Robert Gates: A Brilliant Career — As a Courtier

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corporations, Corruption, Government, Methods & Process, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Richard Wright

I think the best description of Robert Gates is that he is a very smart bureaucrat who exemplifies the concept of go along to get along. He demonstrated this admirably in his farewell ‘warning’ as reported in the Wall Street Journal. This was a “guns or butter” speech designed to reassure the defense industrial complex that the safety of the U.S. will depend on the continued acquisition of pointless complex and expensive weapons systems.

Rather interestingly in this speech Gates ignored two pieces of information that might have caused him to reconsider his advocacy of super weapons systems.

Continue reading “Robert Gates: A Brilliant Career — As a Courtier”

Nuclear/Climate Change: CLOSED 17 May 2011

03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, 12 Water, Communities of Practice, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Technologies

ROLLING UPDATE from Beginning of Crisis

SHORT URL: http://tinyurl.com/PBI-Japan-Update

Click on Image to Enlarge

16 May 2011

ALL:  Study: Seaports unready for climate change

CANADA:  Climate change threatens arctic coastlines

CHINA:  China’s Nuclear Arsenal: Status and Evolution

EUROPE-SPAIN:  Spanish Quake Jolts European Nuclear Debate

GERMANY-JAPAN-USA:  Nuclear Nations Turn To Natural Gas And Renewables

INDIA:  Manmohan Singh takes stock of country's nuclear arsenal

INDIA-PAKISTAN:  Towards An Indo-Pak Nuclear Lexicon: Minimum Nuclear Deterrence – Analysis

INDONESIA:  Strong earthquake strikes off Indonesia’s Java island

JAPAN:  Japanese Officials Ignored or Concealed Dangers

JAPAN:  Japan Sticks to Timeline for Solving Nuclear Crisis

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. also acknowledged that one of the factors contributing to a rapid meltdown of reactor cores was the failure to keep emergency batteries safe from the tsunami, preventing a key emergency cooling system from performing its intended function.

Meanwhile, Tepco said one of the key causes of a rapid meltdown at Unit No. 1 was the failure of two emergency cooling mechanisms—the suppression pool and the isolation condenser—to perform their intended functions.

PAKISTAN:  Pakistan's nuclear surge exposed

Indian slam, satellite and video, 100% jump by 2021.

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SWEDEN:  Sweden's Holding Tank For Nuclear Waste

“We have here about 2,000 tons that you are looking (at), and you can stand here as long as you want to,” she tells me before quickly adding, “If we take one of these bundles out of the water I will give you 20 seconds to leave this room alive.”

USA:  US reactor outages 50 pct above late-spring average

USA:  U.S. Nuclear Output Falls as Entergy, Progress Shut Reactors

Twenty- five of the nation’s 104 reactors were offline.

USA:  75% of Americans Have Never Heard of Climate-Gate, Study Reveals

Prior Updates, Graphics, and Original Overviews Below the Line

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Psychology of Human Incompetence: New Metrics

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, History, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), International Aid, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Policies, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Waste (materials, food, etc)
John Steiner

“Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.”

—George Eliot
We're losing!  Here's a playbook, see especially the focus on new metrics that have more meaning.

Posted by nate hagens on May 11, 2011 – 10:50am
Topic: Demand/Consumption
Tags: evolutionary psychology, human psychology, overconsumption [list all tags]

The essay below is an updated and edited version of a post I wrote here a few years ago, I'm Human, I'm American and I'm Addicted to Oil. Richard Douthwaite, Irish economist and activist, (and a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute), invited me to contribute it as a chapter in the just released book Fleeing Vesuvius, which is a collection of articles generally addressing “how can we bring the world out of the mess it finds itself in”? My article dealt with the evolutionary underpinnings of our aggregate behavior – neural habituation to increasingly available stimuli, and our evolved penchant to compete for status given the environmental cues of our day. And how, after we make it through the likely upcoming currency/claims bottleneck, we would be wise to adhere to an evolutionary perspective in considering a future (more) sustainable society.

Click here for the table of contents from Fleeing Vesuvius, followed by my article.

Phi Beta Iota: Will and Ariel Durant, in Lessons of History, state that the only real revolution is in the mind of man.  We strongly believe that strategic analytics is the next revolution, and that strategic analytics will make possible transparency, truth, and truth leading to compassionate non-zero evolution–a world that works for all.
See Also:

Cooperation Is Pledged By Nations Of the Arctic

06 Russia, 08 Wild Cards, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, History, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Maps, Methods & Process, Open Government, Policies, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Real Time, Reform, Research resources, Serious Games, Standards, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools
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Cooperation Is Pledged By Nations Of the Arctic

By

New York Times, May 12, 2011

NUUK, Greenland — The eight Arctic nations pledged Thursday to create international protocols to prevent and clean up offshore oil spills in areas of the region that are becoming increasingly accessible to exploration because of a changing climate.

