Public Intelligence Blog – Page 3075 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

2011/09/272011/10/01

Review: Public Parts – How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Information Society, Intelligence (Public)

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Jeff Jarvis

5.0 out of 5 stars Being Twittered, a Helpful Contribution,September 27, 2011

I was going to use the existing review as a guest review at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog (all point back to their Amazon pages), but on further investigation have found that this book is being Twittered, and the Executive Director of the Earth Intelligence Network thinks very highly of it (he read it, he does not do reviews, this is my way of sharing his views and my links as well as flagging the book for the global readers of Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog). So in part to give the author a break, in part to urge used of the Look Inside feature that Amazon enables and the publisher utilized, and in part to point to the below books, I give this book five stars and suggest that it deserves a bit more praise than it has received.

AA Mind the Gap — Vote and/or Comment on Review

Amazon sucks in some ways. The following two relevant non-fiction titles are “not allowed” by their rules against “self-promotion,” never mind that they are the only two books on their respective topics and highly relevant to the domain that this book addresses.

2010 INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability

2008 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

2011/09/272011/10/17

John Steiner: October 2011, Occupy Wall Street, Whatever Happened to the US Left?

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Officers Call, Policies, Threats

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“American Autumn” Will Depend on People, Not Parties”

Monday 26 September 2011
by: Ron Boyer, Truthout | Interview

EXTRACT:

A few years later, with the nation plunged into what appears to be a sequel to the Great Depression and another presidential campaign season taking shape, signs of mass populist resistance to the global dominance of the robber-baron class are widely in evidence, both here and abroad. In this exclusive Truthout interview, the October2011 Coalition co-founder and physician Margaret Flowers discusses the conditions that helped bring this emerging movement of citizen activists into being and outlines the key differences between October2011's mission and that of superficially similar emerging “movements” such as Van Jones' Rebuild the Dream.

Read full interview.

Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination

David Graeber
guardian, Sunday 25 September 2011

The young people protesting in Wall Street and beyond reject this vain economic order. They have come to reclaim the future.

• Police tactics attacked as officers pepper-spray women
• Occupy Wall Street: the protesters speak

Read full overview.

Whatever Happened to the American Left?

Michael Kazin

New York Times, 24 September 2011

SOMETIMES, attention should be paid to the absence of news. America’s economic miseries continue, with unemployment still high and home sales stagnant or dropping. The gap between the wealthiest Americans and their fellow citizens is wider than it has been since the 1920s.

Read full article.

2011/09/272011/09/27

Koko: American Patriot Del Spurlock Speaks to the NAACP in Oberlin, Ohio

07 Other Atrocities, Blog Wisdom, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics

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Koko Signs: A small sign of life within the comatose US democracy.

OBERLIN 2011

A Speech Given to the NAACP

at the Oberlin Inn

September 24, 2011

Delbert L. Spurlock, Jr.

Mr. Spurlock was introduced by Robert K. Jones (B.J.), Chief of Police, Retired Oberlin Police Department.

EXTRACT:

We live in a country that has mutated a new confederate virus, wiping out the rights fought for and won against terrible odds by the NAACP, and the unbelievably brave black plaintiffs of the South.

It is a virus that works to obliterate the memory of the contributions of the white southern judges of the old Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

It is a virus that has spread to Ohio through word of mouth in right-wing mega churches and by hypodermic injections of rigged electronic voting devices.

We live in a country that raises its young to be economic units incapable of escaping from a lifetime of paying off the company store.

The days ahead will be very difficult for our America and worse for its human citizens. The country we bequeath to our young people is a country without bearing, without antecedent, a country with a government most resembling the disfunctionality of the slavocracy, which all people of Oberlin should recognize.

Full Presentation Below the Line.

Continue reading “Koko: American Patriot Del Spurlock Speaks to the NAACP in Oberlin, Ohio”

2011/09/272011/09/27

John Robb: Parking Lot Gardens, Five Banks that Destroyed the Global Economy, Mafia Governance (Including USA), and Cyberwar Fact Check

Blog Wisdom

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Case study. Turning a parking lot into a garden.

Too big to fail. Five banks account for 96% of $250 trillion in derivatives.

Cyberwar fact check. “Nearly all SCADA systems are online.” and “747's are big flying Unix hosts.”

