The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Paul G. Gill
The Best in Its Time, Superceded by Marine Medicine, March 29, 2015
Dated but exceptional.
I have been so unhappy with the “standard” references such as Advanced First Aid Afloat that that I created my own informal study guide for offshore use, one page per item, description/diagnostics, treatment, and photo.
Continue reading “Review: The Onboard Medical Guide – First Aid and Emergency Medicine Afloat”
Peter Gill and Mark Phythian
4.0 out of 5 stars Best in Class Strongly Recommended, January 6, 2013
I am a huge fan of Peter Gill's work, and if you are looking for the best possible to reflect on intelligence as it is generally defined today (the province of governments and to a lesser extent the corporate world), this is both the most recent and the best book to get. I also recommend Mark Lowenthal's Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, 5th Edition.
Use Look Inside feature above to get a feel for the book. Of all the books I have reviewed, this is the one that comes closest to my own concept for a book I am working on now, and I very much like the manner in which the authors have organized the work, to include their section on “Why Does Intelligence Fail,” which happens to be what I have been focusing on since 1988.
Where the book fails, as do all books in this genre, is in not acknowledging that intelligence is decision support defined by its outputs, not its inputs. This is a book that is still state-centric, assumes secrecy is a dominant force, and that policy is the intended beneficiary. It does at least make a stab at acknowledging corporate intelligence, but see my list of recommended readings below. More properly understood, decision-support is a craft that can be applied by all eight “tribes” of intelligence (academic, civil society, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental/non-profit), and our greatest challenge today is the need to move beyond the government-secret-policy view of intelligence, and instead advance toward M4IS2 (see the graphic above with the book cover), Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making.
Continue reading “Review: Intelligence in an Insecure World”
Here are a few of the BIG lies used to support the status quo. What we need, rather urgently, is a counter-narrative
LIE 1. The earth is an open system with infinite supplies and sinks;
POSSIBLE TRUTH: Earth is a closed system, changes that used to take 10,000 years now take three, humanity is “peaking” the entire system.
LIE 2. Everything must be monetized;
POSSIBLE TRUTH: Money is an exchange unit and an information unit; in the absence of holistic analytics and “true cost” transparency, mony is actually a toxic means of concentrating wealth and depriving communities of their own resources (e.g. land).
LIE 3. The extreme unregulated free market is the only option for a modern economy;
POSSIBLE TRUTH: Information asymmetries and “rule by secrecy” have been clearly documented–the free market is neither free nor fair. A modern economy needs to be transparent, resilient, and hence rooted in the local.
Continue reading “USA: Thirteen Big Lies — Needed Counter-Narrative”
The documentary film “Inside Job” makes it perfectly clear that there is only one party in DC: The Wall Street Party. With five Wall Street minders for every elected official in DC, why are we surprised? There are of course a few exceptions, but their legislative record suggest they are essentially ineffective.
Phi Beta Iota: Reprinted from Facebook with permission of the author.
Saturday 16 Oct 2010
Commentary by: Jock Gill
How are we going to reduce Vermont’s carbon footprint and at the same time protect Vermont’s agricultural heritage and family farms, create local jobs, and stimulate small business formation? Is utility-scale wind part of the solution? I would suggest the answer is no.
For a number of reasons, utility-scale turbines are not the best and most appropriate tool to reduce Vermont’s carbon footprint; while they may be effective in other states, they are a misfit for our landscape. First of all, it’s a tiny drop in a big bucket. Electrical generation in Vermont contributes less than 1 percent of Vermont’s carbon foot print; heating with fuel oil and burning transportation fuels account for the overwhelming percentage. It would be far more effective, for instance, to increase dramatically the number of homes that heat with safe, clean, automatic biomass heat, using pellets of wood or grass grown and pelleted in Vermont.
Second, even if we wanted to focus on reducing our carbon footprint for electricity, we should look to a resource far more abundant in Vermont than wind: sun. Vermont’s wind resources are estimated to be about 1/620 of its solar resources. It would take less than 7,000 acres of Vermont’s agricultural lands to site enough solar electric generation to meet ALL of Vermont’s current power needs. This amounts to just 0.6% of Vermont’s 1.2 million acres of open farmland. And all of this with no bulldozing, no blasting, no noise pollution or health hazards, and no 400 foot towers strung along our mountain ridgelines.
Phi Beta Iota: The following is borrowed from a colleague commenting on the full article above. We agree.
