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Item 1862 in Dakota Land, a Genocide Forgotten: How civilizational transformation can get lost in the fading rate of history(2008-06-26) Andregg, Michael M.1862 was a critical year in a process by which a land larger than many nations was transformed from one civilization to another. But the process was not a classic conquest easily marked in history books. Rather, it was a slower ‘digestion’ of over 20 million hectares of territory by one civilization accompanied by moments of true genocide or at least “ethnic cleansing” amidst much longer periods of very high death rates for one group and high birth rates and especially immigration rates for the other group. But this was sufficiently gradual that most historians did not record it on their lists of wars and other organized conflicts. I will discuss some extremely divergent views on what happened then. One reason they are so divergent is because the conflict of 1862 and its aftermath were extremely complex, with massacres on both sides, and with Indians working on both sides. Some whites fought to exterminate the Indians while others risked their lives to save them, and vice versa. Half-breeds of many kinds were caught in the middle, trying to survive a dramatic civilizational transformation that was occurring all around them. The result: In 1800, the territory now called Minnesota was 99%+ Indian, and by 1900 it was 99%+ whites of European descent.Item Administrative Reform to Overcome Institutional Racism: Exploring Government’s Trust Building Tactics to Renew Relationships with Community-based Organizations(2021-08) Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Sandfort, JodiInstitutional racism embedded in the existing public management practices has systematically created distrust between community-based organizations serving Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC). However, little is known about how the government could reform public bureaucracies to renew their relationship with these important community-based organizations. Through a process-oriented inductive study of Minnesota’s 2-Generation Policy Network, we find that government’s intentional tactics both inside the bureaucracy and with BIPOC community-based organizations allowed them to create new collaborative infrastructure that both changed organizational routines and built power to address racial inequities in the existing human service system. This study documents the importance of public managers’ intentionality in addressing the historical legacy that is an outgrowth of conventional practice and assessing their own identities to assess and challenge the mechanism of traditional, bureaucratic authority. Trust between the government and BIPOC community-based organizations needs to be earned and rebuilt.Item The Agenda for Dialogues among Civilizations should be Human Survival(2005-06) Andregg, Michael M.THE Agenda for Dialogues Among Civilizations Should be Human Survival Prepared for the ISCSC’s 34th conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA at the University of St. Thomas, June 9-11, 2005. By Michael Andregg, University of St. Thomas, mmandregg@stthomas.edu Abstract The first, and last item on my agenda for dialogues among civilizations is human survival. The prime reason is that this goal generates more cooperation and less argument than any other I have found. If we are to avoid the “clash” of civilizations that many fear, we should avoid angry “debates” about political or ideological issues. The core difference between a “clash” or a “debate” and a “dialogue” is style or tone. These are vague concepts, but profoundly important. Safe food, clean water, fuel for heating and fibers to wear or write on can be politicized (as can anything) but they are also the most universal human needs. Therefore they are also understood by the illiterate as well as by erudite elites. The goal of human survival promotes a positive tone that helps with the very hard work of finding viable solutions to the manifold challenges of our time. From this point of entry, 10,000 other topics can be discussed constructively, including contentious ones. The point is to establish more rapport between participants than often exists initially, by focusing on common ground before the more difficult issues of war, peace and politics inevitably emerge. Even religion and its varieties may be dialogued very constructively if rapport exists with some minimal empathy for the problems that other human beings face. Lacking this, if one starts with religion or politics by contrast, one too often encounters dogmatic views or demonization of the other, and constructive dialogue becomes nearly impossible. Here are some threats to human survival that might better be addressed by a “dialogue” instead of a great “debate” among the civilizations of the earth today. War should be obvious, particularly when weapons of mass destruction are considered. Energy, oil-based and otherwise, is a challenge of vast scale with huge consequences for all. Threats to human survival include the many environmental challenges and even catastrophes cited by the recent Report of the United Nations Department for Economic and Social Affairs, and forewarned by the Global 2000 Report to the President (of the United States, then Jimmy Carter) 25 years ago. They include religious extremism (or militant