15-04-2010, 09:15 PM
The attitudes present within the leadership (currently Obama and Hilary) are particularly annoying. I take all this as propaganda supportive of the recent nuclear meetings and initiatives; the suggestion is that it will be a nuke smaller than that used in Hiroshima, thus presumably the consequences will be limited to one neighborhood, or maybe just a few blocks in either direction, followed on by reports that the authorities in Georgia have stopped a shipment of plutonium. I'm sure the propaganda game has advanced even more, but I haven't yet begun my daily tour of the Internet.
Frankly, the Federal government has done more damage in its cavalier approach to urban centers and housing [see Catherine Austin Fitts' works] than a small nuke could accomplish; they will look at such an event merely as urban renewal.
What grates me especially is the throw-away line by Obama that disaster response-ability belongs first at the local level (he's right), yet his agencies treat it with the opposite approach.
References are available for what follows. I am not blowing my own horn so much as saying that the information is out there, yet little community organizing is happening in these matters. The curriculum, the drills, the technology, etc. come from the top down, and then (as in Katrina), they pull out at the critical moment, and they fail to allow communities to work independently. FEMA and Homeland Security (as suggested by Ed Encho's work on MainCore and the many articles by "Anti-Fascist Calling") is too busy preparing for other things. Sophisticated computer simulation is used more as a predictive, controlling tool -- how to pull off capers -- than it is as an educational tool. The LSU project involving Madhi Beriwal to simulate the impact of a Category V hurricane in New Orleans was chopped off at the knees at its conclusive coalescent moment because FEMA refused to spend $15K (at the height of the GWOT militarism) to have its functionaries attend and print and distribute and play their own role. The hurricane arrived shortly thereafter. The SAIC-related efforts out at Purdue and Los Alamos are focused on pandemics and other things.
There is a vast treasure trove of work done by Enrico Quarantelli and his teams at the Disaster Research Center; I have quoted extensively from some of his monographs. There was, in earlier years, a fine effort by the American Red Cross to express in educational terms the spatial realities of incident and response, since incorporated into my further work. I wrote an article and proposal that drew the curious attention of someone in a cubicle down at Langley because it drew on the wisdom and research of then-secret TRADOC simulation training; he went away satisfied when I quoted him the publications I had read. When, decades later, I was invited to an interview with computer programmers working for the creators of that effort (but now in a separate company, working on full-range distributed-to- desktop 24/7/365 all-force war games, and with DARPA funding), the project director tossed a copy of that article on the table and pointed to its masthead and said "check the publication date". The Department of Justice gave my proposal to an interactive game design company called BreakAway Games which created "Incident Commander" but then took it into a setting where only approved people could participate in that learning environment (but not me). I think they neglected to understand that I had withheld, in my publication, a critical "gear" in the design -- a master key, if you will --- because the game appeared to have become a kludge. I did get that job, by the way, and designed the inner workings of a computer game whose matrix or engine forced people to communicate with one another so as to learn critical information. During that same time period, I was in touch with trainers* for the elite military units known as CBRNE teams, now known as "Consequence Management Response Force". The CCMRF is the CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear and High-Yield Explosives) Consequence Management Response Force.
In 2008:
http://www.army.mil/-news/2008/09/15/124...n-command/
In 2009: http://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2009/09/02/
http://armedservices.house.gov/pdfs/TUTC...072809.pdf
So we know the Feds have the capability -- equipped, trained, pre-positioned on American soil.
[*The event was memorable to me because I had discussed with them some of the materials in my performance psychology compendium; the little ditty on teamwork, grpahite and diamond posted elsewhere in "Other" was of particular interest to them. ]
[/FONT]
Some later, when DARPA and the USDA axed the project, and after the cluster**** that is known as Katrina, I advised a physician friend of mine not to travel 750 miles to New Orleans to lend a hand. We had watched together, virtually, the damn storm march across the Gulf (it was like watching a professional curveball in slow motion) and knew what was happening (and what was not happening). I told her of the concept known as "dysfunctional mass convergence" (a Quarantelli observation), and she started asking more questions. After a two-hour conversation on Skype, she told me I needed to commit to paper what I had taught her. I told her I had already done that and no one paid attention; she said "do it again and make it stick". I wrote a 17-page thesis and she told me in no uncertain terms it was a piece of ____ and told me to go back to work. I spent three months of my time working and kneading something that eventually turned into a 57-page white paper on how, in the Internet age, to develop meaningful community development and planning. It was published by the International Association of Emergency Managers and it is used (in a dismissive, adjunctive way) inside a FEMA curriculum as an example of a "bottom-up" approach versus the preferred and almost universal "top-down" approach of the Federal government. The direct example of my earlier work -- the real response in a well-known industrial explosion incident in which 27 burn/trauma victims were extracted out to life-saving tertiary care in under an hour -- is taught within the FEMA as well, but they still don't see or understand what took place and how... the effective use of time/space/comprehension/communication/coordination within a rapidly-evolving, ever-changing event that moves across that same space and time.
