Allen Roland: The Moon is Down in Afghanistan – Agony, Cognitive Dissonance, & Here in the USA 18 Veteran Suicides, Day After Day After Day…

Corruption, Ethics, Government, Hacking, IO Deeds of War, Military
0Shares
Click on Image to Enlarge

The Moon is Down in Afghanistan, Flies Have Conquered Flypaper

The continuation of attacks on US soldiers by uniformed Afghan soldiers and policemen is an expression of popular hatred for the occupation regime and military invasion forces which brings to mind John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Moon Is Down. Steinbeck fully captures the inner agony, shame and moral guilt of the German occupying forces in Norway whereas the flies eventually conquer the flypaper ~ as they most assuredly will in Afghanistan

Click on Image to Enlarge

EXTRACT

The flies are beginning to conquer the flypaper in Afghanistan , as they did in Vietnam and Martin makes the same analogy ~ “There is a stench of decomposition over the whole US-NATO enterprise in Afghanistan. US troops are being drawn down, US equipment removed, US subsidies cut back, and the US collaborators in the Karzai regime are packing their bags—usually stuffed with cash—and checking their passports. Kabul today increasingly recalls Saigon in the final months and weeks before the collapse of the US-backed puppet regime of South Vietnam.”

Read full post with photos and video.

Robert David STEELE Vivas

ROBERT STEELE:  I personally communicated to Jim Clapper, then Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, the importance of understanding “cognitive dissonance” within the minds and souls of our dedicated military and civilian personnel.  There is a great deal more to the craft of intelligence than going through the motions pumping money and being complacent about policy, acquisition, and operations decisions that are at best insane and at worst criminally treasonous.  Now that I have an SSBI completed by OPM on 15 March 2012  I have applied for multiple positions at the 13-15 level and I am actively seeking righteous employment in the HUMINT/CI arena.  It's time we got serious about bringing US Intelligence into the 21st Century.  General Mike Flynn will fail — I have seen the plans — in two years when he moves on there will be a legacy of paper and not much else.  DHS and SOCOM are off the rails (based on open sources–we can only imagine what a full audit would reveal).  We appear to have the makings of a very expensive global to local inter-agency cluster fuss such as I have not seen since my tour in Panama.  Have brain (and integrity), will travel.

PS  Please do not hold it against me that retired foreign intelligence chiefs like what I do.  I am no longer in touch with them and I  believe their good opinion should be considered a feature not a flaw, assuming my views on the urgency of M4IS2 are eventually accepted as the foundation for a vastly more effective US IC.

Steele book profile 2012 Low Footprint

CV Robert David Steele 17 August 2012

Graphic: Public Governance

Analysis, Balance, Budgets & Funding, Capabilities-Force Structure, Citizen-Centered, Earth Orientation, Graphics, Innovation, Leadership-Integrity, Multinational Plus, Policies-Harmonization, Political, Processing, Reform, Resilience, Strategy-Holistic Coherence, Threats, Tribes, True Cost, United Nations
0Shares
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Source: 2013 Public Governance in the 21st Century: New Rules, Hybrid Forms, One Constant – The Public

NIGHTWATCH: Syria Update

Government, IO Deeds of War, Media
0Shares

Syria: The Syrian army recaptured three neighborhoods in the center of Aleppo while clashes continued in other parts of the city, residents told the press on 23 August.

An interview in The Independent is worth reading for a Syrian government perspective. Robert Fisk reported on an interview with a captured member of the Free Syrian Army, after a successful Syrian Army re-capture of a neighborhood in Aleppo. The youth told his captors and Fisk that he did not realize how beautiful “Palestine” was. This young man and his fellow fighters were not Syrian and though they were fighting in Palestine against the Israelis.

Comment: Fisk was in Aleppo to take the interview. He was escorted by an English-speaking Syrian Army major. His description of what he saw is neutral. Reports about the disorientation of foreign fighters have surfaced previously in Syria, as they did in Iraq during the height of the civil war. Nothing is quite as it is reported.

Politics. Former Syrian National Council member Randa Kassis said President Bashar al-Asad will only be toppled when he loses the support of the minority Alawites. Kassis, a critic of the SNC who maintains the group is ignoring the increasing influence of Islamist extremists, said, “Without the defection of the Alawites, we won't be able to do anything and we will go straight into civil war.

Comment: NightWatch agrees with Kassis' judgment, with one caution. The resignation of Asad appears increasingly likely, but does not signify the end of the Alawite regime. Asad appears weary of his duties, especially since his brother was maimed by a bombing in Damascus. He never had much enthusiasm for the presidency, but has done his duty to his sect and tribe.

He is the public face of the Alawite political and military elite and its Sunni financiers and supporters. Nevertheless, he is expendable.

Syria-Iraq: Reports that a Syrian jet penetrated Iraqi airspace are untrue, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's media adviser said on 23 August.

Comment: Fixed wing combat aircraft always violate national borders when attacking targets near the border. It is a function of the physics of jet-powered flight. The story behind the story is that Iraq did not protest or respond in any obvious fashion, which implies tacit consent. That explains the denial. There is no need to explain an event that officially did not happen.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH: Syria Update”

Michel Bauwens: Thomas Bjelkeman’s response to the arguments against open source innovation

Innovation
0Shares
Michel Bauwens

A response to the arguments against open source innovation

Excerpted from Thomas Bjelkeman:

(the arguments he’s responding to are in blockquotes)

‘Open-source doesn’t offer constant innovation, lowered costs and collaboration?

“The biggest open-source projects of them all is the internet itself. (The internet is without doubt also the most complex interconnected “machine” humans have ever created.) It runs on open standards and protocols and is constantly developed. HTML is the code which is used to markup web pages such that they get structure and layout [2]. The HTML standard is a huge collaborative project. No single organisation owns the HTML standard and it is a constant effort to improve it. It is not always clear what is the best way forward and often something good happens which wasn’t “according to plan”, like HTML5. HTML and its use is a highly collaborative environment, all the code is open (for any web page). You can “View->Source” and see how a particular web page has been assembled. This very open way of working has been a critical part of making the web an enormous success. I think that this is innovative and collaborative…

The web propelled the internet into popularity and has made it possible to get access to all the glory (and gore) of the internet, for as low as US$15/month or free at your local library or school. I think there is overwhelming evidence to support the statement that open-source is offering constant innovation, lowering costs and creates collaboration.

Continue reading “Michel Bauwens: Thomas Bjelkeman's response to the arguments against open source innovation”

SmartPlanet: Chronicling Latin America’s deforestation, leaf by leaf

SmartPlanet
0Shares

Chronicling Latin America’s deforestation, leaf by leaf

By | August 24, 2012, 3:00 AM PDT

BUENOS AIRES–There may be nothing more depressing than watching a deforestation map in real time, knowing that each time a green pixel turns red, the corresponding square of earth has been denuded of trees.

That must make the folks at Terra-i some of the biggest sadists (or masochists) in the world, as they programmed a system that lets you do just that.

Launched at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in June, the Terra-i system uses NASA satellite data to create image frames that, when sequenced together in video, show real-time deforestation in Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina. Developed over more than three years, Terra-i is run out of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) near Cali, in southwest Colombia, with help from the HEIG-VD in Switzerland, and the Nature Conservancy, which funds it.

Read full article with mulitple overhead screen shots.