religion) and the challenges of how to preserve cultural and political diversity in an age of globalization. Each of those threats to physical or cultural survival includes many sub-topics, all of which benefit from a constructive attitude among those who seek solutions through dialogue as opposed to debate. Partisan bickering is the antithesis of this. So I say again that promoting this attitude is as important as any topic or line item on an agenda. No, it is more important than the intellectual elements on such lists of good things one might do.Item The Birth of Professional Ethics: Some Comparisons among Medicine, Law and Intelligence Communities(2008-02-22) Andregg, Michael M.Doctors in antiquity used leeches, herbs and shamanistic rituals to try to help their patients heal from the wounds and illnesses of life. Yet even in this long pre-scientific period, some felt a need to develop an ethos and codes of ethics specific to their craft. One goal was prestige, a social good of intangible but real value (especially when practitioners are ridiculed by many, common when medicine was young). Close behind was another goal, a privileged and eventually exclusive right to practice their craft commercially. As science and technology advanced, a third goal emerged. This was continuing professional education to meet a growing need for both technical competence and some systematic way to evaluate novel dilemmas that emerged as medicine became truly effective. The best examples of those dilemmas come from “test-tube babies,” but there are many other dilemmas like end of life issues when machines can sustain a brain-dead body, or access to intrinsically scarce resources like transplantable organs. The concept of a professional medical ethos was built upon more general ethics of the Greeks (and independently within the Chinese and Indian civilizations at least). Its earliest generally recognized form was the oath of Hippocrates. This served to identify special responsibilities to be assumed by those who would call themselves ‘professionals’ of the healing arts. Sometimes rights were included, but the responsibilities were primary to Hippocrates, like his famous injunction to first, “do no harm.” In addition to that he urged doctors to take care of mentors who trained them and to not dishonor the emerging profession by sexual acts with patients or their families, or by inducing abortion. American Law developed a variety of professional ethos over about 100 years, which is another long story. Intelligence professionals (a.k.a. 'spies') who desired to improve the reputation of 'the world's second oldest profession' began thinking about ethics for spies in the early 2000's, and created an International Intelligence Ethics Association in 2005 as part of a broader effort to "professionalize" what was, in practice, a craft. This paper attempts to integrate these three paths to thinking about codified "professional ethics" and records some of the early efforts in that direction among intelligence professionals and those who study them.Item Birth Rates Determine Life Expectancy in Theoretical Equilibrium Populations: Implications for political demography and conflict early warning(American Intelligence Journal, 2018-04) Andregg, Michael M.Executive Summary This paper examines implications for political demography of a theoretical population that is in complete equilibrium. By “complete equilibrium,” we mean that the population neither grows nor shrinks, there is neither immigration to nor emigration from it, and that the age structure has stabilized so that it no longer changes over time. These are all important elements of complete equilibrium, as opposed to stability in just absolute numbers. This condition is found in some natural populations of animals and plants, but it has not obtained in most human populations in recorded history. Reduced to basics, this theoretical population has the following characteristics: 1. In complete equilibrium populations, birth rates will equal death rates so the population neither grows nor shrinks. 2. In a complete equilibrium population, death rates determine life expectancy, expressible as: LE = 1000/DR. 3. Since, in a complete equilibrium population, birth rates equal death rates, this can also be expressed as: LE = 1000/BR. 4. This implies that fundamentally, birth rates determine life expectancy in complete equilibrium populations. This paper has two goals. The first is simply to check the accuracy of the theoretical formulas identified above. Since they are quite simple and likely accurate, I invite others to identify any errors. The second goal is at least as important. How do human populations evade this limiting outcome? Or do they really? I fear the short answer to these questions is a) genocide and war, and b) no, they do not really escape an iron law of biology. However, they often do displace the high death rates to marginal or weaker populations. If correct, this has significant implications for conflict early warning as illustrated by several real-world examples.Item Book Review of "Glimpses of Igbo Culture and Civilization"(International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, 2005-06) Andregg, Michael M.Book Review of: “Glimpses of Igbo Culture and Civilization,” 293 pgs. Edited by Okolie Animba, Computer Edge Publishers, Lagos Nigeria, 2000. This book is the proceedings from a Pan-Igbo National Seminar and workshop organized by a Cultural Heritage Center in Uwani, Enugu, Nigeria. So its overall academic quality, coherence and so forth are less than one might expect from pure research institutions. Many of the 14 authors are professors from 7 named universities, but some are headmen, chiefs, or other governmental officials. In a similar vein, the printing quality is not the best. However, those reservations noted, this book was a wealth of information on its intended subject, and while the authors were not all 100% pedigreed scholars, they were all very sincerely and earnestly trying to share the essences of Igbo life with a larger world. In that task they succeeded. The chapters proceed from history, through language and literature, social organization to ‘fine and applied arts.’ The most interesting chapters to me, and the ones I will use in class, looked at how the Igbo people try to transmit wisdom across the generations. Along the way one encounters some very interesting asides, as when Chibiko Okebalama of Nigeria University in Nsukka observes that “education in Igboland is gradually becoming a woman affair.” Some things may be universal across our world of transition. But first some background. The “Igbo people” are fundamentally a language group with one large division and many smaller ones. They live mainly in southeastern Nigeria and are known to the outside world more for losing the war for an independent “Biafra” against more dominant Hausa and Yoruba language groups, within a Nigerian context that has over 400 dialects and over 30 distinct languages. The weakness of this text is reflected by the fact that there were zero maps in the entire work, and most discussion of the range the Igbo occupy was in terms of this valley or that river watershed rather than things a western eye could easily place on maps without further research. Another problem it struggles with and notes in the very beginning is that before the British colonialists arrived, the Igbo people were non-literate. So much of the commentary on Igbo culture is necessarily drawn from oral tradition, put into a relatively recent Igbo written language and then translated into English. They did the best they could but this is obviously a difficult problem, and sometimes the real meaning of phrases remains obscure. That said, the book goes through the limited archaeology of the region, noting dates on pottery and human tools around 3,000 B.C.E. which documents “human activity of considerable antiquity.” This section defends the concept of Igbo civilization in an attempt “to contradict here the imperialist view that Ibgoland had no history or culture worth the name until the establishment of British rule.” This defensiveness was not necessary to my eye, but recurs from time to time. Now, to the chapters on proverbs that interested me most.Item Book Reviews of Thucydides' Trap and 2 other books for China, ISCSC, 2018(2018-06-16) Andregg, Michael M.NB: Unlike many reviews, this will combine three books to compare their different perspectives on US – China relations. We will begin with the mechanics and topline of all three. Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s’ Trap? 2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston and New York. 288 pages of text with 20 pages of front matter and 76 pages of endnotes. This is an academic, theoretical text with a dark tone of impending doom. It was also very well publicized and reviewed, resulting in much buzz among policy professionals. John Pomfret, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present. 2016, Henry Holt & Co., New York. This is the most detailed history of US-China relations among these three, written by a long-time correspondent for the Washington Post who married a Chinese woman and clearly loves the country. 637 pages of text with 54 pages of endnotes and index. Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power, 2017, Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 288 pages of text with 42 pages of endnotes and index. This was the most useful for me to help understand historical roots of Chinese thought. It is less detailed than Pomfret, and less theoretical than Allison. French was also a correspondent for the Washington Post, and later a bureau chief for the New York Times in many countries including China.Item Breaking Laws of God and Men: When is this OK for Intelligence Professionals?(2019-11-20) Andregg, Michael M.Attorneys and philosophers have presented detailed answers to the question of when it is permissible to break laws, some of which begin and end with the word “never.” Others answer “always” if reasons of state are compelling. To compound confusion, governments often write special laws for their “spies”* and other “intelligence professionals”* [1]. Some of these laws are publicly known, but others are classified, like a significant fraction of US NSDD’s (National Security Decision Directives) and NSPD’s (National Security Presidential Directives). So what is forbidden for ordinary citizens may be legally “OK” for intelligence professionals, but citizens cannot tell because some of the laws are secret laws administered by secret courts like the FISA court in the USA [2]. This situation can easily degenerate into simple codes: like “Do anything you need to accomplish your mission, but do not get caught” which has been noted by several CIA veterans [3]. That noted here, the CIA may be among the more restrained intelligence agencies in the world, because it is besieged by lawyers who have some actual laws to work with, unlike the secret services of some other countries. Many cases can be studied as dilemmas that challenge these simple, black-and-white views of the world and of moral codes of conduct. A modern classic is the ‘nuclear terrorist with a ticking time bomb’ scenario. Many people conclude that there are no limits at all on what one might properly do to stop him (or her!). A dilemma of longer duration is that of the small unit infantry commander whose surrounded troops will all die if he does not do something to a prisoner that is forbidden by the Geneva Conventions and the American Laws of War. Such cases often involve torture or murder. There is also a long, Catholic tradition called “Just War Theory” that attempts to bring systematic thought to both jus ad bellum issues (is the war just?) and jus in bello (is the war being conducted justly?). Even in a theoretically unified church (regarding fundamental moral issues) one can find substantively different opinions about this among highly competent commentators [4]. This paper will consider both of these hard cases in the context of many years of moral and legal thought with a final focus on two moral principles and one practical observation addressing the question of whether evil means can be morally pursued to achieve good end goals. They are: 1) the Do No Harm principle; 2) the Lesser of Evils principle; and 3) the lesson from human history that the Means Used Determine the Actual Ends Achieved.Item Building Bridges Between Cultures(Busan National University, South Korea, 2002-03-18) Andregg, Michael M.1. Why? Building bridges between cultures can involve many challenges, so the first subject I will address is: Why do this work? Answers important to me include: human survival, achieving prosperity through trade, compassion (especially for those who suffer, like refugees of war and relatives separated by politics) and achieving “the good life” spiritually as well as materially. All of these objectives benefit from a principle of living systems called “hybrid vigor.” These concepts will be illustrated by a few examples. Human civilization is facing a terrible crisis. It is a crisis of population growth combined with excessive consumption by the rich, which results in serious environmental problems and severe competition for the means of survival. Combined with other strains of politics, both normal differences of opinion about how to organize social life and more serious issues of corruption of governance and tyranny, this results in many wars (about 25 – 30 each year during the 23 years I have studied that subject). On the average half a million people die each year directly from these wars. Suffering from dispersed effects like refugee migrations and malnutrition related to the economic costs of these conflicts affects hundreds of millions every year. Human civilization is groaning in pain, but powerful psychological and social defenses exist that keep most people from hearing that pain clearly. It is the business of biologists to attend the living system. I testify before you that the living system itself is in danger because of these problems. If you need convincing I will gladly spend another hour or a day on that alone, because in my country at least, there are always excuses for taking just a little bit more from the living system despite its obvious distress. But our business today is building bridges between cultures, so I will return to that now with the simple observation that if the living system of earth is in trouble, human beings are in trouble. Human survival may even be at risk. So one reason to build bridges between cultures is to restrain people from blowing up the world with nuclear weapons, or despoiling it with endless conventional wars and the new, exotic biological and chemical weapons. Long ago I was a medical geneticist at a major University hospital. One reason I switched to why wars begin was what I knew about biological weapons 25 years ago. We have come a long way since then, and it is not a pretty picture. But even without such exotic weapons, the annual death rate from ordinary bombs and bullets should be plenty to inspire us to build some bridges to a better future for us all. A positive reason for building bridges is the prospect of increasing prosperity through trade. Now, I will venture a small observation on Korean politics. I apologize if I offend anyone. It is very sad to read about starvation in the North at the same time we read about fear created by Taepo-Dong II missiles, and a million-man army. Therefore, it was a happy day when we read about a new “sunshine policy,” and I was pleased when your President Kim Dae Jung was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his lifelong work for a better future.Item Building Bridges Between Cultures in the Nuclear Age: Globalization and the Current World-Wide War(2005-08-26) Andregg, Michael M.The peace community encourages building bridges between cultures to resolve conflicts and prevent war. Other positive results can be more trade to increase wealth, nation building, and growth of our global civilization by cross-fertilization of ideas and art as well as commerce. The UN asked people of goodwill to consider building bridges during