The Arctic Council — the United States, Russia, Canada, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden — said the protocols would be modeled on a separate agreement signed here in Nuuk on Thursday to coordinate search-and-rescue operations over 13 million square miles of ocean.

Read more….

Phi Beta Iota: This is potentially world-changing, but pedestrian at this time.  Legal and logistics arrangements institutionalize old ways of doing things–slow, expensive, often inappropriate ways.  Much more exciting would be for the nations to agree to create an Arctic M4IS2 Centre, perhaps based in Copenhagen or in Oslo, with an emphasis on sustainable energy and climate change to begin with, but rapidly filling out to provide holistic analytics across all threats and helpful to the harmonization of spending across all policies.  Such a center could be innovative from the first day if it includes all eight tribes of intelligence in its organizational and outreach schema, creating a model for both the United Nations and for each of the continental political organizations.

WATER Central to Man Against Nature

Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Geospatial, History, InfoOps (IO), IO Impotency, Methods & Process, Policies, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Research resources, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Threats

Headlines, Comment, and Lists of Book Reviews Below the Line…

Continue reading “WATER Central to Man Against Nature”

Decentralized Web Standard by W3C

Advanced Cyber/IO, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Standards, Technologies
Sepp Hasslberger

When times are right, things do start to move…

ReadWriteWeb

This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

By Marshall Kirkpatrick / May 5, 2011

Imagine a web where our browsers connected directly to each other to do voice, video, media sharing and run applications, using P2P and real-time APIs, rather than going through centralized servers that controlled traffic and permissions. That's a potent idea and if implemented properly could future-proof a part of the web from authoritarian crack-downs, disruptions by disasters and more. It could also establish a permanent lawless zone of connected devices with no central place to stop anyone from doing anything in particular.

It just so happens that something like that may now be under development in the most official of venues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today the formation of a new Web Real-Time Communications Working Group to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers, without the need for server-side implementation. The Group is chaired by engineers from Google and Ericsson. It sounds like Opera Unite to me (see video below), but democratized across all browsers. It sounds like it could be a very big deal.

Defense and the Deficit–Busting the Defense Bubble, Ending Defense Entitlement

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Peace Intelligence, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Winslow Wheeler

Last Saturday's issue of Barron's ran a cover story on the deficit and their own take on how to address it.  In contrast to the recent recommendations from President Obama and the House Republicans, defense was actually “on the table,” not “at” it.  In the absence of any adult thinking on the deficit since the Deficit Commission in December, Barron's addresses a void that remains vast and empty in Congress and the Executive branch.  The article puts on the table a defense recommendation — which I urged to them — that goes significantly deeper than even the Deficit Commission's — in truth fuzzy — recommendation on “security” spending.

Almost immediately, Forbes published at its website a related piece on defense spending and The Pentagon Labyrinth that contains some interesting private sector views on how the public might be beginning to perceive the current size of the defense budget and condition of our armed forces: note the references to “defense entitlement,” “defense bubble,” and “parade ground military.”  It would seem that the paradigm is changing, at least outside Washington DC.  (If you think that the recent killing of bin Laden proves the “parade ground” moniker wrong, I urge you to read the introduction essay in The Pentagon Labyrinth: Why Is This Handbook Necessay?.

Bursting The Defense Bubble: End The Entitlement Mentality
Steve Denning, Forbes, 30 April 2011

Grow Up, Guys!
By GENE EPSTEIN
Barron's Cover SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2011

While the President and GOP sling mud at each other, the debt crisis is growing. Barron's offers some tough-but necessary-ways to alleviate it.

Phi Beta Iota: It is possible to eliminate the deficit by making Medicare prices honest and stopping the borrowing of money for corporate pork that feeds political pork.  It is possible to eliminate personal income taxes by adopting the Automated Payment Transaction (APT) Tax, which actually produces a great deal more revenue which is desperately needed to bail out the equally irresponsible state governments and pension funds (both government and corporate).   America is hosed.  It is not possible to “reset” until Washington can combine intelligence and integrity, and that may require a public revolt on both taxes and the fraudulent corrupt Electoral System that keeps the two-party tyranny in a position to continue looting the Commonwealth.

See Also:

Seven Promises to America–Who Will Do This?

Serious (Honest) Thinking About US Budget

$500 Billion in Cuts is Minimal Mandatory….

US Goverment 2011 Revenue, Costs, & Debt–Two Party Tyranny Lies Straight Up, Media Goes Along