Phi Beta Iota: this specific book is rocketing around Reuniting America, Transpartisan (Left) and Post-Partisan (Right) circles, the 50 million or so Americans–possibly more now–that consider themselves Cultural Creatives. This book will be reviewed here in a week or two. Below are related books with links to their review page and from there to their Amazon page. Put simply, conscious evolution is an information-sharing problem, nothing more or less. You liberate and enrich people in the aggregate by connecting them (cell phones) and then empowering them (access to free information).
Haitians piled bodies along the devastated streets of their capital Wednesday after the strongest earthquake hit the poor Caribbean nation in more than 200 years crushed thousands of structures, from humble shacks to the National Palace and the U.N. peacekeeping headquarters. Untold numbers were still trapped.
Destroyed communications made it impossible to tell the extent of destruction from Tuesday afternoon's 7.0-magnitude tremor, or to estimate how many were dead among the collapsed buildings in Haiti's capital of about 2 million people.
France's foreign minister said the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission was apparently among the dead.
I read a lot, and quite by accident (or courtesy of Dick Cheney who drove people back to books looking for answers) I am the top Amazon reviewer for non-fiction. I would have bought this book, along with the book I did buy today, Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis but one look at the price and a one word decision: NO.
This book is CRIMINALLY priced. As a publisher myself, I can assure one and all that in lots of 1,500 in hard cover, it costs at most two cents a page including color cover and graphics. Using the Amazon on demand printing option, the cost is even less. Authors must STOP allowing publishers to price their precious work beyond the reach of most people with a brain. I offer all my books free online as well as via Amazon.
and many more. Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, provides easy access to all of my reviews (over 1,500) in each of 98 reading categories including Catastrophe & Resilience, Cosmos & Destiny, and so on.
If the author will post this book free online, or if the publisher can be shamed into pricing it at under $35, I will buy it and review it.
In accordance with our mandate to “help connect the dots” across multiple joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational partners, the COIN Center and SO & SFA proponent offices are redoubling efforts to increase presence and activity on the COIN webpage [link here], COIN blog [link here], COIN Center Facebook fan page [link here] and Battle Command Knowledge System (for CAC holders) [link here].
Below are just three of the core represences being used in MNF-I's schoolhouse. The military likes checklists and easy to understand, one reason the “Dynamic Planning Model” was called a “bird's nest” not useful to anyone on the ground–which is correct: it is supposed to be used for strategic level planning, programming, and budgeting, but the US Government does not “do” inter-agency strategic anything.
Phi Beta Iota: Put bluntly, neither COIN nor Stabilization & Reconstruction will ever be viable propositions until DoD implements the recommendations of both the 9-11 Commission (an Open Source Agency, but under diplomatic and civil affairs auspices, funded and operated by DoD) and the Defense Science Board's December 2004 Transitions to and from Hostilities (the OSINT portions were written by Dr. Joe Markowitz), the single persistent senior authority still associated with the U.S. Government.
Phi Beta Iota: Now imagine a global public fully aware of the value of Twitter photos with geospatial attributes, and a multinational decision support team able to receive and plot all such contributions…. As long as “research” is controlled by secret and ultra-far out organizations like DARPA and IARPA this stuff is not going to be applied practically. Civil Affairs Brigade (CAB) and its Joint Civil Information Management (JCIM), combined with a United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (UNODIN), a Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) Information Network, and a Multinational Decision Support Center (MDSC) would go a long way toward getting an immediate grip on all this, in detail, and then creating a Haiti Needs Table at the household level that could be triaged out (see Graphic: Global Range of Nano-Needs for the idea).
Karel Zelenka, a Catholic Relief Services representative in Port-au-Prince, told U.S. colleagues before phone service failed that “there must be thousands of people dead,” according to a spokeswoman for the aid group, Sara Fajardo.
With phones down, some of the only communication came from social media such as Twitter. Richard Morse, a well-known musician who manages the famed Olafson Hotel, kept up a stream of dispatches on the aftershocks and damage reports.
CNN is monitoring tweets and other messages from people in Haiti and reports from those who said they have been in touch with friends and family. CNN has not been able to able to verify this material.
“If anyone in Haiti is reading this, please go out and help in the streets, it's very ug;y out there if you haven't seen it #haiti” –From Twitter user fredodupoux in Haiti at 8:04 p.m. ET
“Tipap made it home from Carrefour – saw many dead bodies and injured along the way – said most buidings w/more than one story are down” — From Twitter user troylivesay in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, at 8:22 p.m. ET
AFP/Twitter – This image obtained from Twitter purportedly shows Haitians standing amid rubble on January 12 in Port-au-Prince. …
A local doctor told an AFP reporter in the city that hundreds of people are feared dead.
A local UN employee said the earthquake had destroyed the headquarters of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the country.
Seventy percent of Haiti's population lives on less than two dollars per day and half of its 8.5 million people are unemployed.
According to official figures, food insecurity already affects more than a quarter of Haiti's population, some 1.9 million people, with women and children the worst affected.
News is still coming in from Haiti even thought night as fallen. Shortly after the quake, our first look at the devastation was given to us via social media websites like Twitter and Facebook.
1st Look At Devastation In Haiti Quake
Tue Jan 12, 10:51AM PT – CBS 2 / KCAL 9 Los Angeles 0:54 | 33138 views
Pictures are coming in via Twitter. The quake, which measured 7.0, toppled buildings and bridges. Sylvia Lopez reports.
A spatial referencing system (SRS) or coordinate reference system (CRS) is a coordinate-based local, regional or global system used to locate geographical entities. Some of systems in existence are:
02:30 SOUTHCOM Strip Alert CAB 21 6-Hour Response Big Bird Takes Off
04:00 CAB 21 Peace Jumpers Parachute into 4 separate locations
04:30 CAB 21 Peace Jumpers provide four separate GPS LZs for GPS-Para Drops
05:00 CAB 21 “Peace from Above” Bulk water, blankets, canned rations begin to drop
05:30 CAB 21 Re-Supply Masters & Emergency Medical Teams parachute in
06:00 Preliminary Multinational Needs List Generated from four different locations
06:30 MDSC begins coordinating multinational lift link-ups with US GPS Para Units
07:00 USN finishes breakfast and starts a hospital ship (creates 75,000 gallons of fresh water from sea water per day) and an amphibious ship toward the scene…still thinking about whether Peace from the Sea has enough promotion slots.
Criminal Pricing in Sharp Contrast to Content
1st Look At Devastation In Haiti Quake
