Quietly marching on in the background, each making a historic contribution.
Graphic: Earth Intelligence Network Founders
Citizen-Centered, Earth Orientation, Leadership-IntegrityGraphic: Holistic Analysis
Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Strategy-Holistic Coherence
Hard to believe, but the U.S. Intelligence Community still does not do holistic analysis, in part because most of what the U.S. Government actually needs in the way of decision-support is not secret and has nothing to do with really expensive improbable threats.
ANY factor can be put in the center–the point is that ALL factors must be analyzed at ALL times.
As with all graphics this remains the intellectual property of Robert Steele.
Graphic: OSINT Marketplace
Advanced Cyber/IO, Balance, Capabilities-Force Structure, Leadership-Integrity, Multinational Plus, Strategy-Holistic Coherence
The OSINT Marketplace will not fully develop until we constrain the corruption within the military-intelligence-industrial complex that substitutes “butts in seats” with clearances and precioius little else to offer, for tangible substance that can be easily shared across all boundaries. Butts in seats are a waste of time-energy. We must also stop paying more than once for anything, which requires a coherent requirements system, harmonzied contracting–we cannot even get one agency to have one OSINT contracting officer uber alles–and an OSINT “cloud” repositiory.
Graphic: OSINT Multinational Information Operations
Advanced Cyber/IO, Multinational Plus
This slide, originally created for THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE was morphed to address needs in a briefing to the Coalition Coordination Center (CCC) in Tampa within the U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM). This remains the core time-energy slide for harnessing the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth leveraging multinational multifunctional information-sharing and sense-making agreements.
Review: American Gospel–God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (Hardcover)
5 Star, Religion & Politics of Religion
Read with Three Other Books (Or My Reviews of All Four),
August 13, 2006
Jon Meacham
I bought and read this book as part of a series, with The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason being the first book. I recommend both highly. “The End of Faith” depicts the threat to America and the world, while this book is more of a historical treatment of how America has always favored religious tolerance and pluralism, but secular governance. Other interesting books deal with misquoting Jesus and the myths of the Bible. I hope to get to them soon.
This book over all an extraodinarily balanced and vital perspective on the good of religion in American life. It puts extremist ideologies in historical context, and concludes in the final chapter that whenever religions become extremist and exclusive, as have both the extreme right Christian evangelicals in America and the radicalized Muslims around the world; they become a tyranny, and must be fought down at all costs.
This is a history book, but it is vibrant with clear and direct quotations showing how successive Presidents used religion to make important points. The books begins with an explosive characterization of liberty and democracy in relation to freedom of religion, and this sets the stage for the entire book which ends by denouncing religious extremism of any sort.
Immortal quotes:
Page 16. “…the Founders understood the dangers of mixing religious passion with the ambitions of politics.”
Page 17. “If totalitarianism was the great problem of the twentieth century, then extremism is, so far, the great problem of the twenty-first.”
The author, while documenting the need for a separation of church and state, is also careful to note that a shared acceptance of public religion and religiosity in all its forms is very helpful to democracy and essential for civil domestic solidarity.
Two books that are unique and distinct from this one, that I recommend be read in addition to this book and “The End of Faith,” are The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right and Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik The four together frame the power of religion in this century, for both good and bad.
The author is quite clear in stating that religions become a problem when their practitioners demand conversion to their own faith, or denigrate all who are not of their faith as unbelievers subject to genocide, confiscation of goods or–as the more rabid Jews taught me in college, full licenses to rape and dishonor, since “chicksas” or gentile girls are “free game.”
This book is the single best authoritative documentation for the hard fact that America was founded as a secular Nation providing for religious tolerance, and it is especially strong in pointing out that Judaism and other religions, including Islam, were present in the early years and America is NOT, per se, a Christian Nation in its founding roots.
The author documents how the Constitution and the intent of the Founders specifically forbade any religious requirements or qualification for holding public office.
