Steven Aftergood: DSB Concludes Violent Behavior Cannot be Reliably Predicted – Does Not Address Larger Issue of Extreme Cognitive Dissonance Inspiring Suicides and Random Violence

Cultural Intelligence
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Steven Aftergood

VIOLENT BEHAVIOR CANNOT BE RELIABLY PREDICTED, PANEL SAYS

The outbreak of violence by individuals who seek to harm other persons or institutions cannot be reliably predicted today, the Defense Science Board said in a new report to the Secretary of Defense.  Instead, efforts to counter violence should focus on prevention and mitigation of the threat.

The new DSB study on “Predicting Violent Behavior” was initiated in response to the 2009 Fort Hood shooting in which thirteen people were killed and dozens wounded allegedly by Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who had not previously been identified as a threat.

“The state of the art in physiological and neurological sciences today does not provide useful capability for predicting targeted violence,” the DSB report said.

“While there are promising indicators that might predict aberrant behavior, severe personality disorders, addiction, and other anti-social behaviors, the current state of the science is such that the false positives and false negatives are very high. In addition, developing a practical means to observe any useful indicators may present a significant challenge.”

In the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, the Defense Department attempted to develop lists of problematic behaviors that might signal a propensity to violence.  One such list was the behaviors included in the adjudicative guidelines for granting (or denying) security clearances.

But the use of that list was not justified, the DSB said.  “The Task Force found little to no relationship between the adjudicative guidelines and targeted violence.”

Moreover, “the Task Force also found that indicator lists are most effective in the hands of trained professionals and are not an effective substitute for a more nuanced, comprehensive set of factors developed by threat-management practitioners. If not handled properly and by trained personnel, lists can lead to high false-positives with accompanying stigma, lack of trust, and reluctance to report. Lists also tend to be static and unless continually revisited the list of indicators becomes less likely to identify adaptive perpetrators who will purposefully avoid elements of listed behavior to avoid interdiction.”

Overall, the DSB Panel advised, “prevention as opposed to prediction should be the Department's goal.  Good options exist in the near-term for mitigating violence by intervening in the progression from violent ideation to violent behavior.”

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Greg Palast: Nine Ways the GOP Will Steal the 2012 Elections

Communities of Practice, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Knowledge
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Greg Palast

Greg Palast on How the GOP Is Planning to Steal the 2012 Election

EXTRACT:

In all, 5,901,814 legitimate votes and voters were tossed out of the count in 2008. In '12 it will be worse. Way worse.

THE BOOK:  Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps

The ‘9 Easy Steps'

1 Purging is the use by partisan election officials of computer databases that identify voter characteristics (race, ethnicity, residence location, etc) to remove from registration rolls names of persons likely to be sympathetic to the “wrong” political party. Plausible pretexts for the removals are sometimes offered, but often not. Purging is what Katherine Harris did to tens of thousands of Florida voters in 2000, claiming the mostly black voters were felons when they were not.

Amazon Page

2 Caging is the mailing of do-not-forward, first-class letters to selected groups and using letters returned as ‘evidence' that voters' listed addresses are fraudulent. Partisan election officials can then strike the voters' names from registration rolls and/or throw out their mail-in ballots. This can happen en masse to military people serving overseas and voting absentee from their home addresses. Likewise to students away at school, and even to voters whose addresses on registration rolls contain fatal typos made, accidentally of course, by election data entry workers.

3 Spoiling is accomplished in a variety of ways. A famous one is to put punched-card voting setups in districts tending to the “wrong” party. Then disqualify all votes where the voter did not manage to punch the hole all the way through, as in the infamous “hanging chads” in Florida in 2000.

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SmartNation: 3D Printing May Put Global Supply Chains Out of Business

SmartPlanet
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3D printing may put global supply chains out of business: report

By Joe McKendrick | October 9, 2012, 7:06 PM PDT

Will 3D printing make global supply chains unnecessary? That’s a real possibility, states a recent report from Transport Intelligence.

3D printing (or “additive manufacturing,” as it’s called in industrial circles) takes offshore manufacturing and brings it back close to the consumer. It has enormous potential to shift the trade balance. Goods will be cheaper to reproduce within the domestic market, versus manufacturing and then shipping them from a distant low-wage country.

The report, authored by John Manners-Bell of Transport Intelligence and Ken Lyon of Virtual-Partners Ltd., points to the growing role of automation in production resulting from 3D printing:

Read full article with excellent summary of the report.

