Gary I. Wilson: G.I. Wilson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel and combat veteran with 33 years of military service and several years of experience in law enforcement-emergency services. He is a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), Marine Corps Intelligence Association (MCIA), Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS), FBI Infragard Program, Naval Intelligence Professionals (NIP), Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP), Disabled American Veterans (DAV), Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), Military Order of World Wars, Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP), Forensic Expert Witness Association (FEWA), and serves on the Board of Directors for Bossov Ballet Theatre, San Diego County Crime Stoppers, and Palomar College Education for Heroes Foundation. He is widely published in professional journals, appears on national television, radio, and in documentaries. He coauthored a 1989 professional paper that coined the term “fourth generation warfare (4GW).” He has BA in psychology from the State University of New York at Albany and MA in Bushiness and Organizational Security Management from Webster University. He is currently pursing another graduate degree in forensic psychology. Personal military awards include the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, and several Combat Action Ribbons.
Haitians live in a make-shift camp close to the airport. Port au Prince Haiti was rocked by a massive earthquake, Tuesday January 12, devastating the city and leaving thousands dead. Photo Marco Dormino
31 December 2010
FILE – In this Nov. 13, 2010 file photo, an ambulance worker prepares to remove the corpse of a man lying dead in a portable bathroom of a refugee camp in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear. Photo: Ramon Espinosa / AP
5.0 out of 5 stars Innovative and courageous social science
June 8, 2009
Eric Wilson and Tim Lindsey (eds)
In this recent volume by Pluto Press, Eric Wilson (Monash University) has assembled an all-stars team of politologists with the objective of changing the face of social analysis. This effort stems from the urgency to redefine the conceptual spaces within which we perforce corral our daily experience as citizens of what has become, in fact, an international polity of overwhelming, as well as highly disquieting, complexity. This is not at all to say, however, that the project limits itself to adding “epicycles,” as it were, to the Ptolemaic vulgate of British constitutionalism–i.e., the standard model of the “Liberal State”–which has imposed itself as the sole lens through which one is to contemplate the social dynamics for every single political reality of this world.
Government of the Shadows (GOS) represents in this regard an honest and brave swerve away from the mainstream in two fundamental respects.
First, it wishes to rethink political science entirely, by rejecting definitively the puritanical dichotomization of society into its predominant and “clean” edifice versus the latter's more or less corrupt “covert netherworld” (p. 228)–the prescriptive implication of conventional analysis being that delinquents need only be jailed, and their activities repressed, as the given regime is in the meantime steered (hopefully) toward the eventual and complete assimilation of Liberal institutions, which will naturally cure it of the criminal deviancy.
Second, and no less important, this project seeks to re-endow the movement for social justice of a unity of intent and of thought, which has lately been shattered by an excessive methodological preoccupation with multiplicity and diversity. By denouncing with reason and cogency the inequities suffered by a majority of innocents–throughout our recent history and all over the world–at the hands of identifiable, responsible parties within the power apparatuses in connivance with the world's mafias, and by ordering all such phenomenological mass into theory, this book, as a collective endeavor, acts as a vigorous reminder that realistic sociological analysis is also very much an instrument of pacific dissent. In this sense, GOS stands as a first and decisive installment of a modern anti-oligarchic theory.
To compass the reality of modern power games in its full spectrum, GOS innovates by proposing the new discipline of “parapolitics,” defined in Robert Cribb's introductory as “the study of criminal sovereignty, of criminals and sovereigns behaving as criminals in a systematic way” (p. 8).
Phenomenal Overview, Timely, the One Book to Buy If…
September 12, 2009
David Gordon
I read in threes and fours on any given topic, and in some ways I regret getting to this book last, but on the other hand, having read the other books below first, it makes me appreciate, and be willing to certify, that this one book is the one to buy if you only want to read one book on the topic.
This DVD was recommended to me by one of the Amazonians that follows my reivews, and as I often do with intelligent recommendations, I bought it.
The movie is both brilliant and funny. The stage setting is incredibly cool. The minds behind this movie have brought us an absolutely first rate combination of great actors depicting stupidity in the future, of “future” scenes that are both complex and credible, and of an outcome that is rather endearing.
It depicts what happens when the smart people put off having babies (by all means including abortion), and the poor less educated people, for whatever reason, keep having babies.
Information Operations (IO) is improperly defined by most as being technical in nature. It is not. Properly understood, IO should cover the totality of information in all its forms, and Human Intelligence (HUMINT) is the primary player. Below is a fine CRS report on this topic from an electronic point of view.
CRS IO EW Cyber
The Special Operations Command (SOCOM) gets it. They like to say:
“Secret intelligence is 10% of all-source intelligence; and all-source intelligence is 10% of Information Operations.”
Below are links to our HUMINT article and to the book on INFORMATION OPERATIONS: All Information, All Languages, All the Time.
Practical Manifesto for Preservation of *Value* in Nature,
February 27, 2002
Edward O. Wilson
Whereas the author's last really big book, “Consilience”, addressed the integral relationship between the knowledge offered by the humanities and that of the sciences (too often isolated and out of context), this book brings together political economy and nature.It is more easily readable than his more heavily foot-noted and astonishingly deep earlier work, but all the more valuable for its smooth overview of why life on the rest of the planet matters to the American heartland; why we must deal with the limits of food production and control population (both in terms of numbers and in terms of consumption per capita).
The heart of the book, for me, can be found in three profound numbers–numbers that we must all appreciate:
Value of the Ecosystem/Cost to Replace: $33 trillion per year in increased Gross National Product (GNP)–and presumably everything would be artificially recreated.
One-Time Cost of Fund for Preserving Nature: $24-72 billion one-time funding. His numbers vary from $24 billion (one -time) to preserve 800,000 square kilometers already under protection, to $28 billion to preserve a (different?) representative sample. The bottom line: for a one-time $100 billion investment, 25% of what the US spends on its military *every* year, we could, at our own expense, save the world.
Subsidies for Unsound Acts Against Nature: $2 trillion per year and rising ($2000 per American alone–this refers to energy, water, deforestation, and agricultural subsidies that encourage and perpetuate unsound acts against nature as well as unneeded exploitation–one example: $20 billion a year in subsidies for fishing–this is the difference between the actual value of $100 billion and the lower subsidized revenues of $80 billion a year).
Wilson's book, in combination with those by Brian Czech and L. O. Stromberg, is in my view a capstone endeavor that moves the environment to the forefront of any intelligent person's agenda. As he concludes, we have entered the century of the environment–we must save it or lose it.
