From Contributing Editor Berto Jongman.

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The Moon is Down in Afghanistan, Flies Have Conquered Flypaper

The continuation of attacks on US soldiers by uniformed Afghan soldiers and policemen is an expression of popular hatred for the occupation regime and military invasion forces which brings to mind John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Moon Is Down. Steinbeck fully captures the inner agony, shame and moral guilt of the German occupying forces in Norway whereas the flies eventually conquer the flypaper ~ as they most assuredly will in Afghanistan

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EXTRACT

The flies are beginning to conquer the flypaper in Afghanistan , as they did in Vietnam and Martin makes the same analogy ~ “There is a stench of decomposition over the whole US-NATO enterprise in Afghanistan. US troops are being drawn down, US equipment removed, US subsidies cut back, and the US collaborators in the Karzai regime are packing their bags—usually stuffed with cash—and checking their passports. Kabul today increasingly recalls Saigon in the final months and weeks before the collapse of the US-backed puppet regime of South Vietnam.”

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Robert David STEELE Vivas

ROBERT STEELE:  I personally communicated to Jim Clapper, then Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, the importance of understanding “cognitive dissonance” within the minds and souls of our dedicated military and civilian personnel.  There is a great deal more to the craft of intelligence than going through the motions pumping money and being complacent about policy, acquisition, and operations decisions that are at best insane and at worst criminally treasonous.  Now that I have an SSBI completed by OPM on 15 March 2012  I have applied for multiple positions at the 13-15 level and I am actively seeking righteous employment in the HUMINT/CI arena.  It’s time we got serious about bringing US Intelligence into the 21st Century.  General Mike Flynn will fail — I have seen the plans — in two years when he moves on there will be a legacy of paper and not much else.  DHS and SOCOM are off the rails (based on open sources–we can only imagine what a full audit would reveal).  We appear to have the makings of a very expensive global to local inter-agency cluster fuss such as I have not seen since my tour in Panama.  Have brain (and integrity), will travel.

PS  Please do not hold it against me that retired foreign intelligence chiefs like what I do.  I am no longer in touch with them and I  believe their good opinion should be considered a feature not a flaw, assuming my views on the urgency of M4IS2 are eventually accepted as the foundation for a vastly more effective US IC.

Steele book profile 2012 Low Footprint

CV Robert David Steele 17 August 2012

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Glasses provide live language translation

Here’s the scene: you’re traveling, and you walk into a little restaurant and the menu is entirely in a language you don’t understand, without pictures. You’ve got a couple of choices. You can leave, and try to find a place with English translations. You can try to hack your way through a conversation with the waiter, who also doesn’t speak your language. Or, you can point randomly at the menu and live with the consequences.

Well, in the future there will be another, better, answer. Live, realtime translation built into your glasses. Enter: Project Glass. British hacker and DIYer Will Powell has built a pair of glasses that can (albeit roughly) project a translation of your conversation onto your glasses. Here’s what it looks like:

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Michel Bauwens

Peer-to-peer production and the coming of the commons | Red Pepper

Michel Bauwens examines how collaborative, commons-based production is emerging to challenge capitalism. Below, Hilary Wainwright responds

Capitalism in its present form is facing limits, especially resource limits, and in spite of the rapid growth of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) economies, is undergoing a process of decomposition. The question is whether the new proto-mode can generate the institutional capacity and the alliances able to break the political power of the old order.

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John Robb

Printing Weapons at Home for Fun and Mayhem

It’s now possible to print functional weapons at home.  This is going to progress rapidly now.

Think: global file sharing of designs for servicable weapons, from pistols on up to ?, that can be printed at home.  What you can print — from the materials to the size/quality of the object to the completeness (snap together construction) — is already moving forward quickly.  The weapons effort will just be along for the ride.

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“HaveBlue” has tested the first “printed” firearm and it works.  Here’s his site, but it’s VERY slow.   It didn’t blow up in his face.

Granted, he used an older professional grade Stratys 3D printer to do it.   Printeres are much better now and handle many new materials.

Haveblue has been testing the “market” for distributing CAD/CAM weapons designs.  His post of an earlier design to Thingverse (a site for 3D printing design patterns) led to a change in their policy (although it hasn’t been enforced).

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Haveblue’s work is based on the Solidworks files available for download from the CNCguns site.  Here’s his earlier project:

Phi Beta Iota:  Violence should be a last resort — publics today are far from fully exploiting the use of public intelligence in the  public interest.  However, it bears mention that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King were quite clear:  non-violence is preferable to violence, but violence is preferable to continued oppression.  Most governments, including the European governments still favoring banks over people and refusing to honor the Iceland model, no longer represent their publics and have lost all legitimacy in the eyes of many.  We pray they will awaken to the reality that those governments that do not empower, protect, and respect the public, will ultimately be abolished.  In the meantime, they are merely ignored.

For reasons unknown to us, Google search with source=phibetaiota are superior to internal Word Press searches.

Here are top three hits using the above formula.

Search: The Future of OSINT [is M4IS2-Multinational]

Open Source Agency: Executive Access Point

OSINT Generic (Category Table at Phi Beta Iota)

OSINT is passe.  Governments and vendors to government have wasted 20 years and perhaps 25 billion dollars in that time.   The refusal to focus on machine-speed translation and inserting geospatial attributes at all points of collection across all collection disciplines, while also refusing to accept multinational human sources unemcumbered by the idiocy of the clearance bureaucracy, have left governments in the stone age.  The next big leap is going to be M4IS2 that routes around governments or — if governments reconnect to their integrity — embraces governments as beneficiaries of M4IS2 (they will never be the benefactors, but one Smart Nation could transform everything overnight).  The biggest change in our own thinking has been the realization that education, intelligence, and research must be reinvented together, and that Open Source Everything is the only agile, acalable, shareable, and affordable means of achieving the necessary pervasive transformations.

See Also:

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You can get yourself a DVD at http://store.2600.com/honunidv.html and experience the HOPE conference in the comfort of your own home (no DRM or region restrictions).

HOPE 9 Schedule     .     HOPE 9 Speakers

See Also:

Event: 13-15 July 2012 NYC Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) Number Nine

2012 Robert Steele at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE)

Sepp Hasslberger

Solar Ice Maker: No Moving Parts, No Electricity

Josh Kilbourn

Here’s the Future of America

Writing from:  Aspen, CO.  I’m speaking/attending the National Geographic Environmental Conference (focus of the conference:  adapting to climate change).

I had the good fortune of sitting on a conference panel with Mayor Fetterman of Braddock, PA.

He’s a great bear of a guy (he makes me, at 6′ 1″ and well built, look small in comparison), but despite his size, he looked like he was slowly being crushed by the weight of the world when he showed up at the panel.

His story explained why.  He’s spent the last decade trying to save a storied American town, crushed by global economic and financial forces.  Forces that gutted a prosperous steel town of 18,000 with some historical treasures (e.g. the first Carnegie Library) and a thriving retail sector.

When Fetterman arrived in Braddock, the town was already in shambles.  The population had fallen to below 3,000 and gang crime was rampant.  In fact, the landscape of the town was so bleak, the town was used as a setting for the darkest apocalypse movie I’ve ever seen, “The Road“

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