NIGHTWATCH: Everyone Has Drones Now — And Drone Counter-Measures

Drones & UAVs
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Israel-Drone: Update. Forty-eight hours into the investigation of an unmanned aircraft flying into Israeli airspace there is no confirmation who flew the drone.

Saturday morning, Israeli radar tracked the drone flying toward the coast from the Mediterranean, then over the Gaza strip and into Israel. Twenty minutes after it crossed into southern Israel, scrambled fighter jets from the Israeli Air Force shot it down.

Comment: Israelis judge that Lebanese Hezbollah operated the drone with Iranian technical assistance. This remains a hypothesis.

What is important for Readers to note is that the US has no monopoly on drones and that every enemy of the US has observed US drone operations in the past decade. In any future war, US drones will not be alone in the airspace and they will be vulnerable to countermeasures that US enemies have had more than ten years to develop.

If Hezbollah can fly drones, imagine what China can do. As for the Israeli success in shooting down a drone, compare the cost of a drone loss to that of the Israeli missile that shot it down and the cost of just scrambling a pair of Israeli fighters to shoot it down.

The point is that US and Allied forces will never again have total control of the airspace as they have had in Afghanistan and Iraq. Everybody has drones and drone counter-measures now.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

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Search: • most but not all of the information needed for strategic reflections comes from open source intelligence.

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This also applies at the operational, tactical, and technical levels; generally the 80-20 rules applies–80% open, 20% closed.  It merits comment that no one is actually producing Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) as a holistic persistent element of decision-making, nor is most secret “intelligence” actually intelligence –it is just classified information.

To qualify as OSINT one must integrate the proven process of intelligence with all sources in all mediums and all languages across all topics of concern to both Whole of Government and M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making.

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This will not happen until the public gets serious about demanding the eradication of the ten threats to humanity through the  harmonizing what can be known and shared across the twelve policy domains, not only to stabilize and reconstruct the USA, but to render–with all due humility–assistance to Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela and Wild Cards so that they avoid our mistakes and embrace both Whole Systems thinking and True Cost Economics.

2008 Open Source Intelligence (Strategic)

Graphic: OSINT Relevance to High-Level Threats to Humanity [Graphic at Top Left]

[Graphic at Bottom Right]  Graphic: OSINT Support to Four Levels of Analysis

This entire website, which is also the front end for www.oss.net and www.earth-intelligence.org, is about intelligence with integrity at all four levels of policy, acquisition, and operations, across all mission areas.

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Mini-Me: One Million Strike in Indonesia – For Labor, Not Religion

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence
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Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Indonesia: One million on strike

Ted Sprague

Militan Indonesia, Tuesday, 09 October 2012

Amazing! There is no other word that can describe the situation on October 3. Workers all over Indonesia went on strike and took to the streets. This first national general strike in half a century truly raises expectations and hopes that it will be a turning point for the Indonesian labour movement.

More than 1 million workers struck in more than 20 districts and 80 industrial zones. Ports and industrial zones were blocked. Workers conducted factory “sweepings” to rally other workers to strike as well. (“Sweeping” is a recent militant tactic often used by Indonesian workers, whereby they go from factory to factory to rally other workers to strike, often forcing the owners to open the factory gates and stop productions).Where owners prevented their workers from joining the strike by closing the factory gates, masses of workers from outside took down those gates to liberate their brothers and sisters. The following short reports give a picture of the militancy of the workers and the dimension of this general strike.

Read full article reporting region by region.

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Penguin: Military Suicides in 2012 – 1 a Day Active, 18 a Day Veterans

Economics/True Cost
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Who, Me?

Extreme Cognitive Dissonance or ECD?

Active Force

The Invisible Wounds of War: Number of Soldiers Committing Suicide Reaches Record High

U.S. military facing ‘epidemic' of suicides

U.S. military averaging a suicide a day in 2012

U.S. Army suicides reached record monthly high in July

U.S. Military Suicides in 2012: 155 Days, 154 Dead

Veterans

18 Veteran a Day Commit Suicide,This is a National Tragedy

The National Tragedy of Military and Veterans Suicides (Update)

Anthony Swofford on the Epidemic of Military Suicides

U.S. must address suicides by military veterans

18 veterans commit suicide each day

See Also:

Military suicides: Defense officials spending $10 million to learn if fish oil can help

Marcus Aurelius: As Military Suicides Rise, DoD Focuses on Private Weapons