Public Intelligence Blog – Page 3478 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Mission

royaldutchshellplc.com is an entirely non-commercial website

Our objectives are simple. We want Royal Dutch Shell executives to act at all times in accordance with Shell General Business Principles which include the claimed core principles of honesty, integrity, openness and respect for people in all of Shell’s dealings.

This is surely not an unreasonable ambition given that the principles were devised by Shell, are promoted by Shell and are supposedly current and binding on all Shell operations everywhere. In other words, we are only asking Shell executives to do what they already claim to be doing.

The plain fact is that if Shell executives had abided with the SGBP, scandals such as the reserves fraud involving blatant deceit and cover-up, the preventable Brent Bravo deaths which flowed from the Shell “Touch F*** All” safety culture on North Sea Platforms, and the more recent PR humiliations arising from outrageous examples of greenwash advertising, could not have occurred.

We do not believe that it is morally acceptable that Shell executives are indemnified so that even if they cheat, deceive and cover-up serious misdeeds, treating shareholders and the public as gullible fools, they are still able to walk away as winners. In the case of Sir Philip Watts, with a severance package/pension pot reportedly worth $18.5 million USD. We think that this is disgraceful situation at odds with all ethical norms including the SGBP and will continue to say so on this website.

The SGBP is being been used as a PR tool to promote undeserved confidence in the scruples and honesty of Shell senior management. For example, the SGBP featured in the Form 20F Declarations filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission thereby generating confidence in the proven reserves volumes which had been inflated i.e. were false.

While Shell execs continue to make pledges of ethical trading which they flout, we will continue our humble efforts to expose their hypocrisy and we welcome the support of others who like us are not prepared to put up with such deception.

Continue reading “Royal Dutch Shell Oil ‘Watchdog' Website”

2010/10/252010/10/25

Journal: Tea Party “Booboisie”

Civil Society, Government

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editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends

The Booboisie creates a fire from the ashes of the Bush Administration, proving once again the timeless dictum of H.L. Mencken: ‘No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American voter.'

Tea Party Robber Barons

Posted on Oct 24, 2010

By Stanley Kutler

We are witnessing, we are told, a groundswell of anger from a spontaneous, grass-roots movement against the president, Congress, Democrats, socialists (are commies extinct?), the debt, higher taxes, the “takeover” of the health system, and on and on. But the tea party appears to be as bothered by the policies of Franklin Roosevelt as those of Barack Obama.

– – – – – –

The media repeatedly invoke grass roots and other code words to describe the tea party. Tell a lie often enough and it is believed. Our media wizards must realize that with the revelations of high-powered funding and the involvement of Republican operatives, the characterization of the tea party as a spontaneous, ground-up movement does not fit; nagging facts nevertheless must bow to pursuing the “colorful.”

Continue reading “Journal: Tea Party “Booboisie””

2010/10/242010/10/24

Review: Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Education (Universities), Environment (Solutions), Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Priorities, Public Administration, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

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Harrison Owen

Low-Cost Priceless Guide Worth Hundreds of Thousands

October 24, 2010

It's been my pleasure to know the author of this book ever since he hunted me down after my review of Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World, and I have also had the benefit of being a participant in a number of Open Space sessions run by, among others, Peggy Holman, author of Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity and the older The Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today's Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems.

I cannot over-state the value of this book to anyone who has a complex and expensive problem but cannot afford to get the author there personally. While the book is no substitute for the genius, the intuition, the experience, and the sheer “quiet energy” that the author can bring to any endeavor, it is not just a starting point, it is more than enough to get you through your first self-organized event, and the results are sure to astonish as well as excite about the potential benefits of having the author lead the next session.

Here is how it works in a nut-shell, and I put this into the review because I am not happy with the minimalist marketing information the publisher has provided but happy that Look Inside the Book is activated–use that feature!

1) Everyone who cares is invited to a meeting in a space large enough to accommodate the group. Many events will charge a fee to cover the space, the food, and the travel costs of the facilitators, some events can be free especially if internal. HOWEVER, the diversity of who is invited (i.e. including outsiders, clients, journalists, the lowest ranking maintenance people), THIS MATTERS….A LOT.

Continue reading “Review: Open Space Technology: A User's Guide”

2010/10/242010/10/25

Search: osint advantages

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The single best articulation of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) advantages remains:

2008 Open Source Intelligence (Strategic)

The single best articulation of how to get OSINT right in the context of global and US needs remains:

2009 DoD OSINT Leadership and Staff Briefings

OSINT is a sub-set of M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making), a Swedish military concept adapted and enhanced by the Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 dedicated to helping create public intelligence in the public interest.

The international OSINT conference that ran from 1992-2006, suspended from 2007-2010, is being resumed as an M4IS2 summit using Open Space Technology (OST), and focusing on the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers. Summit '11 will be the first in the new series but unlike the earlier series, will be run by Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3. OSS.Net, Inc. has been sold and is being managed by a new CEO.

We continue to support an Open Source Agency (OSA) under diplomatic auspices as a sister-agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), with a $125M a year start toward $3 billion a year at Full Operating Capability (FOC).

That agency should in turn fund the Multinational Decision-Support Centre (MDSC) with two-way reach-back, using all militaries as hubs for leveraging the eight tribes of each nation, and for creating regional multinational Stations capable across all of the disciplines applied to all of the domains.

That agency would also fund 50 state-wide Distributed Community Intelligence Network (DCIN), using the National Guard (able to have law enforcement commissions as well as foreign intelligence clearances) as the 24/7 watch-standers around which the eight tribes in each state might rally, with deliberate overlap across all relevant borders.

