The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The 9-11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 26 July 2004. As found on Page 23 in the Summary and Page 413 within Chapter 13, “How to Do It? A different Way of Organizing the Government.”
See also: Search: The Future of OSINT [is M4IS2-Multinational]
Continue reading “Graphic: 9-11 Commission Open Source Agency”
Heads set to roll as Obama goes on attack over security failures that allowed Christmas Day bomber on to plane
A senior aide said Obama would seek accountability at the highest levels for the failure, a remark some observers took to mean that heads would roll.
The terrorist plot to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 exposed a near-catastrophic failure at every level of our government,' the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, John Boehner, said in a statement.
Phi Beta Iota: This would be a good time for President Barack Obama, President in name only, to either be the President and introduce the Electoral Reform Act of 2010, or to resign in ackinowledgement of the fact that he simiply is not up to the job because we live in a two-party tyranny that makes decisions on the basis of nakedly amoral partisan interests, not the public interest. If he also introduced the Smart Nation – Safe Nation Act, with a nod of respect to Congressman Rob Simmons, then (R-CT-02) and today the challenger to Wall Street fixer Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), he would instantly restore the integrity of the Constitution, the Republic, and the US Government.
The FACT is, as we have observed in so many books, articles, chapters, briefs, and postings over the course of 21 years, that we have a corrupt national intelligence “system,” a corrupt national security acquisition & policy “system,” a corrupt (non-existent) Whole of Governance “system,” and underlying all three, a corrupt electoral system that excludes a majority of the eligible voters and their eligible candidates. We need the four reforms, or a Second American Revolution. The Paradigms of Failure are multiple sucking chest wounds.
We do not lack for knowledge of what to do. HUNDREDS of authorities are on record with good ideas that have not been implemented (e.g. the Aspin-Brown Commission). We lack for INTEGRITY in acknowledging reality and getting a grip on all that we need to do that is markedly different from the past.
We predict that President Obama will do something really stupid, such as fire Blair (who is non-partisan) and promote partisan Panetta to his maximum level of incompetence, while ignoring the reality, as we pointed out in ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000), that firing the engineer does not change the train built to run on a single track between Moscow and DC into what we really need–10,000 open source bicyles, 1,000 open source motorcycles, and 100 assorted small-size secret cars, most of them with multinational passengers. What is new is that Homeland Security was built on the old train model, and is just as useless. The USA today is on the cusp of a historic era where we can stick with the simple-minded Weberian stove-pipes of the past, Epoch A command & control “central planning,” or we can ride the wave and embrace bottom-up Epoch B collective intelligence and distributed resilience. From where we sit, no one in Congress or the White House reads or thinks–they are all on auto-pilot, and their definition of progress is to take that next step over the cliff.
The truth at any cost reduces all other costs. We're not there.
See also:
Journal: Director of National Intelligence Alleges….
Journal: Death of CIA Personnel in Afghanistan
Journal: The Demise of US Intelligence Qua Brains
Journal: Underpants Bomber Shines Light on Naked USG–Without Four Reforms, USA Locked in Place
The future of OSINT is M4IS2.
The future of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is Multinational, Multifunctional, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing & Sense-Making (M4IS2).
The following, subject to the approval of Executive and Congressional leadership, are suggested hueristics (rules of thumb):
Rule 1: All Open Source Information (OSIF) goes directly to the high side (multinational top secret) the instant it is received at any level by any civilian or military element responsive to global OSINT grid. This includes all of the contextual agency and mission specific information from the civilian elements previously stove-piped or disgarded, not only within the US, but ultimately within all 90+ participating nations.
Rule 2: In return for Rule 1, the US IC agrees that the Department of State (and within DoD, Civil Affairs) is the proponent outside the wire, and the sharing of all OSIF originating outside the US IC is at the discretion of State/Civil Affairs without secret world caveat or constraint. OSIF collected by US IC elements is NOT included in this warrant.
Continue reading “Search: The Future of OSINT [is M4IS2-Multinational]”
This article by two young scholars is a very good one, very provocative and persuasive. It lacks reference to other giants that have gone before, but stands as the best effort we have seen since WIRED did its own cover story on alternative and renewable energies in 2001, coming out the very week that Dick Cheney was meeting secretly with Enron and Exxon to discuss the elective war on Iraq. Also available from the lead author:
Online interactive version (link)
More detailed analysis (pdf)
E&ES article on ranking energy solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security (link)
Report on matching hourly and peak demand by combining different renewables (pdf)
October 30, 2009 Presentation (pdf)
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Phi Beta Iota: We are often irritated by the young who represent their triumphant ideas as if arrived at by immaculate conception. No discussion of this topic is credible without reference to, at a minimum, Buckminster Fuller, Herman Daly, and Paul Hawken, among many others. Below are just three books among the many we have received pertaining to sustainable design, zero waste, and green to gold, and the most recent book to put all of this into proper perspective.
Review: Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Review: Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
Review: The Resilient Earth–Science, Global Warming and the Future of Humanity
If one takes the “battlefield” to include all challenges, not just the challenge of a battle in a singular time and place, then this search is the mother of all searches.
We like to use the analogy of sailboat racing, something we learned from a video, DVD: THE ART OF RACING SAILING. This DVD begins with an inspection of the hull of the sailboat out of the water and the point is that the race is often won or lost BEFORE THE RACE EVEN BEGINS. If you have failed to assure a correct hull; if you have failed to train, equip, and organize the right forces for the right mission, if you have failed to understand the historical, cultural, and geographical reality you are entering into a context with; then no amount of excellence on the field itself will prevail.
Continue reading “Search: Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield”
Police chiefs endorse anti-terror community watch
By EILEEN SULLIVAN and P. SOLOMON BANDA (AP)
4 October 2009
DENVER — A store clerk's curiosity about why Najibullah Zazi was buying large quantities of beauty supply products indicated that something about the transaction wasn't quite right — and it's an example of the kind of citizen vigilance that can combat terror, a police commander said Saturday.
Phi Beta Iota: This new initiative is precisely as recommended by Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02), then a very active member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, and author of the Foreword to the book, The Smart Nation Act: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest. Included in his vision is a 411 number for calling in suspicious information, and a similar Internet address that delivers the information to the right precinct. Congressman Simmons has always been a decade or more ahead of the government bureaucracy in recognizing the value of first Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), of which he is the only Member pioneer, and then Public Intelligence in the Public Interest, of which is also the sole Member pioneer.
Pushes the Re-Set Button on Both Gore and LomborgRight up front this book, read crossing the Atlantic from Madrid with a bad case of bronchitis, forces me to go back and downgrade my reviews of everything by Al Gore, and insert an update with apology and revisit for the work of The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World whose new book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (Vintage) I am buying today as part of my apology. In the process of just doing that, I discovered Lomborg's edited work, Global Crises, Global Solutions and the first two words I saw, “Copenhagen Consensus,” sold me. Denmark is one of a tiny handful of “smart nations” and pioneered the citizen wisdom council concept that Jim Rough writes about in Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People.
Opening quote on page 5: “Fedor Dostoevsky once said, `A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else.” What an epitaph for partisan governance based on lies.
Before I lay out my fly-leaf notes, a comment spanning all the books I have read:
Continue reading “Review: The Resilient Earth–Science, Global Warming and the Future of Humanity”
