Public Intelligence Blog – Page 3716 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

Consumers, it’s time to get your free annual credit reports. You can order a free report annually from each of the three major credit-reporting agencies.

“Basically, Congress gave you the right to look at your credit report for two reasons,” said Ed Mierzwinski of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington. “First, to see if you’ve been the victim of identity theft and, second, to see if mistakes are dragging down your credit score and causing you to pay more for, or be denied, credit opportunities,” he said. “So look at your free credit reports and avoid the trap of paying the credit bureaus for extra credit-monitoring services, which no consumer advocate recommends.”

Here are three ways to do it:

• Order by phone. Call (877) 322-8228 and follow the prompts. Be prepared to say your Social Security number and other personal information, so be sure no stranger is around to overhear.

• Order by mail. Print out the form online at < www.annualcreditreport.com > — the only official site to obtain the
free reports. Click “request form.” Fill it out and mail it back. It will be processed within a few weeks.

• View it instantly online. Go to www.annualcreditreport.com. Select and click your state from the drop-down menu (Virginia, for us) and follow the instructions. You can buy your credit score, too.

Once you get your free report, dispute any errors that you can identify.

Also, instead of ordering three reports now, consider ordering one from a different agency each quarter.

It’s a way of monitoring your credit for free throughout the year.

2010/01/022010/01/02

Graphic: GIS Makes Discrimination Black and White

Analysis, Balance, Citizen-Centered, Geospatial, Leadership-Integrity, Policies-Harmonization, Political

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The Revolution Will Be Mapped

GIS mapping technology is helping underprivileged communities get better services — from education and transportation to health care and law enforcement — by showing exactly what discrimination looks like.

Bob Burtman | December 28, 2009

The institute's maps played a vital role in a federal jury's decision last year to award the excluded Coal Run residents almost $11 million in damages from the city of Zanesville and Muskingum County. The supporting evidence was strong on its own: African-American residents without water had made repeated requests over a period of almost 50 years to remedy the inequity, to no avail. Instead, they had to haul water from the plant or pump it from wells contaminated with sulphur and oil from old mining operations. In the interim, Zanesville had extended its water lines on numerous occasions to new, predominantly white developments that were farther away from the water plant than Coal Run.

Bob Burtman is a freelance investigative reporter and researcher who lives with his wife and animals in the woods outside of Hillsborough, N.C. He has won numerous national and regional journalism awards for his stories on the…

Phi Beta Iota: This is precisely what we have been looking for–the use of information as a non-violent means of achieving equity. This is HUGE in our view, and a tiny micorcosm of how We the People in the aggregate will sort out the massive concentration of wealth that has been made possible by corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse all condoned and made possible by the Republican and Democratic parties in collusion with Wall Street (and especially Goldman Sachs).

2010/01/022010/01/02

Journal: Rural; Cooperative; Wind; Fast–Any Questions?

05 Energy, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

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Full Story Online

Rural Electric Cooperative Completes $240 Million Wind Farm in 4 Months

A North Dakota rural electric cooperative made history on New Year’s Eve, in completing the nation’s largest wind project to be entirely owned by a consumer cooperative.

The $240 million, 115.5 MW wind farm was begun in August and completed a mere four months later; three and a half hours before midnight on the last night of 2009. GE supplied the 77 1.5 MW turbines.

. . . . . . .

By the end of 2010 the cooperative hopes that it will produce 20% of its electricity from wind power for its 2.8 million rural consumers in parts of rural Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

. . . . . . .

1. Rural empty states are where the wind is.
2. Rural empty states are where electricity cooperatives are.
3. Rural empty state’s cooperatives are beating national averages in bringing the most renewable energy online the fastest.

Renewable capacity among rural electricity cooperatives grew 65% in 2008. The rest of us: 25%

2010/01/022010/01/02

Worth a Look: Economic Intelligence for the Public

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Policies, Worth A Look

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Chris Martinsen's Free Crash Course on Economics

