Open Source Homeland

1. You’ve gotta have equipment for training

2. Three things after an emergency

Daily Herald | NIU to offer training in disaster response

Hansen, an associate professor with Northern Illinois Universitys Department of Technology, and assistant professor Dennis Cesarotti want the body of an airplane to teach students how to effectively handle disasters and emergencies in a productive, methodical manner.

“You cant manage what you dont know,” Hansen said. “If you dont have the equipment, its hard to train your people. You want to expose students to as many learning opportunities as possible.”

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He also said the key to homeland security isnt complicated.

“It comes down to three things: Where do you go? What do you do? What do you do it with?” Cesarotti said. “Thats something even residents of a small town need to know in an emergency situation, not just the responders.”

Best to examine them outright:

The CIAs Biggest Bloopers - Fact Checker
So the CIA got it wrong on Irans nuclear program in the last National Intelligence Estimate, back in 2005. But does that mean they have got it right this time? Not necessarily. The history of the CIA is littered with spectacular intelligence mistakes. Sometimes, the correction of one error can lead to a new error, as analysts atone for past mistakes by moving too far in the opposite direction.

In the spirit of caution and skepticism, here is the official Fact Checker list of the CIAS Biggest Bloopers, over six decades of intelligence-gathering. I have compiled it with the assistance of researchers at the indispensable National Security Archive, a non-profit group that has published more than half a million government documents. A disclaimer: the Agency has had some successes too, but I will let their public relations operation draw up that particular list.

There are some things that only government can do, All hail Malawi.

Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts - New York Times
But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.

Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.