Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2531 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Half-full, glass is.

Hillary Clinton Helps Silicon Valley on Her Way Out the Door

Elizabeth Dwoskin

BloombergBusinessWeek, 4 February 2013

Taking the podium in the State Department’s Ben Franklin Room one last time on Thursday before stepping down, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thanked lots of people, offered reminiscences, and announced a flurry of last-minute initiatives. “We’re all like one millisecond away from just collapsing here, because of the emotion and the feelings that are coursing through all of us,” Clinton said.

One of those new initiatives, the Alliance for an Affordable Internet, barely got a mention in Clinton’s speech. But it merits attention. If successful, the project—a public-private partnership among the State Department, the World Wide Web Foundation, and tech companies such as Cisco Systems (CSCO), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO) and Intel (INTC)—could end up helping many people in poor countries get onto the Web. It could also cement long-term ties between the State Department and the companies—while opening new markets and reaching new customers for Silicon Valley. “We’re going to help the next billion people come online,” said Clinton, quickly announcing the project before going on to talk about clean cook stoves for women in the developing world.

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Continue reading “Yoda: US Diplomatic-Commercial Internet Initiative — Affordable Good, Proprietary Bad”

2013/02/04

Marcus Aurelius: 20 Years Late, US Military Focuses on Drugs

Ineptitude, Military

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Slow learners.

US Military Expands Its Drug War In Latin America

Martha Mendoza, Associated Press

The crew members aboard the USS Underwood could see through their night goggles what was happening on the fleeing go-fast boat: Someone was dumping bales.

When the Navy guided-missile frigate later dropped anchor in Panamanian waters on that sunny August morning, Ensign Clarissa Carpio, a 23-year-old from San Francisco, climbed into the inflatable dinghy with four unarmed sailors and two Coast Guard officers like herself, carrying light submachine guns. It was her first deployment, but Carpio was ready for combat.

Fighting drug traffickers was precisely what she'd trained for.

In the most expensive initiative in Latin America since the Cold War, the U.S. has militarized the battle against the traffickers, spending more than $20 billion in the past decade. U.S. Army troops, Air Force pilots and Navy ships outfitted with Coast Guard counternarcotics teams are routinely deployed to chase, track and capture drug smugglers.

The sophistication and violence of the traffickers is so great that the U.S. military is training not only law enforcement agents in Latin American nations, but their militaries as well, building a network of expensive hardware, radar, airplanes, ships, runways and refueling stations to stem the tide of illegal drugs from South America to the U.S.

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Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: 20 Years Late, US Military Focuses on Drugs”

2013/02/04

Stuart Umpleby: Social Sciences Differ from Physical Sciences

Science

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Here is a fragment from a listserve that is related to reflexivity. It explains how social science is different from physical science. Assuming that an approach developed for physical systems can also be used for social systems will miss a key feature of social systems.

Very interesting paper on application of science to agriculture, in which the authors come up with this very interesting notion of ‘systemic science':

“A systemic science is a science that influences its own subject area.”

This explicitly tackles the challenge thrown down by Michel Foucault concerning the human sciences, for which the problematic was that their object of study (say the human mind) was at the same time their subject (us humans studying that object of study). The application to agricultural is very clear, succinct and makes very good sense of such a systemic science. Don't know the authors and haven't come across any of their previous work. The paper is longish but very readable:

PDF 31 Pages: ‘Towards a systemic research methodology in agriculture: Rethinking the role of values in science'.

Hugo Fjelsted Alrøe and Erik Steen Kristensen

Further explanation of this notion of ‘systemic science':

Continue reading “Stuart Umpleby: Social Sciences Differ from Physical Sciences”

2013/02/042013/02/04

Review: The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won’t Tell You About What They’ve Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War

5 Star, War & Face of Battle

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5.0 out of 5 stars ABSORBING — An Essential Reading for Citizens and Soliders, February 4, 2013

I did a very detailed review of the author's first book, In the Hot Zone and I recommend that book as well as this one. They are different books and complement one another. The first book is about the over-all external reality of war, this book is about the internal reality and loss of reality and inner psychic confusion, grief, pain and general loss of self that war inflicts on those that survive it.

The book can be read in a morning, and in my view is an excellent gift for young men thinking about joining the military. It is also an excellent reference and could usefully be required reading in both entry level and mid-career courses for Staff Non-Commissioned Officers (SNCO), Chief Warrant Officers (CWO), and officers including officers at Command & Staff College or a War College. Certainly it would be a very valuable reference for those who are going into a combat zone as civilians, including United Nations, Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, and others. In all my reading, I have no encountered a book quite like this, focused on putting together direct first person stories covering the following topics as ably captioned by the author:

Part I: The Killing Business: What's It Like to Kill in War?

Part II: The Wounds of War: What's It Like to be Shot, Bombed, or Burned in Combat?

