Methods & Process – Page 47 – Public Intelligence Blog

November 22, 2010 23:10

From a University of Texas at Austin Announcement:

As a new Congress prepares to take office, a powerful online tool from University of Texas at Austin political scientists can help answer questions about lawmakers' shifting focus over time, differences between Republican and Democratic priorities and whether wave elections correlate with policy changes in Washington.

The Policy Agendas Project database allows journalists, scholars and interest groups to easily track and compare the issues that presidents and members of Congress have taken up since 1947 and to assess how those actions reflected the mood of the country.

The interface lets users sift through dozens of issues and sub-issues — health care, the environment, taxes — to look at the topics leaders dealt with in congressional hearings, new laws, executive orders and State of the Union addresses, as well as public opinion about problems facing the nation.

[Clip]

The data generated by the project are free and publicly available. They come with software that allows them to be used in classrooms. Jones and his colleagues released earlier versions of the Policy Agendas Project while he was a professor at the University of Washington.

Tip of the Hat to Gary Price at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: This has some promise, especially if they design it to be scalable across countries and down to the state and local level. However, since nothing is policy until it is in the budget, the real truth tellers will be if they can link this to actual budgetary authorizations, allocations, and obligations; factor in “true costs” of any given policy element; and open it up to fact-based citizen dialog and deliberation.

2010/12/022010/12/02

Reference: Saving the World–Some Perspectives

Blog Wisdom, Methods & Process, Movies

NIGHTWATCH EXTRACT: STRATFOR Does Not Understand Intelligence

Cultural Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

NIGHTWATCH For the record. STRATFOR published an essay on intelligence that posited that the tension in the intelligence world is between collectors and others and analysts. That mischaracterizes of the source of the tension and shows very limited insight.

At the national level, among national agencies, there is an overwhelming volume of information sharing on thousands of topics, but not necessarily on the right topics. The sources are well protected. An experienced professional can scan more than 2,000 reports per hour from 16 different agencies, if he has tweaked his message profile.

The tension is not between collectors and analysts, but between Security and the information flood. How do an agency's security people protect more than 50,000 electronic messages per hour in computer profiles for – or from — disgruntled employees with clearances, every hour of every day?

State Department's effort to be a team player after 9/11 by making most SECRET-classified State cables accessible to anyone with a SECRET clearance now appears to have been excessive. It enabled the Wikileaks event this week.

In an earlier time, no PFC in the Army would ever have had such access to diplomatic traffic. Prior to 1986 the government had no personal computer work stations. Then, a PFC got to read the paper reports that senior personnel gave him to read and evaluate. He was accountable for them, usually had to sign a custodian's receipt and had a deadline for his evaluation. That system was inflexible to the point of near uselessness, but it was secure.

The US intelligence confederation of agencies still has not found a formula for balancing security and access that is any better than “need to know.” 9/11 showed that “need to know” is too restrictive for efficient counter terror cooperation. The Wikileaks event showed that the “need to share” initiative is too broad to ensure security of critical information and systems.

This is a domain still waiting for a new good idea.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: STRATFOR does not understand the intelligence discipline, but this is not a surprise since most senior managers of US secret intelligence do not understand it either. Our earnest NIGHTWATCH colleague has it half-right: the security (and legal) mind-sets are both death rattles for US intelligence. He is incorrect on the meaning of WikiLeaks–what WikiLeaks actually represents is the visible collapse of government relevancy and the end of government (as well as corporate) legitimacy as a means of organizing global to local security and sustainability. The government is–as one journalists called George Bush I–an “empty suit.” It lacks citizen-centered structure, purpose, and maturity. With respect to intelligence, there has been no lack of good ideas, only a total resistance to ideas that threaten the status quo, which is totally devoted to keeping the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) going, at taxpayer expense. Conflicts include those between inputs (empire building) and outputs (no accountability for relevance and timeliness); between technical collection (very high profit margins) and processing (too hard, low profit, analysts don't have money to spend and also lack substantive knowledge of what to demand); between technical disciplines (very high profit margins, no accountability) and human/open disciplines (very low profit margin, hard to do, actually requires professional skill); and between “secrets for the President” (no accountability despite a 4% accomplishment record) and decision-support for everyone else (which would actually make intelligence timely, relevant, actionable, and a profit center for the public). US Intelligence could double or triple its utility overnight with three simple steps:

1. Open Source Agency (OSA) outside the wire, civil affairs representing the military

2. Multinational Multiagency Multidiscipline, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) with OSA funding for regional intelligence centers funded by US but manned by indigenous nations and controlled by indigenous nations (all eight tribes of intelligence)

3. Whole of Government redirection of resources from dysfunctional national security state to a new hybrid model that melds the eight tribes with a slightly restructured government (three Vice Presidents for Commonwealth, Education-Intelligence-Research, and Global Engagement) that scrubs fraud, waste, and abuse while waging peace and empowering the five billion poor starting here in the USA.

