had A Financial Crisis

Steve Denning

Forbes, 22 November 2011

When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this infallible sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

Jonathan Swift

It is clear to anyone who has studied the financial crisis of 2008 that the private sector’s drive for short-term profit was behind it. More than 84 percent of the sub-prime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending. These private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year. Out of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006, only one was subject to the usual mortgage laws and regulations. The nonbank underwriters made more than 12 million subprime mortgages with a value of nearly $2 trillion. The lenders who made these were exempt from federal regulations.

How then could the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg say the following at a business breakfast in mid-town Manhattan on November 1, 2011?

It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not saying I’m sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t have gotten them without that. But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.”

Barry Ritholtz in the Washington Post calls the notion that the US Congress was behind the financial crisis of 2008 “the Big Lie”. As we have seen in other contexts, if a lie is big enough, people begin to believe it.

Full Story Below the Line with BLOCKBUSTER Itemization

Continue reading “Steve Denning: Itemization of How We Blew Up the World”

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Howard Rheingold: Expert Information Access Strategies

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Methods & Process
Howard Rheingold

SkillCraft: Information Access Strategies

EXTRACT:

So, how does expertise affect these information access strategies? A study of professional athletes’ demonstrated the idea that experts use a “just-in-time” strategy, where information that is required to do well in their respective sports is accessed at the time it necessary. Such strategies also appear to be employed in everyday tasks such as making tea or a peanut butter sandwich (Hayhoe & Ballard, 2005). It seems that experts merely use the same strategies in their specific tasks to perform better. Through the acquisition of a “just-in-time” strategy experts are able to look at what they needed to, when they needed to, faster than novices (Land & McLeod, 2000).

Read more.

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Chuck Spinney: UXO Waste of War Decades Later

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Military, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Chuck Spinney

For every square meter of land along the Western front from the Channel coast to the Swiss border it is estimated that a ton of explosives fell during WW1 (the “Iron Harvest“)

Belgian UXO (unexploded ordnance) experts estimate there are 450 million pieces of UXO in Belgium alone. At Verdun in France the estimate is that 12 million pieces of UXO remain.

Belgium – 450 million pieces

Verdun 12 million pieces

Verdun II

Belgian EOD

French UXB info

630 French UXO personnel have been killed since WWII working on this stuff. Currently in France the UXO specialists recover about 900 tons per year, with 30 tons of that being chemical munitions (mustard gas shells, phosgene shells, etc.), and they estimate there's enough work there to keep them busy for another 900 years.

French UXO specialist deaths

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: UXO Waste of War Decades Later”

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David Swanson: 70 Years of Lies About Pearl Harbor

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Media, Military, Officers Call
David Swanson

70 Years of Lying About Pearl Harbor

By davidswanson

WarIsACrime.org, 04 December 2011

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's fervent hope for years was that Japan would attack the United States. This would permit the United States (not legally, but politically) to fully enter World War II in Europe, as its president wanted to do, as opposed to merely providing weaponry and assisting in targeting of submarines as it had been doing. Of course, Germany's declaration of war, which followed Pearl Harbor and the immediate U.S. declaration of war on Japan, helped as well, but it was Pearl Harbor that radically converted the American people from opposition to support for war.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had tried lying to the American people about U.S. ships including the Greer and the Kerny, which had been helping British planes track German submarines, but which Roosevelt pretended had been innocently attacked. Roosevelt also lied that he had in his possession a secret Nazi map planning the conquest of South America, as well as a secret Nazi plan for replacing all religions with Nazism. And yet, the people of the United States didn't buy the idea of going into another war until Pearl Harbor, by which point Roosevelt had already instituted the draft, activated the National Guard, created a huge Navy in two oceans, traded old destroyers to England in exchange for the lease of its bases in the Caribbean and Bermuda, and — just 11 days before the “unexpected” attack — he had secretly ordered the creation of a list of every Japanese and Japanese-American person in the United States.

