Phi Beta Iota: This is of passing interest as an overview of what people are thinking about at the shallowest possible level in relation to the Wall Street/Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC).
STRIKE ONE: The document still does not understand that overt Human Intelligence (HUMINT) is 90% of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), or that OSINT is a discipline in its own right as well as an interactive element of any properly-managed classified discipline (none are).
STRIKE TWO: The document fails to represent the near-total failure of the US Intelligence Community to meet the needs of all consumers below the level of President, and does not appear to recognize the sharp negative assessments of General Tony Tiny (4% “at best”) or General Mike Flynn (“irrelevant”).
STRIKE THREE: The document fails to present Congress with the deeply documented alternatives to unilateral top-down very expensive technical-collection driven secret intelligence, and it especially fails to outline the immediate possibilities of the Open Source Agency (OSA) as called for in the 9-11 Commission Report on pages 23 and 423 (but under diplomatic auspices), or the integrated elements of that agency, the Strategy Center advocated by General Tony Zinni and the Multinational Decision Support Centre proposed by comprehensive architect Robert Steele.
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Phi Beta Iota: This is worth a look because it is backed by a co-founder of Facebook who has also been an advisor to President Barack Obama on social networking; because it is a variant rip-off of WISER Earth: The Social Network for Sustainability; and because it represents the beginning of the World Brain & Global Game in which all individuals are connected to all information in all languages all the time. It lacks a strategic analytic model and a “true cost” and policy-budget engagement tool, but it is a milestone in some ways, largely because of WHO is behind it. When combined with the Google purchase of GroupOn for six billion dollars (which Google will screw up big-time, but that gives Eric Lefkofsky, a Chicago-based social networking entrepreneur, more money to experiment with–that is a good thing. This is BIG PICTURE stuff that will scale rapidly.
In my obligatory post about Wikileaks as the story du jour, I point to the great set of questions Dan Gillmor has posted in his column at Salon. These are especially lucid. I like especially Dan’s point about the character of the communications that were leaked, that many of the messages are gossip. Journalists are dutifully reporting “facts” gleaned from the leaked material without necessarily digging deeper, verifying and analyzing. Of course, they don’t have time – the information environment moves too quickly, he who hesitates is lost, accuracy be damned.
Then again, journalism is so often about facts, not truth. Facts are always suspect, personal interpretations are often incorrect, memories are often wildly inaccurate. History is, no doubt, filled with wrong facts and bad interpretations that, regardless, are accepted as somehow “true.”
The high-minded interpretation of this and other leaks, that people need to know what is being said and done by their representatives in government, especially in a “democratic society,” is worth examining. We’re not really a democracy; government by rule or consensus of a majority of the people doesn’t scale, and it would be difficult for the average citizen to commit the time required to be conversant in depth with all the issues that a complex government must consider.
Do we benefit by sharing more facts with more people? (Dan notes that 3 million or so in government have the clearance to read most of the documents leaked – this seems like a lot of people to be keeping secrets… is the “secret” designation really all that meaningful, in this case?) But to my question – I think there’s a benefit in knowing more about government operations, but I’m less clear that this sort of leak increases knowledge vs. noise.
I’m certain about one thing: we shouldn’t assume that the leaked documents alone reveal secrets that are accurate and true. They’re just more pieces of a very complex puzzle.
NIGHTWATCH Comments on two Wikileak reports in the news: The Guardian and The New York Times today highlighted one leaked report that North Korea sold Iran 19 BM-25 nuclear-capable ballistic missiles and another that alleged that Chinese officials support Korean unification and expect North Korea to collapse. Both deserve comment.The North Korean BM-25 missile is based on the Soviet SS-N-6 submarine launched ballistic missile which North Korea obtained from the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago. The SS-N-6 is one of the most reliable nuclear delivery systems ever developed.
North Korean engineers converted it into a truck launched vice submarine launched system, which was fielded in North Korea.more than five years ago. From North Korea, this missile can reach Guam.
Iran bought a battalion of these missile about five years ago according to FAS — a photo of the missile can be found on the Internet. From Iran, the missile can reach Moscow and Eastern Europe.
Experts say that from its inception this missile was designed as a nuclear warhead carrier. Iran's possession of this missile is one of the more salient pieces of indirect evidence that support those who argue that Iran intends to develop nuclear weapons. Any other warhead on this missile underutilizes its capabilities.
The point of this comment is that the US diplomat reporting officer mentioned in the report seemed unaware that this information has been in open sources since at least 2006. Moreover, the writers for The Guardian and The New York Times failed to do due diligence searches on the BM-25 sale to Iran.
More knowledgeable observers have known for years that Iran has a reliable nuclear warhead delivery system in these missiles. That information is always important, but it is not new and no longer sensational. Five years ago it was blockbuster news.
As for the report on China supporting Korean reunification, The Guardian's analyst overreached, at least based on the portions of the report that he quoted and missed much of the significance of the material he had at hand.
The portions of the telegram that he quoted did not support the headline that China supports Korean unification. It supported the proposition that China would not stand in the way of reunification if the US took the lead and made it happen.