The demise of the US Government began immediately after World War II, as President and General Ike Eisenhower warned it would, with the MICC taking control of the government budget while the banking world began experimenting with “exploding the customer” and getting away with it. Each decade has seen a severe upward climb of both of these pathologies, coincident with–after Viet-Nam–with a decline in the efficacy of investigative journalism and citizen activism. The good news is that the decline of the later was what Bill Moyer in Doing Democracy calls “stage five” or “the darkness.” 2012 is a convergence and emergence year. No one–least of all Phi Beta Iota–knows what it will bring, with one observation: the game will change.

If there is anyone out there able to focus Presidential attention on the fundamentals, here are the four references that matter:

2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated

2010 M4IS2 Briefing for South America

2009 Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A Twenty-Year Restrospective

2000 ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World

2010/11/302011/10/22

Reference: Legitimate Grievances by Robert Steele

Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Augmented Reality, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Corporations, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Open Government, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Strategy, Threats

As we all observe with stunning detachment the symbiotic continuance of Bush-Obama Democratic-Republican support to the Wall Street looting of America led by Goldman Sachs, whose executives continue to “own” the Department of the Treasury and the Bank of New York (Federal Reserve), I believe it helpful to itemize some legitimate grievances that could inspire State by State nullification of federal mandates and regulations, and perhaps a few secessions, with Cascadia, Vermont, Hawaii, and Alaska being well positioned to abandon a compact that no longer serves the United STATES of America, nor We the People.

I am indebted to Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale and founder of the Middlebury Institute, for teaching me about the urgency and relevance of the secessionist movements, and the detailed reflections that they have published, reflections that I point to here for the common good.

LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCES (Domestic)

The Chattanooga Declaration of 2007 (7 Points)

Core Point: Liberty can only survive if political power is returned from the banks and corporations that have corrupted the federal government, to local communities and States. The American Empire is no longer a nation or a republic, but has become a tyrant aggressive abroad and despotic at home.

The Burlington Declaration of 2006 (5 points)

Core Point: Any political entity has the right to separate itself from a larger body of which it is a part and peaceably to establish its independence as a free and legitimate state in the eyes of the world. Governments are instituted among peoples, deriving their just powers power from the consent of the governed, and whenever any form of government becomes destructive of the legitimate goals of life, liberty, prosperity, and self-determination, it is the right of the people in democratic fashion to aleter or abolish it, and to institute new government in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

The Logic of Secession: Three Tines to a Trident (A Manifesto by Kirkpatrick Sale)

Core Point: In the face of a rigged game in which two parties have conspired to corrupt, manipulate, and generally monopolize power, third party politics will not work. Only secession will allow for the emergence of a restored Republic once the federal government and its two-party tyranny are made irrelevant (and starved of revenue).

In Defense of Vermont's Secession from the Union (A Manifesto by Keith Brunner)

Core Point: Vermont was its own country before it joined the Union, and nothing in the Constitution of the United STATES of America precludes secession from this voluntary compact [Lincoln violated the Constitution in multiple ways, most Americans simply have not learned the truth of the matter]. The American Empire is economically, politically, cultural, and especially environmentally unsustainable, and far from fixing itself, is just getting worse. When a government of people who have no moral authority are in the possession of enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over, in the position to dominate the global economy for their own interests, and continually and foolishly pace the needs of the “economic system” above the needs of the natural world, the time for action cannot be put off any longer.

LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCES (Anti-Americanism)

In sound support of the above, I have itemized a list of the behaviors and conditions that have inspired anti-Americanism. Each is, without exception, a betrayal of the public trust and grounds for abolishing the present political criminal enterprise that has hijacked the federal government and the public treasury on behalf of its banking and corporate masters. Each of these high crimes and misdemeanors justifying impeachment is derived from one or more works on non-fiction.

A harvest of lies and a complete lack of intelligence
Always, without exception, failure to invest in peace in the aftermath of war
Axis of Evil #1: poverty, disease, and ignorance
Axis of Evil #2: US support for 42 of 44 dictators, idiocy on the other two (Cuba, North Korea)
Continue reading “Reference: Legitimate Grievances by Robert Steele”

2010/11/302010/11/30

Journal: Mice, Men, Aging, & Policy

11 Society, Academia, Augmented Reality, Earth Intelligence, Methods & Process

Aging Ills Reversed in Mice

Scientists Tweak a Gene and Rejuvenate Cells, Raising Hopes for Uses in Humans

By GAUTAM NAIK

Scientists have partially reversed age-related degeneration in mice, an achievement that suggests a new approach for tackling similar disorders in people.

