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Journal: Haiti Update 4 February 2010

02 Diplomacy, 06 Family, 07 Health, 08 Immigration, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society
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Aerial View of Destroyed Buildings

Adequacy of Aid.  Foreign Food Aid Trickles Into Haiti's Black Market (New York Times, 4 Feb 10). PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – Blocks from where U.S. and U.N. soldiers distribute sacks of rice to Haitian women in earthquake-shattered Port-au-Prince, street vendors are openly selling rice by the cup from bags stamped with U.S. flags.   . . .   For two weeks, the World Food Program will give out only rice, deciding later whether to add other staples like beans, cooking oil and salt.  Phi Beta Iota: This is nuts.  We should be carpet bombing this place with ALL possible survival ratios to the point that no one has to buy anything for the next 90 days.  Idiocy and lack of imagination.

Adequacy of Aid:  Already Bad Health Situation in Haiti Has Gotten Worse – It’s Aftershock (Health Kut 29 Jan 10). For years Haiti has had to deal with inferior medical care and various health concerns. The earthquake that has recently impacted the country has made conditions worse for the country and is likely to end up causing a new series of medical concerns. These concerns are ones that could end up killing hundreds of thousands of people who didn’t die right after the earthquake.  Phi Beta Iota: We agree with this, and forecast it within a week of the disaster that the US has now turned into a catastrophe.

Adequacy of Aid.  Wickham: A short attention span won't save Haiti (Towntalk Canada, 2 Feb 10). To help Haiti recover, the U.S. has to help it rebuild Port-au-Prince, the capital city that was leveled by the 7.0 magnitude earthquake. The U.S. also has to help rebuild the country's shattered economy. “In 30 seconds Haiti lost 60 percent of its GDP,” Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said during the day-long meeting.  It's estimated it will take at least 10 years and $3 billion to rebuild Haiti – and probably a lot more time and money to help shed its identity as the American hemisphere's poorest county.  Phi Beta Iota: Haiti is already old news and back-burner, We’re simply not serious, if we were, USG would mandate a pooling of all donations, publish a day to day spending bill, and show planned spending for public comment 90 days out.

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Search: scope triangle

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Very interesting.  Below are a couple of links to top pieces on the scope triangle, search appreciated.

Reference Online

A Project Management Primer: Basic Principles – Scope Triangle

Reference Online

The “Broken Iron Triangle” Software Development Anti-pattern

Phi Beta Iota: The Scope Triangle  is desperately out of date.    The two new major factors are first: the role that intelligence (decision-support) can play in what we have called since the 1990's “Information Arbitrage,” which is the use of information converted into intelligence as a substitute for time, space, capital, and labor as well as materials (e.g. substituting plastic for steel in car construction); and second: the role that social production or Collective Intelligence can play in being a substitute for hard and soft power–for example, Thomas Jefferson's observation that a  Nation's best defense was an educated (armed) citizenry.

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Journal: Sun Tzu & How NOT To Lose…

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Chuck Spinney

A biography of the author of this excellent essay can be found here.

Phi Beta Iota: When the public disconnects from public policy, policy is made without regard to intelligence.  This is one reason we concluded that to save the value of secret intelligence (i.e. prevent its being ignored and manipulated) we needed to create a public intelligence foundation to keep policy and acquisition honest.

Sun Tzu and America’s Way of War
by Jon Basil Utley, February 04, 2010

America’s way of war is, actually, not so new under the sun. Centuries ago, China’s Sun Tzu would have recognized some of our ways and errors. Indeed he would be rolling over in his grave at seeing how his famous dictums for successful wars are ignored and violated by America: a trillion-dollar war in Iraq, losing our allies, creating more and more fanatical enemies willing to do suicide missions against us, borrowing from foreigners to finance our wars. In fairness, part of our failure is the simple determinant that democracies can’t run empires and most armies hate occupation duty. Our military still trains to re-fight World War II, not for unending wars of occupation and trans-national terrorism. So now we fear and isolate ourselves from most Muslims, nearly a quarter of the world’s population, and are nearly bankrupted. However, bin Laden’s campaign followed Sun Tzu’s teachings to a “T.” (See “How Bin Laden Bankrupted America.” For why we can’t win our wars, see Andrew Bacevich’s “When Was the Last Time We Won A War?“)

Following are some of Sun Tzu’s main maxims from The Art of War and how and why America breaks them:

Full Story Online

See also:

Journal: Afghanistan, Sun Tzu, State, & “Intelligence”

Journal: New QDR–Pentagon Goes Intellectually AWOL

Journal: Pentagon's Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) as a Metaphor for a Predictable Defense Meltdown

Review: Defense Facts of Life–The Plans/Reality Mismatch

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MILNET Headlines 4 Feb 10 AM

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Afghanistan: Lurching Toward Defeat In Afghanistan Wall Street Journal

Cyber-Security:  Report Details Hacks Targeting Google, Others

Cyber-Security: Google To Enlist NSA To Ward Off Attacks  Washington Post

Cyber-Security: Hackers Steal Millions in Carbon Credits

Strategy Future Conflict Future Character of Conflict

Strategy Green Paper: Defence Green paper 2010.