a decade of dialogue among civilizations, rather than engage in destructive clashes. Unfortunately, the current “global war on terrorism” (“GWOT” in American military jargon) highlights some downsides to the building bridges theory. The same mechanisms that move people, money, goods, and information more efficiently can also move murderers, bombs, war plans, and nuclear or biological weapons components. Also, “Globalization” was increasing economic inequalities and tearing up established economies long before the current war. And “cultural hegemony” became a recognizable term long before the “war on terrorism” did. So global tension grows for many reasons. This paper will review these issues and examine three specific cases: South Africa, North and South Korea, and Israel / Palestine to ask whether, on balance, we are moving forward or backward on the road to peace and global harmony. One case appears a clear success, another a failure, and the third remains to be determined.Item Causes of Wars and the Developing Global Crisis(2018-06-15) Andregg, Michael M.This paper connects some ultimate causes of wars through history with a set of contemporary problems we have been calling the “Developing Global Crisis” for about 20 years. Therefore, one first step is identifying what that crisis entails. Very briefly, the living system that sustains all of our global civilizations is in great distress these days. This leads to many armed conflicts and even “failed states.” Sometimes failed states produce terrorists and large numbers of other desperate people who flee the chaos that results. Former US Director of National Intelligence, General James Clapper provides an apt description of the Developing Global Crisis on page 157 of his 2018 memoirs: “Factors like food and water shortages and poor living conditions – increasingly driven by climate change – oppression of political freedoms, corruption by autocratic governments and rulers who had been in place for decades … made them (North African and some Middle Eastern states) extremely unstable. The spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) threatens Everything under Heaven, because many terrorists want WMD and are not deterred by threats of retaliation. There are at least 40 recurring causes of wars through history, so we cannot consider them all in the time available. Today we will focus on four especially important ultimate causes of wars. They are Population Pressure, Militant Religion, Authoritarian Law, and Corruptions of Governance. The case of contemporary Syria will be examined briefly to illustrate connections between these causes of organized armed conflict and many other problems. There is also a particular reason why I came to China. This is called “Thucydides’ Trap” which is a theory about great power relations of Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, inspired by an ancient Greek historian named Thucydides. Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War that ended Greece’s dominance of the Eastern Mediterranean and Western civilization about the same time that Sun Tzu wrote his incomparable “Art of War.” Allison’s more recent theory suggests that when one “great power” declines while another great power rises, war between them is almost inevitable.Item The Challenge of Achieving Wisdom in Intelligence Products and Processes(2016-03-16) Andregg, Michael M.This is a PowerPoint presentation sized for typical, ISA intelligence section panels. Its ~ 20 frames deal with institutional constraints much discussed elsewhere like the perennial desire of policy makers to keep their intel staffs out of policy (e.g. they often discourage anything close to wisdom, preferring "just the facts" so they can make the big decisions. Other common themes are very short time constraints and overreliance on "secret" sources of information that are often tainted in many ways. It brushes on some uncommon themes like the prevalence of psychopaths in secret power systems, but does not go into any depth on those difficult topics.Item The Challenge of Achieving Wisdom in Intelligence Products and Processes, outline(2015-02-19) Andregg, Michael M.The word "wisdom" almost never appears in intelligence literature. Here are eleven reasons why, which were offered as hypotheses for a roundtable of extremely experienced practitioners from many three letter agencies to discuss.Item Clashes of Civilizations Gave Rise to Martial Arts, but Enlightened Martial Philosophies Reveal the Better Way(2012-06-08) Andregg, Michael M.MarHuman beings have studied how bodies can move from time immemorial. Some of those studies have focused on the disciplined development of various skills, like acrobatics, dance and martial art. Millennia of genocides, wars and lesser atrocities have concentrated more attention on the latter than the former, although the former are more beautiful. Thoughtful practitioners of the deadly forms have often devoted considerable thought to ethics or other philosophies that should accompany their craft. This is especially important in martial arts, because to teach those skills means arming people for life with deadly capabilities. So thoughtful teachers in particular have had to worry often about what their students might do with skills once learned. Most of this brief review will be academic history, since ISCSC is a Comparative Civilizations Society, but one of the truisms of martial art is that it is never strictly ‘academic.’ Words on paper cannot begin to express some things at the heart of the art. Therefore, I will begin with a very modern example, towards which the history leads, and end with a physical demonstration. The modern example is the attempt to teach martial ethics to soldiers in the context of learning technique. The soldiers are US Marines who study the forms described by the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program (MCMAP) adopted in 2001 CE (1) and logoed thus:Item A Critical Lesson not yet Learned in America: Intelligence Ethics Matter(2012-10-16) Andregg, Michael M.Introduction Intelligence ethics matter because mistakes here can result in loss of thousands of innocent lives, and in worst cases to destruction of whole governments and their peoples. The Cold War swung as much on moral factors as political, economic or military, but bureaucracies learn slowly. Deep history shows that political hubris can bring any empire down. When mistakes have such large potential consequences, accuracy is critical. The modern world must deal with diffuse terrorist and “failed state” threats, and complex, non-military threats to civilization like global warming, international crime and rogue financial entities that can ruin entire economies. Accuracy in complex problems requires close cooperation among intelligence systems, both national security and law enforcement focused. Close cooperation requires trust. When one intelligence entity in a cooperative system becomes immoral, corrupt or unreliable in protecting methods and sources, cooperation declines, accuracy declines, and somewhere down the line innocent people may suffer or even die. Many examples could be considered, but a particularly relevant case is what happened before the United States of America attacked Iraq on 19 March, 2003. The causus belli alleged were aggressive weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in Iraq, with a secondary concern that Saddam Hussein was helping Al Qaeda. After many over 100,000 Iraqis were killed, the country laid waste, occupied and thoroughly searched, no WMDs were found. And Hussein had been hostile to Al Qaeda, not a friend. In the short space available, we will consider this case in detail. Some have called this an “intelligence failure,” but most call it a policy failure blamed on intelligence agencies. Either way, the cost to the USA has been huge. Thousands of billions of dollars were wasted attacking Iraq, and thousands of US and allied troops were killed or gravely wounded. The costs to Iraq were relatively much larger. I will focus on how these costs reflect failures of ethics at the level of intelligence professionals who knew that bad things were being done for false reasons, but remained silent. That was the biggest ethical lapse for many of them. But do not forget the policy people who actually ordered this unjustified carnage, or the citizens like me who let them do it. In America we sacrificed a modest reputation of respect for rule of law, for due process, for human rights and for many other things like honest cooperation with allies as we rationalized these mortal sins that killed so many innocent others. Cold War contests helped set the stage for this illegal and immoral war so we will comment on that also. But we begin with some specific lies that led to the deaths of perhaps a million people if all casualties were properly counted.Item The Decay Phase of Civilizations: Some Comparisons between Rome and the Current Situation(2011-06-02) Andregg, Michael M.This 61 slide PowerPoint discusses the "Decay Phase" of civilizations alleged by Carroll Quigley among others with data from the early Third Millennium and the Roman period. There are many, and we are not the only people who have wondered if our current civilization is "decaying" in various ways, moral, economic and practical.Item Demographics and Conflict(American Intelligence Journal, 2016-04) Andregg, Michael M.Demographics and Conflict (written April, 2016, by Michael Andregg for the American Intelligence Journal, of the NMIA) Introduction to an Ancient Paradigm: population growth, environmental degradation, rising death rates and conflicts; exodus, war or genocide. People have been killing each other since before the beginning of written history, as recorded by the broken bones of people massacred long before writing was invented. One of the quiet reasons for the large scale killings called genocides and wars is demographics, the statistics of birth rates, death rates, growth rates and migrations into or out of territories. This dimension is under-covered by those who focus on the statements or acts of key leaders. Politicians and commanders of war typically describe their reasons in political, religious or military terms, not demographics. But they were also often driven by forces they barely understood and could not control. The Mayan Empire probably fell that way. Easter Island certainly did. And the deserts of North Africa are filled with ruins from cities and empires that thrived … before the forests and farmable land turned into desert. The Kenyans have a saying: “First came forests, then man, then the deserts.” Therefore this chapter will show how simple births, deaths and migrations lead to an iron law of biology. This law observes that all living populations eventually achieve equilibrium