#	Chapter	Duration	Translations
—	Introduction (on this page, above)	1:47	Español, Français
1	Three Beliefs	1:46	Español, Français
2	The Three “E”s	1:38	Español, Français
3	Exponential Growth	6:20	Español, Français
4	Compounding is the Problem	3:06	Español, Français
5	Growth vs. Prosperity	3:40	Español, Français
6	What is Money?	5:55	Español, Français
7	Money Creation	4:19	Español, Français
8	The Fed – Money Creation	7:13	Español, Français
9	A Brief History of US Money	7:14	Español, Français
10	Inflation	11:48	Español, Français
11	How Much Is A Trillion?	3:28	Español, Français
12	Debt	12:32	Español, Français
13	A National Failure To Save	12:06	Español, Français
14	Assets & Demographics	13:41	Español, Français
15	Bubbles	14:10	Español, Français
16	Fuzzy Numbers	15:52	Español, Français
17a	Part A: Peak Oil	17:52	Español, Français
17b	Part B: Energy Budgeting	12:15	Español, Français
17c	Part C: Energy And The Economy	7:05	Español, Français
18	Environmental Data	16:22	Español, Français
19	Future Shock	8:02	Español, Français
20	What Should I Do?	19:48	Español, Français

Tip of the Hat to pinecarr, who provided this comment at Book: INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH–Chapter 7 Loaded.

Retired Reader states “Identifying what he [Robert D. Steele] conceives as the ten major threats to humanity as the bases for designing a global intelligence system is exactly the way to begin.” I couldn’t agree more.

Given that, and as someone who greatly admires your ability to digest huge amounts of information in your pursuit of truth, I would like to bring “The Crash Course”, by Dr. Chris Martenson, to your attention. It is available free on-line..

I think Chris’s 5 year search for the truth -relating to interacting problems in the economy, energy, and environment- complements your search for larger truths, just starting from a different perspective. I also think the knowledge he conveys may contribute additional insights for your assessment of the top threats to humanity.

For an independent review of the Crash Course by the Huffington Post, see “The Perfect Crash Course on the Economy”.

EXTRACT from Huffington Post (a great review) on the author's three core points:

“The first is that the next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the last twenty years. Second, I believe that its possible that the pace and/or scope of change could overwhelm the ability of our key social and support institutions to adapt. Third, I believe we do not lack any technology or understanding necessary to build ourselves a better future.”

2010/01/022010/01/02

Journal: Financial Intelligence for the Public

03 Economy, 11 Society, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Ethics

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Stiglitz’s 5 Lessons from 2009

Thursday, 12/31/2009 – 12:01 pm by Joseph Stiglitz

New Deal 2.0

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster and Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz identifies five lessons we can take away from the financial crisis.

The best that can be said for 2009 is that it could have been worse, that we pulled back from the precipice on which we seemed to be perched in late 2008, and that 2010 will almost surely be better for most countries around the world. The world has also learned some valuable lessons, though at great cost both to current and future prosperity — costs that were unnecessarily high given that we should already have learned them.

The first lesson is that markets are not self-correcting. Indeed, without adequate regulation, they are prone to excess. In 2009, we again saw why Adam Smith’s invisible hand often appeared invisible: it is not there. The bankers’ pursuit of self-interest (greed) did not lead to the well-being of society; it did not even serve their shareholders and bondholders well. It certainly did not serve homeowners who are losing their homes, workers who have lost their jobs, retirees who have seen their retirement funds vanish, or taxpayers who paid hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks.

Continue reading “Journal: Financial Intelligence for the Public”

2010/01/022010/01/02

Reference: Jack Devine on Tomorrow’s Spygames

Articles & Chapters, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC)

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cover devine — Jack Devine on Future of Spying

Jack Devine is the finest manager we have ever known, and the only one we know of who has never let a case officer miss a deadline without asking why. Former Acting Deputy Director of Operations while appointed as ADDO, former head of Latin America Division, he managed the Afghan Task Force whose outcomes are have been tactically and operationally successful and strategically painful. His signal idea in the above article is a Secretary of Intelligence. It's not a bad idea, if accompanied by legislation that gives the Secretary the powers that the Director of Naitonal Intelligence (DNI) does not have now, but a better idea would be a Secretary for Education, Intelligence, and Research, with CIA converted into Director of Classified Intelligence, a new Director of Open Source Intelligence, NSA becomes the all-souorce processing center, and the NRO gets folded into NGA at the same time that USGS is absorbed by NGA. The article also falls prey to the acceptance of glibness by others–cyberwar, for example, is not something we can just throw money at–there are not enough qualified cyber-warriors with US citizenship eligible for clearances to become competent in less than a decade–cyberwar is going to have to be a multinational endeavor, and the Chinese are twenty years ahead of us in both offense and defense. Reality can be such a pesky creature to deal with….

With a tip of the hat to the Association for Intelligence Officers (AFIO), which provided this in Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies (Fall 2009), pages 49-55 (7 pages). Although AFIO has not opened its doors to all multinational multifunctional intelligence professionals across the eight tribes of intelligence as we expect it to one day, its web site and publications are openly available and we encourage one and all to subscribe.