Strategy Trends UK Global Strategic Trends Edition 4, FCOC & Green papers

Testimony DNI: ODNI Congressional Testimony: House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Hearing

Threat Chinese: Chinese intelligence agents stepped up spying and technology collection activities against the United States last yearInside The Ring  Washington Times

Threat Statemen DNI t: Statement for the Record by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair – Annual Threat Assessment of the United States Intelligence Community.

US Defense Animals: Lawmaker Says DOD ‘Tortures' Animals  Politico.com

US Defense:  COIN Attack Plane Not Til Next Year  DEFENSETECH.ORG

US Defense: US Marine: “The Rules of Engagement Prevent Me From Doing My Job”

US Liberty: Police want backdoor to Web users' private data

US Policy Iran: US Says It Cannot Force Iran To Shun Bomb  Financial Times

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Journal: NIGHTWATCH Extract France & Citizenship

08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence
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NIGHTWATCH HOME.  France: For the record. Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on 3 February he would sign a decree barring a Moroccan man from receiving French citizenship because of his insistence that his French wife conform to the strictest Islamic practices. Fillon said that the man “has no place in our country.”

The French authorities describe the case as being about a religious radical who requires his wife to wear the burqa (the head to toe covering with eye slots); he insists the separation of men and women in his own home, and he refuses to shake the hands of women,” Fillon said.

On 2 February, Immigration Minister Eric Besson said that during checks into the man's application for citizenship, he explicitly stated that he would never allow his wife to leave the house without wearing a full veil and that he believed a woman is “an inferior being.”

Earlier this week a parliamentary panel called for a law to ban the wearing of full Islamic veils in public institutions such as schools, hospitals and transport. “It's French law,” Fillon told Europe 1 radio. “The Code Civile has for a very long time provided that naturalization could be refused to someone who does not respect the values of the French Republic.

A Reader could conclude that political correctness in France favors the Republic’s interests over the individual’s right of self expression and even personal religious observance. In this case, the Republic places respect for women and women’s rights over male dominance prescribed in religious texts. This is a study in democracy.

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Journal: Whither Twitter?

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Geospatial, Mobile, Real Time, Technologies
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Twitter not all that popular among teenagers, report finds

“I don't know a single person who uses Twitter,” says Samara Fantie, 17, of Gaithersburg, who added that with so many of her friends on Facebook, Twitter seems beside the point.

Fantie listed its drawbacks, saying it appears to be less secure, more public and too condensed. “Teenagers like to talk, and 140 characters is just not enough,” she said. Facebook “does everything Twitter offers, only it's better. It would be like going backwards.”

Blogs Just Aren't Cool Any More, Teens Say

Blogging is slowly becoming the domain of adults, as a recent Pew study shows more teens abandoning the medium for social networks.

The study, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, showed a decline in the number of teens who say they blog, from 28 percent in 2006 to 18 percent in 2009, when the study was conducted. Just 52 percent comment on their friends' blogs, versus 76 percent three years ago.

By contrast, the survey found that about 10 percent of adults maintain a blog, a figure that has remained unchanged.

Phi Beta Iota: We appear to be in an interregnum, with some very serious perople such as Pierre Levy and Jeff Jarvis seeing the enormous potential of Twitter, while the run of the mill “crowd” may be bored.  Our view: Twitter is a game changer in part because geospatial location and identity are embedded, it is both mobile and real-time, and back office trends and aggregation and clustering can be attached.  Something really cool is happening, and Pew missed it.

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Journal: Earth-Homes and Trash for Building

Earth Intelligence
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Rammed Earth Construction (Using Tires)

In the tire method, a row of used automobile tires is simply laid atop the concrete footing, perhaps centered around steel reinforcing bars that extend out of the footing. The tires are then filled with soil. About 1,000 tires are used to build the walls of a 2,000 sq ft 1609.6 sq m) house.

the prepared soil into these molds, which are removed after the walls are completed. The rammed-earth tire method is a commonly used alternative.