with their environment, which means birth rates equal death rates and the population neither grows nor declines, or they die. Populations that try to grow forever suffer catastrophic death rates or become extinct. The modern case of Syria disintegrating after 2010 will be considered in some detail, because it also shows how other global factors like climate change can trigger chaos. Syria’s population growth rate in 2011 was 2.4% per year, but when half of its population was displaced by civil wars and about 6 million fled, its growth rate became sharply negative. At least 450,000 people died by violence alone. This will be followed by a short section on “Human Nature, Nurture, Free Will and War” because that topic has generated much commentary over centuries, with large implications if one accepts the simplistic conclusions that people are either born “innately” warlike, or rather “innately” social and cooperative. Truth is that people can be either one or the other depending on circumstances, and that much neglected factor “free will” or personal decisions. Finally, we close with how a few more complicated demographics like “pyramidal” vs. “columnar” age distributions, and distorted sex ratios may influence the probability of organized armed conflict on earth today and in the future.Item Design of a Location-based Publish/Subscribe Service using a Graph-based Computing Model(IEEE, 2017) Tripathi, Anand; Hoang, HenryWe present here the initial results of our investigation of a system architecture for location-based publish/subscribe services utilizing a graph-based model for managing data and computations. This architecture is implemented on a cluster computer using the facilities and the computation model provided by the Beehive framework which supports a transactional model of parallel computing on dynamic graph data structures. We implemented a Museum Visitor Service as an example of a location-based publish/subscribe system to study and evaluate the performance this approach. This service includes features utilizing location-based publish/subscribe functions for supporting coordination and collaboration among members in a social group visiting the museum. We implemented a testbed system for this service and evaluated its performance on a cluster computer. Our work also illustrates that weaker consistency models for transactions can be utilized in such services to achieve higher performance and scalability.Item The Developing Global Crisis and the Current Wave of Migrant / Refugees heading for Europe(National Intelligence Academy of Romania (Mihai Viteazul), 2015-10-16) Andregg, Michael M.Item The Developing Global Crisis: A Strategic Paradigm for Understanding Global Conflicts Today(2017-02-25) Andregg, Michael M.The Developing Global Crisis: A Strategic Paradigm for Understanding Global Conflicts Today by Michael Andregg, University of St. Thomas, mmandregg@stthomas.edu For the ISA/ISS meetings in Baltimore, MD, USA, Feb. 22-25, 2017 Scheduled for SA-28, Feb. 25, in 326 BCC, -- draft 7 abstract The US Air Force has been at war continuously for over 25 years now, and large areas of its operation like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are still convulsed by wars. Those zones of conflict have grown, adding Syria, Yemen, Somalia and ‘tribal areas’ of Pakistan to the regular Air Force target lists. Dozens of other countries in Asia, Latin America and especially Africa see more discrete visits by US Special Forces with occasionally lethal consequences. Many Americans, including some troops who have deployed into war zones that their parents fought in, are starting to wonder why these wars do not end. The “Developing Global Crisis” is a strategic paradigm that tries to answer that question with a focus on why the wars are starting in the first place, and how to better address their ultimate causes, instead of just symptoms. That is the strategic “solution” to this problem, focus on ultimate causes instead of just symptoms. Those ultimate causes of organized, armed conflict present a disturbing picture because militaries cannot easily influence many of them. This is a main reason such wars are so hard to stop once started. Those forces, or ultimate causes, include population pressure, corruptions of governance, rising authoritarian law and militant religions that interact synergistically, severe and growing income inequalities, and derivative factors like climate change (a consequence of the ever-growing population pressures and corruptions of governance in addition to the obvious burning of fossil fuels and forests). That is six, very tough problems facing human civilization today. Basically, there are too many people trying to live on too little land in most conflict zones today, so genocide or at least ethnic “cleansing” is an option contemplated by far too many people and politicians. Fear of genocides, so amply illustrated by the ancient histories of such areas, also fuels violent resistance to elites. Syria provides an exceptionally vivid case with relatively hard numbers that can illustrate this “Developing Global Crisis” and why that resists solution by ancient and modern military methods. The confluence of WMDs and hundreds of millions of teen-aged males maturing into such desperate circumstances provides real urgency to the task of rethinking the old ways of conceptualizing global conflicts and how to solve them.