Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2593 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Respect is due to those who developed the viable method of desalination of seawater described in this report. A means of mitigating the damage done by fracking to potable ground water should include Canadian advances in desalination technology presented by Tang/Zoshi of rexresearch.com. The cumulative effects of fracking includes networked systems in the environment including aquatics. Mere substitution of lost fresh water supplies may prove inadequate to remedy the total negative cost of fracking. Anticipated economic benefits from shale oil production may fund a more profound restoration of lost environmental securities.

James TANG & Joshua ZOSHI

Desalination

Saltworks Technologies is positioned to commercialize a breakthrough desalination technology during a time of increasing freshwater scarcity, rising energy prices, and mounting concerns over carbon impacts.

Saltworks' patent pending technology employs an innovative Thermo-Ionic™ energy conversion system that uses up to 80 per cent less electrical/mechanical energy relative to leading desalination technologies. The energy reduction is achieved by harnessing low temperature heat and atmospheric dryness to overcome the desalination energy barrier. Saltwater is evaporated to produce a concentrated solution. This solution, which has concentration gradient energy, is fed into Saltworks' proprietary desalting device to desalinate either seawater or brackish water. Some electrical energy is used to circulate fluids at a low pressure, yet the bulk of the energy input is obtained through the evaporation of saltwater.

Perfomance of this novel process improves in arid regions, which happen to be the very regions that require freshwater. The technology also requires less pre-treatment and chemicals than traditional processes.

Applications for Saltworks' technology include producing drinking water for communities and municipalities, irrigation water for agriculture, and process water for industry. It is especially well-suited for situations with low temperature thermal energy (30-40 degrees Celsius) such as simple solar thermal or waste heat.

The technology has been proof-tested by the National Research Council of Canada and BC Hydro's Powertech Labs. An outfitted 1,000 litre a-day seawater pilot plant complete with chemical free pre-treatment will soon be fully operational at a harbour location in Vancouver, British Columbia.

2012/12/152016/03/25

Robert Steele: How Dutch Intelligence Survived & Prospered Using Open Source Human Intelligence as a Foundation for Ethical Evidence-Based Decisions

Advanced Cyber/IO, Ethics, Government

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Robert David STEELE VivasClick on Image for Bio Page — Robert David STEELE Vivas
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REACTION TO: 2012 Robert Steele: The Human Factor & The Human Environment: Concepts & Doctrine? Implications for Human & Open Source Intelligence 2.0

These are my words, reflecting what I learned in multiple funded trips to work with Dutch intelligence at various levels, and multiple conversation across various conferences I attended in Europe. This is more or less what I told George Tenet when he became DCI….to no effect, naturally.

1994 was a very stressful time in Dutch intelligence history. A scandal had erupted in which the Parliament was investigating Dutch intelligence intrusions with audio-video into the homes of specific Dutch citizens suspected of this and that. Parliament was so angry they threatened to cut all funding for all intelligence. Two very good things emerged from this:

Continue reading “Robert Steele: How Dutch Intelligence Survived & Prospered Using Open Source Human Intelligence as a Foundation for Ethical Evidence-Based Decisions”

2012/12/152012/12/15

Sir Richard Branson: Breaking the Taboo — Ending the War on Drugs also known as the War on People

Education, Knowledge

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Narrated by Oscar winning actor Morgan Freeman, “Breaking the Taboo” is produced by Sam Branson's indie Sundog Pictures and Brazilian co-production partner Spray Filmes and was directed by Cosmo Feilding Mellen and Fernando Grostein Andrade. Featuring interviews with several current or former presidents from around the world, such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, the film follows The Global Commission on Drug Policy on a mission to break the political taboo over the United States led War on Drugs and expose what it calls the biggest failure of global policy in the last 40 years.

YouTube (1:50) Movie Trailer

YouTube (58:09) Full Documentary in English, Subtitles as Needed

Continue reading “Sir Richard Branson: Breaking the Taboo — Ending the War on Drugs also known as the War on People”

2012/12/152012/12/15

SchwartzReport: Poisoning the Well – Federal Collusion with Industry to Pollute Natio’s Underground Water Supply

Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude

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Injection Wells: The Hidden Risks of Pumping Waste Underground

Poisoning the Well: How the Feds Let Industry Pollute the Nation’s Underground Water Supply

Federal officials have given energy and mining companies permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500 places across the country, releasing toxic material into underground reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation's drinking water.

In many cases, the Environmental Protection Agency has granted these so-called aquifer exemptions in Western states now stricken by drought and increasingly desperate for water.

EPA records show that portions of at least 100 drinking water aquifers have been written off because exemptions have allowed them to be used as dumping grounds.

“You are sacrificing these aquifers,” said Mark Williams, a hydrologist at the University of Colorado and a member of a National Science Foundation team studying the effects of energy development on the environment. “By definition, you are putting pollution into them. … If you are looking 50 to 100 years down the road, this is not a good way to go.”