Frankly, the Federal government has done more damage in its cavalier approach to urban centers and housing [see Catherine Austin Fitts' works] than a small nuke could accomplish; they will look at such an event merely as urban renewal.
What grates me especially is the throw-away line by Obama that disaster response-ability belongs first at the local level (he's right), yet his agencies treat it with the opposite approach.
References are available for what follows. I am not blowing my own horn so much as saying that the information is out there, yet little community organizing is happening in these matters. The curriculum, the drills, the technology, etc. come from the top down, and then (as in Katrina), they pull out at the critical moment, and they fail to allow communities to work independently. FEMA and Homeland Security (as suggested by Ed Encho's work on MainCore and the many articles by "Anti-Fascist Calling") is too busy preparing for other things. Sophisticated computer simulation is used more as a predictive, controlling tool -- how to pull off capers -- than it is as an educational tool. The LSU project involving Madhi Beriwal to simulate the impact of a Category V hurricane in New Orleans was chopped off at the knees at its conclusive coalescent moment because FEMA refused to spend $15K (at the height of the GWOT militarism) to have its functionaries attend and print and distribute and play their own role. The hurricane arrived shortly thereafter. The SAIC-related efforts out at Purdue and Los Alamos are focused on pandemics and other things.
There is a vast treasure trove of work done by Enrico Quarantelli and his teams at the Disaster Research Center; I have quoted extensively from some of his monographs. There was, in earlier years, a fine effort by the American Red Cross to express in educational terms the spatial realities of incident and response, since incorporated into my further work. I wrote an article and proposal that drew the curious attention of someone in a cubicle down at Langley because it drew on the wisdom and research of then-secret TRADOC simulation training; he went away satisfied when I quoted him the publications I had read. When, decades later, I was invited to an interview with computer programmers working for the creators of that effort (but now in a separate company, working on full-range distributed-to- desktop 24/7/365 all-force war games, and with DARPA funding), the project director tossed a copy of that article on the table and pointed to its masthead and said "check the publication date". The Department of Justice gave my proposal to an interactive game design company called BreakAway Games which created "Incident Commander" but then took it into a setting where only approved people could participate in that learning environment (but not me). I think they neglected to understand that I had withheld, in my publication, a critical "gear" in the design -- a master key, if you will --- because the game appeared to have become a kludge. I did get that job, by the way, and designed the inner workings of a computer game whose matrix or engine forced people to communicate with one another so as to learn critical information. During that same time period, I was in touch with trainers* for the elite military units known as CBRNE teams, now known as "Consequence Management Response Force". The CCMRF is the CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear and High-Yield Explosives) Consequence Management Response Force.
In 2008:
http://www.army.mil/-news/2008/09/15/124...n-command/
In 2009: http://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2009/09/02/
http://armedservices.house.gov/pdfs/TUTC...072809.pdf
So we know the Feds have the capability -- equipped, trained, pre-positioned on American soil.
[*The event was memorable to me because I had discussed with them some of the materials in my performance psychology compendium; the little ditty on teamwork, grpahite and diamond posted elsewhere in "Other" was of particular interest to them. ]
[/FONT]
Some later, when DARPA and the USDA axed the project, and after the cluster**** that is known as Katrina, I advised a physician friend of mine not to travel 750 miles to New Orleans to lend a hand. We had watched together, virtually, the damn storm march across the Gulf (it was like watching a professional curveball in slow motion) and knew what was happening (and what was not happening). I told her of the concept known as "dysfunctional mass convergence" (a Quarantelli observation), and she started asking more questions. After a two-hour conversation on Skype, she told me I needed to commit to paper what I had taught her. I told her I had already done that and no one paid attention; she said "do it again and make it stick". I wrote a 17-page thesis and she told me in no uncertain terms it was a piece of ____ and told me to go back to work. I spent three months of my time working and kneading something that eventually turned into a 57-page white paper on how, in the Internet age, to develop meaningful community development and planning. It was published by the International Association of Emergency Managers and it is used (in a dismissive, adjunctive way) inside a FEMA curriculum as an example of a "bottom-up" approach versus the preferred and almost universal "top-down" approach of the Federal government. The direct example of my earlier work -- the real response in a well-known industrial explosion incident in which 27 burn/trauma victims were extracted out to life-saving tertiary care in under an hour -- is taught within the FEMA as well, but they still don't see or understand what took place and how... the effective use of time/space/comprehension/communication/coordination within a rapidly-evolving, ever-changing event that moves across that same space and time.
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"