Category: Topics (All Other)

Posted on

DOT&E Documents and Tony Capaccio Story

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Standards, Technologies
Winslow Wheeler

There are a set of documents at the DOT&E website which offer DOT&E insights into the reason for why about 40 programs have experienced delays — and costs.  These documents relate to a Tony Capaccio story in today's Bloomberg News (below).

The document titled “Updated DOT&E Input on Program Delays” (at the DOT&E link shown above) identifies various specific reasons for the problems programs experience — different from most of the explanations from contractors and other system advocates in and out of the Pentagon.  (Eg. for the F-35:  Fly rates per month lowered to more realistic projections (from 12 max for all variants and venues to 10 max for CTOL/CV flight sciences, 9 max for STOVL flight sciences, 8 max for all mission systems); increased planning factors for re-fly and regression (up 15% for flight science, 10% for mission systems); more time required for software development and incremental builds.”)

Beyond the F-35, the various systems described in the analysis are typically more obscure programs (eg. AIM-9X 8.212 Software Upgrade) but there are also a few better known ones, such as LCS, which is described in “fly before buy,” Congress and the Navy want to rush ahead of testing to buy 4 LCS in the 2012 HASC DOD Authorization bill for $1.8 billion in production costs.

Availability of complete mission packages will be delayed until at least 2015.

Instead of withholding production of untested systems with clear and obvious development problems, Congress and the Pentagon are intent on business as usual.  The LCS is a good example: instead of “fly before buy,” Congress and the Navy want to rush ahead of testing to buy 4 LCS in the 2012 HASC DOD Authorization bill for $1.8 billion in production costs.

Some will think the DOT&E analysis and documents to be obscure and too “in the weeds” to pay much attention to.  Instead, they offer a major part of the explanation for why hardware costs and delays are so out of control, and they offer a stunning view into how little is being done about that.

BloombergNews.com, June 13, 2011

Weapons Testers Found Not to Blame for Procurement Delay

Posted on

NO DIFFERENCE: Obama’s White Half Is Bush III

Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Law Enforcement, Policies, Threats
Sucks for You....

Headline Revelations

Glenn Greenwald

Salon, 13 June 2011

Dan Gillmor observes that the two top New York Times headlines this morning “sum up the Obama administration”:

EXTRACT:  As Yale Professor Jack Balkin recently put it to Jane Mayer about the Obama presidency: “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state.”  This state, as much as anything, is devoted to gathering as much intrusive data as possible about as many citizens as possible without a shred of oversight or suspicion of wrongdoing: exactly that which has proven to create inevitable abuse and exactly that which the Fourth Amendment sought to bar.

SECOND EXTRACT:  The article also notes that one possible threat to Obama's plan would be a Romney candidacy, as Wall Street would love to back one of their own, and Romney — who amassed a fortune by saddling companies with debt and then firing huge numbers of their employees — is the very essence of what Wall Street loves.

Read full review….

Posted on

Whistle-Blowers of 1777 & Congressional Intent

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, IO Impotency, Law Enforcement, Officers Call
Michael Ostrolenk Recommends...

The Whistle-Blowers of 1777

Stephen M. Kohn

New York Times, 12 June 2011

The tension between protecting true national security secrets and ensuring the public’s “right to know” about abuses of authority is not new. Indeed, the nation’s founders faced this very issue.

. . . . . . .

Later that month, without any recorded dissent, Congress enacted America’s first whistle-blower-protection law: “That it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.”

. . . . . . .

Nearly two centuries later, the Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, praising the founders’ commitment to freedom of speech, wrote: “The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information.”

Read full article…..

Phi Beta Iota: This is not about Barack Obama–he sold out, get over it.  This is about a two-party tyranny that hides its prostitution to Wall Street behind secrecy–chasing down whistle-blowers benefits both these parties all those they have shaken down for kick-backs.  This is about a system that is inherently corrupt, in which 63 of 65 parties–and all Independents–are shut out, disenfranchised, and cheated.

Posted on

Non-Geek Digerati Anti-Intellectualism

Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, History, info-graphics/data-visualization, IO Impotency, Key Players, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Policies, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Research resources, Serious Games, Standards, Threats, Tools, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Larry Sanger

Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism?

Is there a new anti-intellectualism?  I mean one that is advocated by Internet geeks and some of the digerati.  I think so: more and more mavens of the Internet are coming out firmly against academic knowledge in all its forms.  This might sound outrageous to say, but it is sadly true.