The Guardian writer was not alone in interpreting Chinese ambiguous language as a green light because apparently US and South Korean officials began to make plans on reunification, according to accounts by other repositories of the leaked reports.
The story behind the story is that China only makes statements of this kind when it is seriously concerned about the survival of the Kim regime and wants to set in place plans for avoiding responsibility for the North Koreans during a political and economic implosion.
The Chinese made even more explicit suggestions during the severe famine of 1995 and 1996 when the North Korean economy devolved into a barter system that almost imploded. After the food crisis stabilized with UN and South Korean help, China denied it ever made suggestions about reunification.
The Chinese laid out a trap. If the public distribution system for food and daily necessities ceases to function, North Korea would become the world's largest ever refugee camp, with between 20 and 23 million people requiring food, public health provisions and medical care every day.
No one is smart enough to know how to take care of a dependent population that large. Plus the North's infrastructure is so decrepit that it has discouraged South Korea from investing in it or pursuing reunification with much vigor. That means that the roads and bridges in North Korea cannot support sustained aid convoys for long and would have to be rebuilt as part of the humanitarian aid problem. The same is true of the telecommunications system and the railroads.
The Chinese want no part of that burden or cost and would be pleased for the US and its allies to shoulder them. Consider, how do you disarm a hungry million-man army that has been raised from infancy to be hostile to Americans? The Chinese do not know the answer and would prefer to see Americans and Koreans die trying to find out, rather than Chinese soldiers.
Finally, the statements by the Chinese diplomats are not consistent with Chinese actions, aid and investments to prop up the Kim regime. That means the statements probably were made in the context of a hypothetical and imminent regime collapse, as in the mid-1990s. Today's news treatment made it seem as if China supports reunification now, which is not accurate.
The lesson for new analysts is that a statement by a foreign official or diplomat, as reported in a diplomatic telegram, always carries spin. If it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true, even if it is partly true. Krauthammer said on 29 November that state department telegrams report our diplomats lying to their diplomats lying to our diplomats. That characterization is a bit harsh, but it is a useful starting point for analysis. Evaluation of diplomatic traffic requires subtlety and skill and lots of critical questioning. The meaning of the language is never self-evident.
The substantive information disclosed to date is somewhat embarrassing, but not all that newsworthy. One element of damage from the leaks not mentioned in mainstream reporting is the establishment of feedback links to the security establishments of the foreign countries.
Foreign security establishments can now develop a very good understading of what the US thinks about key issues; why it thinks that way; whether it is accurate or misguided in their view; whether US diplomats put personal spin on their reports; and whether they perceive accurately, understand the significance of what they are told and report is in verbatim and in spirit, as the host country judges such traits. With that knowledge, they can guide their own diplomats and officials more confidently.
Diplomacy and deception both require a feedback link so that the diplomat or the deceiver can fine tune the negotiations or the deception operation. In this respect, the leaks set up US ambassadors and senior officials to be manipulated because the other side knows the “real” US views on hundred of issues in hundreds of countries. That explains why national leaders can minimize and excuse the more sensational disclosures because all received an intelligence bonanza that should enhance their future engagements with US diplomats and officials.
Revolutionary–a Milestone in Human Applied Thought
November 30, 2010
I have looked over the galley that is free online (as are all my books) and consider this to be a milestone in human applied thought. I have bought it here at Amazon, confident this is going to be one of the few books that I do not donate to George Mason University, which took over my entire library when I joined the United Nations in March 2010.
Medard Gabel is modest–the blurbs do not do justice to him or his work or the incredibly talented and imaginative individuals (not just youth, but mid-career professionals) that he attracts to this calling.
I have participated in two of his design labs and recommend them to one an all. Everyone enters with their own issue area (urban planning, energy, whatever) and halfway through they experience the “aha” moment (epiphany for Republicans)–everything is connected and NOTHING can be planned, programmed, budgeted, or executed without integrating everything.
As Russell Ackoff likes to say, what is good for one part of the system might be very bad for all the other parts. Comprehensive architecture and prime design–all threats, all policies, all demographics–are the future.
6 Star and Beyond–the Essence of Fuller, the Future of Humanity
November 28, 2010
I did not truly begin to understand the breadth and depth of Buckminster Fuller's thinking until I read this book as it deserves to be read, with full attention and detailed notes. This is one of those books that merits–and received from me, a Work Table of core concepts, definitions, obstacles, and solutions, posted online at Work Table [link live at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog].
Although I heard Fuller speak personally at Muhlenberg College and distinctly remember him saying that a housing foundation could support the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner, it was not until this book that I understood in detail exactly what he meant: that we are wasting 90% of what we put into buildings. I have previously read and reviewed Critical Path as well as Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and it is my great privilege to know Medard Gabel, co-creator of the analog World Brain and sole creator of the new digital EarthGame (in concept pending funding).
CORE POINT: True wealth is cosmic energy and the creation of means to deliver to humanity unlimited free energy. Among many other things this creates the possibility of applying energy to create self-contained homes that are lightweight, fully self-contained in water and sewage, and totally green.