Continue reading “Review: The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won't Tell You About What They've Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War”

2013/02/042013/02/04

Patrick Meier: Does Big Data Lead to a Knowledge Society? No.

IO Impotency

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Big Data for Development: From Information to Knowledge Societies?

Unlike analog information, “digital information inherently leaves a trace that can be analyzed (in real-time or later on).” But the “crux of the ‘Big Data’ paradigm is actually not the increasingly large amount of data itself, but its analysis for intelligent decision-making (in this sense, the term ‘Big Data Analysis’ would actually be more fitting than the term ‘Big Data’ by itself).” Martin Hilbert describes this as the “natural next step in the evolution from the ‘Information Age’ & ‘Information Societies’ to ‘Knowledge Societies’ […].”

Hilbert has just published this study on the prospects of Big Data for inter-national development. “From a macro-perspective, it is expected that Big Data informed decision-making will have a similar positive effect on efficiency and productivity as ICT have had during the recent decade.” Hilbert references a 2011 study that concluded the following: “firms that adopted Big Data Analysis have output and productivity that is 5–6 % higher than what would be expected given their other investments and information technology usage.” Can these efficiency gains be brought to the unruly world of international development?

To answer this question, Hilbert introduces the above conceptual framework to “systematically review literature and empirical evidence related to the pre-requisites, opportunities and threats of Big Data Analysis for international development.” Words, Locations, Nature and Behavior are types of data that are becoming increasingly available in large volumes.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Does Big Data Lead to a Knowledge Society? No.”

2013/02/042013/02/04

SchwartzReport: Bees Make 70 of 90 Human Foods Possible — US Lost One Third of All Bee Colonies in 2012, While EU Striving to Protect Their Bees

01 Agriculture, 08 Wild Cards, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government

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Although there is still great resistance as you can see in this report slowly, at least in Europe, the truth about the role of pesticides and herbicides in the decline of the bees is being recognized. Here in the U.S. nothing is happening, even as the collapse of bee colonies increases. About one-third of bee colonies was lost this last year. Of the 90 plant food stuffs humans eat 70 are utterly dependent on bee poll! ination.

EU Proposal to Protect Bees Stirs Hornets' Nest
DON MELVIN – The Associated Press

BRUSSELS – An attempt to protect Europe's bee population has kicked up a hornets' nest.

On Thursday, the EU's commissioner for health and consumer policy, Tonio Borg, proposed to restrict the use of three pesticides – called nenicotinoids – to crops to which bees are not attracted.

The three pesticides were clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiametoxam; the crops from which they would be banned include sunflowers, rapeseed, cotton and maize. The policy would take effect July 1 for the EU's 27 nations and be reviewed after two years.

But while environmentalists welcomed Borg's proposal as an important first step, Borg's spokesman, Frederic Vincent, confirmed that some countries reacted unenthusiastically, preferring further study to immediate action. He declined to identify them.

Marco Contiero of the environmental group Greenpeace said Britain was firmly opposed, and Germany and Spain were either opposed or wanted more time to consider.

Luis Morago of the advocacy group Avaaz, meanwhile, condemned what he called “spurious” British and German opposition and said 2.2 million people had signed an Internet petition calling for a comprehensive ban on the pesticides.

Beekeepers have reported an unusual decline in bees over the past decade, particularly in Western Europe, the European Food Safety Authority says. Bees are critically important to the environment, sustaining biodiversity by providing pollination for a wide range of crops and wild plants – including most of the food crops in Europe, it says.

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2013/02/04

SchwartzReport: Get Police OUT of the Schools

04 Education, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Academia, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Law Enforcement

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Here is the latest in the school-to-prison pipeline, part of the New American Slavery trend. This time the outrage comes from

Juvenile Judge: My Court Was Inundated With Non-Dangerous Kids Arrested Because They ‘Make Adults Mad’

The United States is not just the number one jailer in the world. It also incarcerates juveniles at a rate that eclipses every other country. Evidence has long been building that schools use the correctional system as a misplaced mechanism for discipline, with children being sent to detention facilities for offenses as minor as wearing the wrong color socks to school. A juvenile county chief judge testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that these are not isolated incidents, but rather systemic trends that bombard prosecutors and courts with a glut of cases in which kids pose no danger but merely ‘make adults mad”:

When I took the bench in 1999, I was shocked to find that approximately one-third of the cases in my courtroom were school-related, of which most were low risk misdemeanor offenses. Upon reviewing our data, the increase in school arrests did not begin until after police were placed on our middle and high school campuses in 1996-well before the horrific shootings at Columbine High School. The year before campus police, my court received only 49 school referrals. By 2004, the referrals increased over 1,000 percent to 1,400 referrals, of which 92% were misdemeanors mostly involving school fights, disorderly conduct, and disrupting public school.

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