Read lengthy post with links…

Robert David STEELE Vivas

 

Robert David STEELE Vivas: Digerati are not geeks.  They are adept at social media, a process, rather than the substance of any discipline.  Their scorn for the mandarins of knowledge would not be possible if academia had not lost its soul, sanctioned massive intellectual corruption, and fragmented itself to the point of irrelevance.  The serious educational literature (not something the digerati read) is clear: inspiration and innovation

Click on Image to Enlarge

emerge faster, better, and cheaper from minds that are prepared, to include a foundation of memorization and a deep familiarity with the thinking of those who have come before.  The digerati point of view half-right and is embodied in Smart Mobs, Wisdom of the Crowd, Everything is Miscellaneous, and Maria Popova's latest thought, that “information curation is the new authorship.”  The digerati approach splits the roles of originator of an idea and connector of an idea down, and assumes that “the collective” can replicate and even surpass the individual human brain, without recognizing that the whole is only as good as the sum of the part foundation plus whatever the collective adds.  My own finding re Wikipedia is that the mob destroys intellectuals.  My own efforts to enhance the Open Source Intelligence page there were destroyed by idiots that “assumed” that because I pointed to oss.net so much (to many of the 800 people whose work is there including the 144 that received Golden Candle Awards) I was “self-promoting.” The digerati are fragile and very shallow, and by Larry Sanger's very interesting account, a new form of neo-Luddite.  The academy is corrupt and fragmented–we are in an era where all forms of organization have lost their soul and whatever semblance of philosophical context they may once have possessed.  We are suffering from the Paradigms of Failure that I discussed in the pre-amble to ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (EIN, 2008).  There is only one option leading to stabilization & reconstruction:  INTEGRITY.  The digerati aren't–as a general rule–very appreciative of holistic thinking or in-depth expertise–they are a spoiled generation badly in need of some personal suffering and exposure to global reality–IMHO.

Posted on

Long-Term Implications of Netanyahu Over Obama

02 Diplomacy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Chuck Spinney Recommends...

Attached herewith is an important essay on the long term implications of Netanyahu – Obama spectacle of late May. The Author, William R. Polk, has kindly given granted me permission to distribute it.

Read preliminary comment and full text of William Polk's

Obama and Palestine

What will make Obama willing to move on the issue?

Also by William Polk:

Journal: William Polk AF Trip Report August 2010

Journal: William Polk on Afghanistan Non-Strategy Plus Consolidated Journal, Review, and Reference Links for Afghanistan

Posted on

Worth a Look (DVD): One Man, One Cow, One Planet

Advanced Cyber/IO, Atlases & State of the World, Change & Innovation, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Complexity & Resilience, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Crime (Corporate), Cultural Intelligence, Culture, Research, Disease & Health, Earth Intelligence, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Ethics, Gift Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (Public), Key Players, Methods & Process, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace Intelligence, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Public Administration, Reform, Reviews (DVD Only), Science & Politics of Science, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Technologies, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), Threats, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
Amazon Page

Home Page of DVD

Phi Beta Iota: The industrialization/ chemicalization of agriculture, in combination with the corruption of every aspect of society beginning with governance and extending to the media, has allowed for the desecration of the Earth and the poisoning of humanity.  This has been done with the explicit consent and encouragement of the so-called elites of the West, who have a vision of eugenics and the covert eradication of the poor and uneducated over time.  These elites do not see that the brainpower of the three billion poor is the only thing that can restore natural harmony and sustainable agriculture as well as legitimate governance and natural capitalism.  The time has come to create M4IS2–public intelligence in the public interest.

Posted on

Worth a Look: Peak Soil, Food Shock, Biodynamics

01 Agriculture, 01 Poverty, 03 Environmental Degradation, 11 Society, Civil Society, Earth Intelligence, IO Deeds of Peace, Methods & Process, Worth A Look
Peak Soil

Oil is what most of us think of as a strategic resource, yet in the long run it is soil which is the more important. Even so, people’s eyes tend to glaze over when talk turns to soil conservation, maybe because it’s so much easier to see the immediate relevance of rising gas prices and climate change in these days of peak oil. So while public attitudes on climate change have shifted dramatically over the past few years, a crisis in global agriculture remains hidden: we are, and have long been, using up the supply of topsoil we rely on to grow our food.

 

Food Shock

New “Food Shock” Report Released by OffTheGridNews.net Reveals Disturbing U.S. Food Supply Trends

 

THOMSON, IL–(Marketwire – April 2, 2011) – The world's food supply is shrinking and as it does the price of food continues to climb, reaching record levels and leaving most of the global population in a state of emergency. This isn't an opinion created out of thin air; it's a strong message that has been researched and delivered by the United Nations. In an article published on Bloomberg.com on March 31, 2011 a representative from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization surmised that world food production would have to increase by 70 percent by 2050 to meet the increasing demand from an expanding global population that is expected to eclipse the 9.1 billion mark by 2050, a dramatic rise from the 6.9 billion that make up today's world population.

 

Biodynamic Agriculture

Biodynamic agriculture is a method of organic farming that treats farms as unified and individual organisms,[1] emphasizing balancing the holistic development and interrelationship of the soil, plants and animals as a self-nourishing system without external inputs[2] insofar as this is possible given the loss of nutrients due to the export of food.[3] As in other forms of organic agriculture, artificial fertilizers and toxic pesticides and herbicides are strictly avoided. There are independent certification agencies for biodynamic products, most of which are members of the international biodynamics standards group Demeter International.

 

noble gold