By tweaking a gene, the researchers reversed brain disease and restored the sense of smell and fertility in prematurely aged mice. Previous experiments with calorie restriction and other methods have shown that aspects of aging can be slowed. This appears to be the first time that some age-related problems in animals have actually been reversed.

Phi Beta Iota: Utterly fascinating in isolation. However, in the context of the fragmentation of knowledge and the incoherence of policy, this kind of development is frightening in the absence of a draconian move away from stove-pipe and inherently corrupt (again, integrity is about coherence, not honor per se) governance, and toward comprehensive design that nurtures all humans, all minds, all the time.

See Also:

Graphic: Web of Fragmented Knowledge

Reference: 8 Populations, 4 Methods

Reference: 12 Core Policy Domains

Reference: 10 High-Level Threats to Humanity

Review: The Life and Death of NSSM 200 –How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy

Dennis Kucinich, Vice President for the Commonwealth–and Some Details

2010/11/30

Journal: AlterNet on “Beyond Madness”–Patraeus in Pakistan

Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence

‘Beyond Madness': Obama's War on Terror Setting Nuclear-Armed Pakistan on Fire

Rather than seeking to stabilize Pakistan, General David Petraeus has been irresponsibly lighting matches with his shortsighted use of Special Forces and drone strikes

by Fred Branfman

EXCERPT 1: But rather than seeking to stabilize Pakistan, General David Petraeus has, incredibly, been irresponsibly lighting matches through his shortsighted and relentless effort to secure Afghanistan by using U.S. forces and drone strikes, and pressuring the Pakistani Army to attack Taliban “sanctuaries” in Pakistan’s northwest provinces. Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan's High Commissioner to London for the past 16 years and a pillar of the Establishment, has recently stated that U.S. drone and gunship attacks in Pakistan have “set the country on fire” and threatened that such acts could eventually lead to attacks on U.S. personnel in Pakistan. Petraeus has disastrously miscalculated. The more “progress” he tries to show in Afghanistan, the more he weakens the U.S. position in far more important Pakistan.

EXCERPT 2: The single most important — yet surprisingly ignored — revelation of Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's Wars, is that Petraeus and the Obama team never discussed how their strategy for attacking Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan was weakening the Pakistani state. Woodward also makes clear that it is Petraeus, not Obama, who is driving U.S. policy in “Af-Pak.” CIA Director Leon Panetta declared that “no Democratic president can go against military advice, especially if he asked for it. So just do it. Do what they say,” according to the book. Petraeus’ power derives from America’s unconscious need for a military hero and his perceived and overblown success in Iraq. But this perception has blinded normally sensible observers to his disastrous performance in Pakistan since becoming Centcom commander in October 2008.

Tip of the Hat to John Steiner via E-Mail.

Phi Beta Iota: the author has pulled together a number of linked references and this is a useful article narrowly focused. He missed the larger picture, the fact that Obama has no strategy and no brain trust (the emphasis being on brains in touch with reality). Obama will get his Wall Street reward on his present course, but he is neither leading nor serving the nation with his ideologically passive-aggressive incoherence across the board–nothing serious on all ten threats to humanity, nothing serious on all twelve core policies, an intelligence community that is pathologically expensive and ineffective, and a Pentagon that is so out of control as to be a cancer on the public blood, treasure, and spirit. these are all good people trapped in a bad system–they desperately need a “wake-up call” and we are not sure that is achievable at this point.

2010/11/282010/11/28

Reference: The Modern Big Picture–Two Minds

Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Geospatial, History, InfoOps (IO), IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Open Government, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Real Time, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools, Waste (materials, food, etc)

Extract from Conclusion in the Above: I have observed the World Game as a student-participant, and wish it well. I have also observed Bob Pickus's work, as a student-participant in Turn Toward Peace, and wish him well. There are still other alternatives, but whichever road leads us faster into a world without war, what I gain most from Pickus and Fuller is their sense of the Big Picture. No one else can match their indefatigable and comprehensive efforts to see the problem whole, and to steer the world's energy into a grand design of peace.

See Also:

Who's Who in Collective Intelligence

Who's Who in Peace Intelligence

BigPictureSmallWorld

BigPicture Consulting

Design Science Lab

Global Education Lab

EarthGame