NGO leader looks at the rise of ‘mafia governance.'

See Also:

Paradigms of Failure

Legitimate Grievances (US Internal)

Legitimate Grievances (Anti-US Global)

2011/09/262011/09/28

Review: Lines of Fire – A Renegade Writes on Strategy, Intelligence, and Security

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, War & Face of Battle

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Ralph Peters

5.0 out of 5 stars Six Star Epilogue, the Capstone Work, September 26, 2011

I have been a fan of Ralph Peters for over fifteen years now, going back to the early 1990's when the US Marine Corps was trying to get the Secretary of Defense (then Dick Cheney) to focus on most likely vice worst case threats. Having been the senior civilian responsible for creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Center, and the Study Director for the flagship study, Planning and Programming Factors for Expeditionary Operations in the Third World, I recognized both his deep integrity and his broad intelligence, both so uncharacteristic of the near-venal to all-banal US secret intelligence community that I had served since 1976.

This is his capstone work. Below are a few of his most notable recent works, there are many others, and I also recommend his Owen Parry series on the Civil War. If you only get one book by Ralph Peters, this is the one to buy.

Endless War: Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization
Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the Twenty-First Century
Never Quit the Fight
Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?

2012 in my view is a turning point year for America, and I pray that it is the year that citizens with integrity kick politicians without integrity (all of them) out of office and get a clean sheet fresh start in recreating a government of, by, and for We the People instead of what we have now, what Matt Taibbi describes so well in Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, “a highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government.”

Continue reading “Review: Lines of Fire – A Renegade Writes on Strategy, Intelligence, and Security”

2011/09/26

Chuck Spinney: Obama’s Shame — & Threat to USA

02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War

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President Obama's craven performance at the UN has both humiliated the United States and made a mockery of what little remains of America's pretensions to the principles of freedom, democracy, fair play, and simple human decency. Like Colin Powell, he made the wrong turn at the “to be” or “to do” fork in the road; he put career and short-term ambition ahead of common sense and personal honor; and ironically, he made the same faustian bargain publicly on the same world stage for all to see. For a men of such great promise to stumble so miserably is not only a personal tragedy of Shakespearian proportions: their pusillanimity under pressure opens the door to unpredictable grand strategic* ramifications that menace the wellbeing of hundreds of millions of people at home and abroad.

Below is one thoughtful observer's exploration of some of these ramifications; there will be other assessments … and very few of them will be pretty.

At least LBJ, who tried to do some things, recognized when his time was over, and left gracefully. But in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac at the dawn of the 21st Century, that won't happen again, and Mr. Obama's ultimate disgrace will be to prove that the easy being was far more important than the hard doing when engineering the moral and material decline of a nation.

________
* The criteria underpinning a sensible grand strategy are explained here.

Chuck Spinney
Port Vendres, France

The Third Intifada Targets Israel-America

by Rami G. Khouri

Agence Global, 26 Sep 2011

[CS Note: I reformatted this insightful essay to highlight important points, but did not change any text or the order of presentation]

BOSTON — It remains to be seen what actually changes on the ground in the months ahead following the Palestinian initiative to ask the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state in the 1967 Israeli-occupied territories as a UN member or observer state. The move could be a substantive gain for the Palestinian people, a symbolic victory only, or a measurable setback if the United States and Israel translate their vindictive rhetoric into hard policies. While we wait for the impact of the UN move to become clearer, we should acknowledge nevertheless that this has been a historic week in several ways.

I.The most important new development that future historians will record is that this last week in September represented the moment when the Arab-Israeli conflict structurally transformed into the Arab-Israeli/American conflict, because of the profound and explicit manner in which the U.S. government has come down on the side of Israel. The United States historically has tried, without much success but with visible endeavor nevertheless, to express its support for Israel’s survival and security while also trying to mediate a resolution of the conflict that sees the birth of a Palestinian state in much of the 1967 occupied lands. That balancing act, unconvincing as it was, is formally dead for now — repeatedly shot in the heart by a firing squad of American politicians who have unleashed volleys of shotguns at the weak and doomed phenomenon that was once called “American mediation”.

Graphic: Occupy Together – Citizen Oilspots Begin…

Citizen-Centered

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