CONCEPT: Intelligence

Intelligence: In safety and "security" terms, as broadly conceived -- and, by extension, outside of the field of psychology -- intelligence generally refers to any kind of information or set of data considered crucial to maintaining the status quo (and related advantages), overcoming threats to it, and/or gaining actionable advantage over identified barriers to desired goals. In a much-quoted passage, Stephen Hawking, leaning toward the psychological view and away from the "security" perspective, sees intelligence rather differently -- as "the ability to adapt to change". 

From the safety and "security" perspectives -- that is, in the field of emergency and disaster management, public safety and health, and among others -- intelligence refers to any information, privileged or open-sourced, which gives managers marked advantage over likely, impending, or on-going threats to humans and all things of value to them as individuals and collectivities -- that is, family, belongings, property, community, institutions, ecosystems, society at large and country. 

"Intelligence gathering" has many labels and involves a variety of activities, including: Preparedness, precaution, data gathering (or mining), business intelligence, surveillance, monitoring, SWOT analysis, GIS, observation, investigation, probing, espionage, spying and secret service. Importantly, "Intelligence Communities" of all kinds are quite alive to the insight embedded in the adage that information is power. Interestingly, moreover, Artificial Intelligence (AI), both as a concept and bundle of practices and applications, spans both psychology and safety/"security". 

THE THREE DIALECTICS: Dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian Question

The dialectical approach is an ever-present route to a deeper understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian question. It seems to me that this approach becomes increasingly attractive and fruitful with the passage of time – that is, with each passing decade. We may even add that its revelations (I use that term consciously) are generationally packaged in a broad sense; which means that we have three sequential packages so far (that is, since 1948) to worry over.

There are indeed three dialectics, which intertwine, in the Israeli-Palestinian Question; and their intertwining is itself of a dialectical nature.

The first of these is what I will call the Occupation Dialectic -- the Territorial Dialectic, if you wish. Here, the struggle/confrontation/ hostilities/contradiction or thesis-antithesis conflict, now on and now off, revolves around historical rights to territory and unfettered settlement, self-determination, settlement

The second is the Conversation (or Voice) Dialectic. Issues here are couched in highly emotive historical, cultural and religious terms. Each side invokes history, and even chronology, in support of its arguments. The Palestinians want their own independent state, with Jerusalem included. The Israelis want secure borders, in which its citizens are safe from remotely or otherwise instigated and organized attacks -- by PLO originally and Hizbollah and the like now. The Palestinians view the Israelis as an illegitimate occupying force. Israelis insist there is nowhere they are going,  

The third is the Action (or Power) Dialectic. Technology, particularly the technology of war and of surveillance, plays a key role here – and may yet be the decider, the Endgame factor.  And the game may not quite end in the way the protagonists typically frame the end.

[First written on January 5, 2009. To be expanded upon]

Remembering the Chinese Earthquake of May 2008

As we mark the first anniversary of the Great Sichuan Earthquake of May12, 2008, and as we remember rather more particularly what happened in and around the city of Chengdu (capital of Sichuan Province), there are images to look at (or look at again), and there are lessons to learn and re-learn:

1. Two Photo Specials:
a) Click Here for the first photo special
b) Click Here for the second photo special

2. A YouTube Footage, in which a most severe quake appears doubly so from its "shaking" effect on a CCTV (surveillance) camera whose routine and continuous gaze captures the quake's high moment -- as well as the real-time drama of (unscripted?) self-evacuation by apprehensive "office workers": Click Here

3. Click Here for lessons to learn and re-learn, and hazard/disaster classifications to ponder, as certain observers and I see them. Besides, of course, the great toll in human life and property, the phenomenon of quake lakes , and how it was responded to, as well as the ease with which apparently modern schoolhouses were, unlike older and more "traditional" ones, nearly everywhere flattened, were to me among the most attention-grabbing aspects of the Sichual Earthquake.

4. Click Here for a conversation about the environmental challenges that the Great Sichuan Earthquake wrought.