Laurel Adams February 6th 2011
Center for Public Integrity
EXTRACT: The GAO singled out the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as agencies with risky contractor oversight. The GAO also said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services failed to review contractor rates and identified $90 million in questionable costs.
Phi Beta Iota: Government–and society–are comprehensive design problems–advanced intelligence (decision-support). The US Government is archaic in its design, and lacks integrity (holistic accurate feed-back loops) at all levels across all mission areas. It is a useful challenge for 2012 and beyond.
Maj. Nidal Hasan, accused in the murders of 13 people and the attempted murders of 32 others in the shooting spree at Fort Hood, Tex., in November 2009, appears to be the toughest kind of terrorist to spot: a lone wolf who plots without the overt support of domestic cells or foreign sponsors.
Still, the attack did not come as a complete surprise to some in the Army and the FBI, and that makes this incident all the more tragic. Our Senate committee's 14-month investigation of the Fort Hood killings has concluded that the Department of Defense and the FBI “collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan's radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it.”
The deaths at Fort Hood could and should have been prevented. The Defense Department's failure to acknowledge the threat of violent Islamist extremism within its ranks, coupled with organizational and communication flaws in the FBI's counterterrorism operations, contributed to the tragedy.
Computer hackers have repeatedly breached the systems of the company that runs the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York but did not penetrate the part of the system that handles trades, according to several law enforcement officials.
* You might have to advocate policies that would be hard on yourself, your constituents or your supporters — even temporarily. You might become unpopular. You might get assassinated or your plane might develop unexplained engine trouble and crash. You might even not get re-elected!
* You would actually have to face reality, get the facts, learn about complicated stuff like how complex systems work. (It's really unfortunate, but most of our thorny problems are all tangled up with complex systems that are tangled up with other problems, too. Yuck!!)
* You would have to listen to and work with people who see things differently from you. After all, they may know something that's important to take into consideration. That could be really unpleasant and take you far afield from your party line, out in the political boonies where the real danger lies.
* You just wouldn't get the same adrenaline rush you get when you stick with oversimplifications, grandstanding, being loved by your supporters, and launching juicy attacks on your enemies. There just aren't as many ego-strokes or perks available for working with others to deeply understand things and come up with what makes sense for the long haul.
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is not worth a doctorate. What is worth a doctorate is the ability to meld intelligence and policy-making into a coherent ethical whole. Reflexive practice and comprehensive design are also worth PhDs, both are integrated in principle into the PhD central to the new holistic public policy PhD. Here is one vision for greating a new reflexive practice that allows political and civil service professionals to be both ethical and effective.
One of central causes of the financial meltdown was the lack of transparency in the complex derivatives, like bundled mortgages and credit default swaps. Advocates of global warming would have us to believe that they can construct a transparent carbon emissions trading scheme that will provide market incentives to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.
At the center of this trading scheme is the idea of a carbon credit, which is a generic term for any tradable certificate or permit representing the right to emit one ton of carbon or carbon dioxide equivalent. Think of a carbon credit as property in a free market economy — Ayn Rand, meet Global Warming.
Egypt is throbbing with resistance. Cairo is cloven between the forces of revolution and those of counterrevolution. Hundreds of thousands of people – on Tuesday, February 1, well over a million – have been streaming each day into Tahrir Square, the largest plaza in the Arab world, located in the heart of downtown Cairo. Army tanks line the streets, helicopters and F16s buzz overhead, and pro-Mubarak demonstrators, many of them hired thugs, bloodied thousands of protesters yesterday in Tahrir and elsewhere. Yet the people keep pushing for Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak's unconditional ouster, and not just in Cairo. Alexandria has been convulsed, while Suez, a small city abutting the Suez Canal, has been riven with some of the fiercest street battles between the police and protesters, while workers there have gone on strike, demanding that Mubarak step down from his palace in Heliopolis.
Phi Beta Iota: The US appears naive and uninformed at this time. This would have a much better outcome if there were a strategic game plan for pulling US forces out of the region, cutting all US military assistance to the region, and pushing Israel out of the US policy process while redirecting 50% of existing US assistance toward waging peace, the other 50% toward deficit reduction. The sooner the US can achieve intelligence with integrity, the better for all.
Economic Recovery on Edge