Continue reading “David Swanson: 70 Years of Lies About Pearl Harbor”

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Thomas Briggs: No, China Does Not Have 3,000 Nuclear Weapons (Nor Does CIA Have Clandestine Assets Anywhere Relevant)

02 China, 10 Security, Academia, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence
Thomas Leo Briggs

Here is another posting related to this topic to balance the earlier piece from the Washington Post.

No, China Does Not Have 3,000 Nuclear Weapons

A study from Georgetown University incorrectly suggests that China has 3,000 nuclear weapons.The estimate is off by an order of magnitude.

By Hans M. Kristensen

EXTRACT:

According to the International Panel on Fissile Materials, China has produced an estimated 2 tons of plutonium for weapons. Some has been consumed in nuclear tests, leaving roughly 1.8 tons. The estimate is consistent with what the U.S. government has stated and theoretically enough for 450-600 warheads.

Total production of HEU is thought to have been approximately 20 tons. Some has been spent in nuclear tests and research reactor fuel, leaving a stockpile of some 16 tons. That’s theoretically enough for roughly 640-1,060 warheads.

Another critical material is Tritium, which is used in thermonuclear weapons. China probably only produces enough Tritium at its High-Flux Engineering Test Reactor (HFETR) in Jiajiang to maintain an arsenal of about 300 weapons.

The U.S. intelligence community concluded in 2009 that China likely has produced enough weapon-grade fissile material to meet its needs for the immediate future. In other words, no vast warhead expansion is in sight.

Read more, several excellent images.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Phi Beta Iota:  We are reminded of how the British government sacrificed its intelligence and integrity in copying from a university paper to inflate the Iraq WMD threat, and we continue to believe that the “restricted” papers the students were given are both grounds for an investigation of their professor, and grounds for an Inspector General if not a Department of Justice inquiry into illegal PSYOP funding influence from the Pentagon to Georgetown University.  It merits positive comment that neither the CIA's “all source” Directorate of Intelligence nor the CIA's Open Source Center are capable of this level of work–the students, and their professor–have done a great deal of good.  They simply cannot combine — as the CIA and DIA cannot combine — open sources in all languages; deep analytic tradecraft; and rigorous personal integrity….nor does the CIA have any clandestine assets in China relevant to this particular inquiry, nor does the US Intelligence Community have leadership capable of focusing all-source collection and requisite (non-existent) processing on this vital question.  On the one hand, the Pentagon is correct to say that the US intelligence community stinks on all questions Chinese; on the other, the Pentagon and the White House are telling impeachable lies to Congress and the public on all matters relating to the Chinese threat and the Pentagon budget.  Our personal speculative estimate of China's nuclear capability is closer to 30 operable weapons, to which we add that the US has never actually tested any of its nuclear weapons–we literally do not know if they will work as advertised.

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DefDog: DHS Comedy of Errors on Water-Pump “Hack”

10 Security, Corruption, DHS, Government, IO Impotency
DefDog

If there is ever a story to validate the reduction of spending in the
intelligence community, this would be it……….

Exclusive: Comedy of Errors Led to False ‘Water-Pump Hack’ Report

It was the broken water pump heard ’round the world.

Cyberwar watchers took notice this month when a leaked intelligence memo claimed Russian hackers had remotely destroyed a water pump at an Illinois utility. The report spawned dozens of sensational stories characterizing it as the first-ever reported destruction of U.S. infrastructure by a hacker. Some described it as America’s very own Stuxnet attack.

Except, it turns out, it wasn’t. Within a week of the report’s release, DHS bluntly contradicted the memo, saying that it could find no evidence that a hack occurred. In truth, the water pump simply burned out, as pumps are wont to do, and a government-funded intelligence center incorrectly linked the failure to an internet connection from a Russian IP address months earlier.

Read full article with two photos.

More reporting on this event, with some detail showing the lack of “intelligence” within this intelligence activity…….

America's critical infrastructure security response system is broken

Following SCADA water utility ‘hack', is the reporting system in need of re-thinking?

By Ellen Messmer | Network World US | Published: 16:01, 02 December 2011

The flap over the reported water utility hack in Illinois begs the question: Is the reporting system that the US has set up to identify cyberattacks on critical infrastructure broken and in need of re-thinking?

Read full article.

noble gold