Let the battle begin! Jock's analysis of the problematic nature of siting industrial-scale windmills in VT raises a much larger political/philosophical question about what kind of energy future we should be investing in. The forces of the current centralized power station/gigantic distribution network system will naturally favor very large-scale sourcing for renewables, and the mainstream media are quite comfortable framing the discussion of renewables as if a simple overhaul of the sources of our electricity sources were the only issue on the table.
How many times have you read that some area of the country (usually in the south-western desert or more recently along a north-south axis in the farm belt states) could supply all of the electrical demand of the United States? This vision is very common, and assumes that we will also be building of thousands and thousands of miles of high-voltage distribution lines. And where will those lines be built? Is there any doubt that federal and state governments will eagerly put their powers of eminent domain to work in order to run these lines wherever they want them to go, with “energy security” justifying their work?
Supporters of the gigantic renewables model believe that solving our energy problems involves no changes in business-as-usual beyond changing the source of the energy used to power everything else in today's global economy.
But if we take Jock's arguments about the unsuitability of gigantic renewables for the state of Vermont seriously, we have to ask whether the same arguments do not carry the same weight wherever we might turn. If we believe that this argument can be generalized, then the challenge to the current system goes far beyond the question of what technologies we happen to be using to generate electricity. Gigantic renewables do not threaten the current distribution of political power; the localized model inherent in Jock's approach is a profound threat to that same distribution of political power. Building gigantic windmills is a fairly trivial problem compared with moving to a truly localized system.
Review: Escaping the Matrix–How We the People can change the world
Review: The Great Turning–From Empire to Earth Community
Review (Guest): Power Hungry–The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future
Review: Leave Us Alone–Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives
“I've been trickled on for thirty years. Tastes like piss.”
— Randall Head, attorney in Louisville, KY
This is the single best explanation of the raging anger in America today I have seen. Reagan voodoo economics sowed a bitter crop that we are reaping with a vengence today. And neither party seems to care or be willing to take corrective action. No wonder we have anger on the streets and in the ballot box. Frank Rich is right, it will not end with the mid-term elections. It will only end when we replace Reagan's magical thinking and its reality distortion field with a reality based economics with fairness as justice for all.
All this 3rd party stuff will not amount to a hill of bean if these 5 heresies are not converted into common wisdom that everyone knows and accepts:
1. We live in a closed system;
2. Corporate profits have trumped democracy for far too long;
3. Global Climate Disruption is a real game changer;
4. Caucasians will no longer run the casino and the country club
5. Knowledge will always be imperfect.
So long as we fail to modify our ‘narrative' to take these facts into account, it is unlikely we, or any third party, will be able to embrace the future with confidence. Any party, economics, or politics that must assert that these truths are heresies is, of course, then based on fiction and lies. That is why, amongst other things, they are intellectually bankrupt. As you may recall, I have been saying this about both parties since about 1993.
You might want to checkout the work of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minqi_Li
#5 is a killer as it is the force that drives the seven deadly sins.
So a third party, technology to the contrary not withstanding, will not matter until these heresies become truths. It is essential that we develop education, politics, and economics that are based on these truths. No third party I have heard of has even begun to tackle this very difficult challenge.
We are in the fix we are in because we deny these 5 truths and, as a consequence, live in a reality distortion field.
Phi Beta Iota: Brother Gill is correct, which is why we started funding this non-profit in 2006. Public intelligence in the public interest is the CRITICAL ingredient in moving beyond kum-ba-ya hand-holding and long sighs of Ommmm. Below the line we RECAP Third Party relevent-entries.
Continue reading “Reference: Third Party Bubble & Possibilities, RECAP”
Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous to Your Health (GQ)
Christopher Ketcham
Ever worry that that gadget you spend hours holding next to your head might be damaging your brain? Well, the evidence is starting to pour in, and it's not pretty. So why isn't anyone in America doing anything about it?
Phi Beta Iota: This is “old” news that is still news because neither the government nor the public actually pay attention. We've known since the 1980's that Soviet emission controls were ten times tougher than ours, and now in Afghanistan as we find UAVs and all other devices conflicting with each other across old “dumb” (assigned) spectrum, we are learning, AGAIN, why spectrum consciousness matters. Open Spectrum and smart devices are the way to go, along with public truth-telling about electromagnetic emissions as part of the “true cost” of all devices.