CORE CONCEPT: Capitalism and democracy have been perverted by money–those who manage money manage those who manage politics, and they both concentrate on optimizing the false God of money, an abstract concept hardly worth its paper representation, while ignoring–even subverting–the possibility of achieving infinite cosmic wealth on behalf of all of humanity.
CORE CONCEPT: Predatory capitalism on the one hand, and controlled socialism on the other, are both extremes and both fail to meet the needs as well as the possibilities of humanity. Fullerism is at root a non-zero equation.
PERSONAL POINT: This book answers the question I could not answer when a senior executive asked me “what do you do?” Now I know. I am a Comprehensive Global Architect whose objective is Prime Design: From Waste to Wealth (the title of my next book, inspired by this core reading from Buckminster Fuller). All my prior works, including my most recent, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty, have been a preamble to what I now recognize is my life's work…I will try to earn another 25 years (I am 58, 58 + 25 is 83 — my family history suggests I will make it.). I am still looking for a country or global organization that wants to profit from doing this.
A few definitions up front:
QUOTE (142): WEALTH [is] the measurable degree of forwardly organized environmental control, in terms of quickly convertible energy, capacities and performance ratioed system capabilities, per capita, per diem.
Advertising destroyed public trust by pre-empting “industrial design” as code for airbrushing superficial changes to move products to market, rather than seeking integral improvements that could be shared with the consumer.
Design-improved livingry increases wealth.
Synergy is the delta between the sum of the parts and their anticipatable outcomes, and the actual outcome not anticipated.
CORE CONCEPTS
Architects deal with the externalities of man.
“At rest” science and understanding (Newton's paradigm) have been replaced by “constant change” (Einstein's paradigm).
Bad housing breeds bad humanity and bad science–the time/energy costs and the materials costs are too high, housing is the socio-economic “runt” of all the professions.
Challenge is IRREDUCIBLE.
Design is innovative re-assembly that adds value.
Design-preventable includes illumination and prevention of corrupt exploitation of materials for inefficient or unjustifiable applications.
Energy mass, energy radiation, energy gravitation (E3) times Intellect (E3I)
Good design would reduce the per capita consumption of building materials from nine tons per person to one ton per person [this is in the developed world–these reductions would allow the extension of the lower tonnage home designs to nine times more people and more–with mass consumption come mass efficiencies.]
Industry is *supposed to be* the organization and application of collective knowledge and action that produces synergy (added value) over the sum of the parts in isolation.
Individual freedom is ESSENTIAL to the expansion of diversity needed to enable collectives to see the whole.
Total Thinking is the intelligent acquisition, ingestion, processing, and exploitation of all relevant information in order to produce efficiencies and effects beneficial to the mission objective.
Wealth is intellect plus energy combined to create capacity [with more free energy making more refined capacity possible].
Worldwide commonwealth credit is both needed and achievable to provide mass-produced sustainable housing for all. That in turn frees up the five billion poor to create “infinite wealth” by combining their intellect with infinite free energy to advance civilization.
OBSTACLES to advancing humanity include:
Advertising in place of genuine progress [should not be a tax-deductible expense in my own view]
“Credit” fueled the perpetuation and expansion of rotten housing at great cost.
Housing is the works of design, the worst of materials, and the worst of applied engineering
Housing as the sucking chest wound in economics [mortgages should not be tax-deductible, this both encourages waste of materials on housing, but also enables the growth of financial fraud]
Managers lack the over-all philosophical discernment to be effective at seeing the whole and building to the whole.
Politics is VERY wasteful, perpetuating inefficient industries.
Specializations are attracting the most gifted, and this leaves the less gifted dealing with integration if they think about it at all. [I always thought this was what business and public administration programs were supposed to do, but having graduated from such a program realize they do not.]
A HANDFUL OF QUOTES
p. 25 “My envisioned transcendental world design plan would be inherently nonpolitical, because it would be utterly independent of any need for authority beyond that to-self-by-self for initiation of its study and development.”
p. 95 In relation to the waste of heavy materials in housing, “…that in this war crisis it is technically treason to allow ourselves to be short sixty-five thousand freight cars weighing fifty tons of steel each, which shortage is equivalent to the number of cars required exclusively to transport the solid foundation and flooring materials unscientifically employed as frozen compression elements to structurally support the tiny weights of one-tenth-of-a-ton load of men who comprise the negligible working loads of housing, or to support machinery from below that could better be suspended, etc.”
p. 246 “The efficiency of the industrial equation is directly proportional to the numbers consuming.” [In other words, capitalism focused on the needs of the one billion rich is long overdue for a redirection of focus to the needs of the five billion poor.]
p.247 “Serve one hundred per cent will involve a world design revolution, not just design of end-products, but of the comprehensive industrial network equations including world-around-livingry-service systems, at regenerative occupancy rentals, mutually installed in anticipatory facilitation of total world enjoyment of individually respected total man.”
p. 249 “Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet, who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his coordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.”
SOLUTIONS
Energy investments will define the future.
Need a world housing industry. We do NOT need water, sewer, and electrical infrastructure. Distributed housing and small cities connected by high-speed rail should be the norm.
Harvesting of scrap is the next needed Manhattan Project/Marshall Plan.
Revolutionary–a Milestone in Human Applied Thought