On page 93 the author discusses how the Founding Father explicitly favored and sought a diversity of churches and faiths to reduce the possibility of any one faith “coming to play too large a role in politics,” (something I believe we can all see has hurt America gravely as the extremist religious right has trashed civil liberties at home and the Nation of Iraq as a whole–never mind global rendition and torture and a refusal to respect the Geneva Convention.
The author concludes that the USA and radicalized Islam are indeed on a collision course, of pluralism versus monotheism, but a careful reading of the book suggests that we must first heal ourselves internally and stamp down the extremist religious right (I am a moderate Republican who segued from Catholicism to high Episcopal to Methodist via two marriages).
The book includes ten extraordinary appendices and one excellent compilation of Presidential scripture citations up through President Eisenhower (I recommend the DVD on “Why We Fight” to better understand the pernicious effects of faith-based decisions to go to war that ignore all facts and evidence).
This is a serious book. Religion is going to be, as the author documents, a key factor in whether we prosper or implode in the 21st Century. For that reason alone, I strongly recommend all four of the books I have cited above, including this one.
Review DVD: Why We Fight (2006)
5 Star, Military & Pentagon Power, Reviews (DVD Only)
Foundation Film With Fog of War, Wal-Mart, and The Corporation,
August 11, 2006
Gore Vidal
This is a foundation film, a foundation for citizens restoring power to the people and removing it from the corporations. Other films that complement this one are the Fog of War (documentary with McNamara), the Wal-Mart video, and “The Corporation” on how corporations use their “legal personality” to keep their managers immune from accountabiity.
High points of this video:
1) General and President Eisenhower's son says on camara that his dad told him he wished we had never invented the nuclear bomb, when Truman used it it made him feel “low.”
2) Growing gap between the elite and the public. Still a general assumption by the public that the govenrment knows more than they do about the reasons for going to war.
3) Too many accept the premise that democracy can be imposed at gunpoint, and do not realize (see my review of book “The End of Faith”) that religious fanatism must be repressed before secular democracy can be adopted.
4) Huge segment on how the draft was our best defense against being manipulated, how the volunteer Army makes it possible for the elite to use the military for the wrong reasons while lying to the public.
5) Good references to how the rest of the world sees us as practicing economic colonialism combined with unilateral militarism.
6) Oil, oil, oil and lies, lies, lies.
7) Elite lesson from Viet-Nam was that death cannot be seen in US living rooms. The embedded media, far from being more useful is being distracted at the tactical level, and kept from focusing on the strategic question of “is this war necessary?”
8) Senator Byrd is featured as the lone adult voice against the war. Congress is widely perceived as having failed in every possible way because it is both beholden to the military-industrial complex and its bribes, and has (see my review of book “The Broken Branch”) abdicated its role as the “first” branch of government and accepted a subordinate role as “footsoldiers of the President.”
9) Perhaps most useful, as more and more voices call for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, is the clips of the lies told to us on television by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, interspersed with interviews of military and other intelligence analysts who now can speak of the truth as it was known then. This DVD could be “Exhibit A” in any impeachment trial.
10) Hottest quote: “A terrible thing when Americans can't trust their President….the government exploited (my emotions and trust after 9/11)”.
11) Those interviews believe that we had no exit strategy from Iraq precisely because Cheney and Rumsfeld did not plan to leave, and they cite as proof the fact that 14 permanent installations have been built in Iraq, instead of the reconstruction and stabilization of the civil sector that would normally be the priority in an exit strategy.
This is a compelling objective film. Those who demean it by associating it with the Oliver Stone JFK conspiracy documentary are doing Amazon readers and the DVD a great dis-service.
Review DVD: The World’s Fastest Indian
Culture, DVD - Light, Reviews (DVD Only)
“A Thoughtful Customer” Says It All,
August 11, 2006
Anthony Hopkins
I can do no more than second the superb review by “A Thoughtful Customer,” with the note that I would not have pulled this movie to watch if it had not had Anthony Hopkins. His participation was for me a guarantee of nuance and value, and the movie proved to be all that “A Thoughtful Customer” discusses.