As part of an investigation into the threat to water supplies from underground injection of waste, ProPublica set out to identify which aquifers have been polluted.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The ignorance of the US National Intelligence Council in endorsing fracking as a path to energy is breathtaking. $70 billion a year plus, and the National Intelligence Council has no idea that fracking causes earthquakes and contaminates scarce groundwater?

2012 Global Trends 2030: Review by Robert Steele — Report Lauds Fracking as Energy Solution, Disappoints on Multiple Fronts

Sir Richard Branson: Breaking the Taboo — Ending the War on People also known as the War on People

2012/12/142012/12/14

Review: Poor Economics – A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

4 Star, Economics, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

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Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

4.0 out of 5 stars Serious Economics Poorly Presented, December 14, 2012

I have no doubt that among economists this book merits all the praise it has received; I do NOT recommend it for the general reader, indeed, I do not recommend it at all unless it is assigned reading, in which case my recommendation is moot. The book is neither as radical as its title pretends, nor as detailed as I was hoping for–how, exactly, do the one billion poor spend their 99 US cents a day? I bought the book because I am thinking about how to persuade Sir Richard Branson that he should sponsor “The Virgin Truth” [one pager concept has been posted online]; go “all in” on all the Opens including Open Base Transceiver Station, Open Spectrum, Open Software, etcetera [topic of my most recent book], and give each of the five billion poor free cell phone access and free education “one cell call at a time” as conceptualized by the Earth Intelligence Network. For me, this book is a four and not light reading. All text, few charts, no lists, no comparatives, no visualization.

The authors take one really brilliant idea and then talk around it, and that is why they lose one star. The brilliant idea is that we really do need to understand at a micro level how the just under one billion extreme poor spend their 99 cents a day (the other four billion less poor live on $2 to $20 a day), and how they make their choices, choices that often reject tiny investments in prevention (chloriating their water, for example) with the result that they end of losing work and spending more on remediation after the fact. YES! I agree. They then proceed to answer, at best, 20% of the question.

The big take-away for me–I was absolutely delighted to see this smessage repeated throughout the book–was how a tiny bit of information can make a world of difference, both in the choice that an individual poor person makes, and in the eradication of corruption once detailed numbers are published about what *should* have reached each schoolhouse in any given district. In other words, and this is NOT the key point of the book, but rather my key point: without changing a single institution, without redirecting a single dollar, the simple implementation of an information transparency regime changes everything. Now THAT is a book I hope these two authors will write soon, and that book will probably join my 10% “Beyond 5 Stars.” [I read in 98 categories, just one of them fiction, access all my reviews and their Amazon pages by category at Phi Beta Iota, here are just two: Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design (206); Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class (253).

Continue reading “Review: Poor Economics – A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty”

2012/12/142012/12/14

Berto Jongman: New Chapter in Story of Dehumanization

Culture

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Ends on a very pro-human note.

New Chapter in the Story of Dehumanization

Ilkka Vuorikuru

Ilkka Vuorikuru
Ethical Technology, Posted: Dec 14, 2012

Last week I really thought that people like Francis Fukuyama and Jürgen Habermas have been right all along. Both have claimed in different writings that modern (and especially future) technology will cause our fragile human nature to deteriorate and in effect dehumanize us and our societies.[1]

. . . . . .

A person is an instance, self conscious instance, that can achieve happiness and understanding now and in the future. A neurone here or there is not something to worry about too much. In stead we should ready ourselves and our societies to leap beyond the body and of the person or the “I”.

The question is not what is happening to our brain (if anything) but how do we integrate it into the social media so that the end result is the same or better than we are now.

Read full article.

2012/12/142012/12/14

2012 Ishmael Jones (P) on The Human Factor

Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), IO Impotency

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REACTION TO: 2012 Robert Steele: The Human Factor & The Human Environment: Concepts & Doctrine? Implications for Human & Open Source Intelligence 2.0

Ishmael Jones (a pseudonym) is a very experienced non-official cover (NOC) officer who left the CIA and wrote an excellent book, The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture (Encounter Books, 2008). The lessons from his experience are available directly from him to DoD clients that wish to avoid CIA's many mistakes.

Hello Robert, thanks for your note and I comment as follows:

I certainly agree with Tom on bad management being the cause of poor intelligence collection. Bad management in the intelligence field thrives within bureaucracy, which is easy to create in the Washington, DC area. Today, more than 90% of CIA employees live and work entirely within the United States because bad management finds it convenient to do so. Employees learn skills which advance them within bureaucracy but which do not contribute to intelligence gathering. The lack of on-the ground focus on foreign lands leaves major intelligence gaps unfilled.

Best regards, Ishmael Jones

2012 Tom Briggs on The Human Factor