2010/10/242010/10/24

America’s Next War: Southwest Border–Both Sides

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Immigration, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Government, Law Enforcement, Peace Intelligence

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Phi Beta Iota: Most of the weapons being used by the cartels do NOT come from US gun shops. They come from the Latin American militaries who have received large shipments of “older” weapons and ammunition from the US, and then turned around and sold them to the cartels. Just as the US is indirectly funding the Taliban in Afghanistan, it is indirectly enabling the cartels with weapons. Furthermore, to imagine that with the money they have the cartels cannot “order in” anything they wish from the Chinese, Israeli, or Russian arsenals, is naive in the extreme. As many or more are dying violent deaths every day in this region as in Iraq or Afghanistan. In our view, the current era of politicians (1981-date) is going to be held accountable for four major strategic blunders, all of them deliberate:

1. Elective invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq on top of irresponsible military cuts and acquisition pathologies

2. Willful acceptance from Bush Senior onwards of the willful destruction of the US economy for the benefit of a few led by Goldman Sachs, Citi-Bank, and Morgan

3. Ignoring the depth and extent of the Southwest Border instability and threat to local communities

4. Ignoring the imminent clean water crisis across the entire region as well as across America

On The Southwest Border (Photo Essay) (Latin America News Dispatch)

Posted by Molly OToole on Sep 15th, 2010

These photographs were taken on an 852-mile, 72-hour trip across the Southwest border, from San Diego, California to Arizona and back. Many citizens from the United States and Mexico have never seen the line that divides and defines their countries, marked by walls, barbed wire fences, U.S. Border Patrol checks and, increasingly, controversy.

2010 National Drug Threat Assessment: Southwest Border Smuggling and Violence

GAO: Border fence lagging, over budget, Home Security mismanaged project, report says (Washington Times, 24 October 2010)

Napolitano visits San Diego, says border is more secure from cartels (Los Angeles Times,October 18, 2010)

Time for U.S. to get serious about cartel threat (MySanAntonio, 16 October 2010)

Cartel Threat Grows, Illegal Numbers Drop (Homeland Security Today, 6 October 2010)

Pirate Lake: Mexican Bandits Terrorizing American Boaters on the Border (FOX.News, 4 October 2010)

Governor Perry Releases Statement on Border Violence (KRGV.com Texas, 2 October 2010)

SECURE BORDER INITIATIVE DHS Needs to Address Testing and Performance Limitations That Place Key Technology Program at Risk (GAO-10-158 January 2010)

Secure Border Initiative: SBInet Expenditure Plan Needs to Better Support Oversight and Accountability (GAO-07-309 February 15, 2007)

2010/10/242010/10/30

Review (Guest): Science, Strategy and War–The Strategic Theory of John Boyd

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Force Structure (Military), Military & Pentagon Power, Science & Politics of Science, Strategy

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cover science strategy and war — Amazon Page

Frans P.B. Osinga

5.0 out of 5 stars “Hell of an Engineer”

October 24, 2010

By Retired Reader (New Mexico) – See all my reviews

Phi Beta Iota: This is the long review provided directly to Phi Beta Iota. A shorter review can be read at the Amazon Page.

I have just completed a first read of “Boyd”, by Robert Coram and have concluded that I a made a big mistake reading Osinga’s book first. Osinga explains what Boyd did; Coram describes how he did it. If you read Coram’s book first, Osinga’s book will be much easier to tackle. Both are quite good, but Coram gives a much better sense of the context in which Boyd did his work and a better understanding of who John Boyd was and what he represented. Robert D. Steele has an excellent review of Coram’s book that I recommend. I purchased both books at the same time, but read them in the wrong order.

I was not surprised to find from the Coram book that Boyd attracted a select group of like minded individuals who put integrity ahead of the go along to get along mehtod of moving forward. We could certainly use a similar group at the Pentagon of 2010.”

This book has the rather ambitious goal of “better understanding the strategic thought developed” by Colonel John Boyd (USAF ret.). For the most part it succeeds in doing this. Since Boyd choose not consolidate his thoughts into one or more books, Osinga was forced to develop his information from Boyd’s slides used to brief his ideas and from Boyd’s notes. So what does this book tell the reader about the “strategic thought” of Colonel Boyd?

Although Osinga does not address it, John Boyd appears to have had what can only be called the mind of an engineer. The application of scientific principals to practical ends seemed to come naturally to him. He actually received a degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech in 1962, but this appeared to have primarily credentialed his existing engineering talent.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): Science, Strategy and War–The Strategic Theory of John Boyd”

2010/10/242010/10/24

Reference: How Goldman Sachs Looted America

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

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Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's ‘Griftopia'

Matt Taibbi's unsparing and authoritative reporting on the financial crisis has produced a series of memorable Rolling Stone features. He showed us how Goldman Sachs, that “great vampire squid,” played a central role in creating not only the housing bubble but four other big speculative booms that filled its coffers while wrecking the American economy. He explained how Wall Street banks cooked up schemes that helped decimate municipal budgets and cost countless jobs, and how Wall Street lobbying led to a financial reform bill that won't prevent another meltdown. Taibbi builds on that eye-opening work in his new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America , due out from Spiegel & Grau on November 2. In this exclusive excerpt, he describes how our cash-strapped country is auctioning off its highways, ports and even parking meters at fire sale prices — and finding eager buyers in the unregulated sovereign wealth funds of oil-rich Middle Eastern countries.

Read the exclusive Griftopia excerpt.