Month: May 2011

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Integrity, lacking in the White House…..

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Media
DefDog Recommends....

Original Story:

The hip, transparent and social media-loving Obama administration is showing its analog roots. And maybe even some hypocrisy highlights.

White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news.

The Chronicle's Carla Marinucci – who, like many contemporary reporters, has a phone with video capabilities on her at all times –shot some protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel.

Read more….

UPDATE:

Update: In a pants-on-fire moment, the White House press office today denied anyone there had issued threats to remove Carla Marinucci and possibly other Hearst reporters from the press pool covering the President in the Bay Area.

Chronicle editor Ward Bushee called the press office on its fib:

Read more….

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There’s Something Happening Here…[or Not]

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence
Venessa Miemis

There’s Something Happening Here…

May 1, 2011

by Venessa Miemis

I came across this post from Dave Pollard via Twitter the other day, and found it so provocative that I am compelled to crosspost. (I emailed Dave and he gave me his permission.) After I retweeted it, a few people wrote back saying it was overly pessimistic and doom-and-gloomy, but after looking through some of Dave’s other posts, he seems to actually be quite optimistic that the power of local community and resilience can “save the world.” Some other posts of his work checking out – A Framework for Personal Action, How to Save the World Reading List, and a really neat list of 65 Essential Abilities for a Relocalized World. Anyway, the piece just made me go “hmmm,” so I wanted to share. The original can be found here.

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Source

Phi Beta Iota: We agree with the deep dismay, we do not agree with the forecast.

The ONE THING that is agile and resilient in the face of catstrophic complexity is the human brain–all of them, all the time.

Industrial Era governments and corporations and non-governmental organizations are now pathologically inept, and must be replaced by hybrid networks that share information and achieve sustainable progress through trust and consensus.

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Graphic: Billboards for Truth in Seattle Rejected

Balance, Corruption, Threats
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Source

Phi Beta Iota: Israel should not be singled out as the recipient of US Government funding that relies on borrowing “in our name.”  Most of the world's dictators are also supported by the US military industrial complex and its Congressionally-mandated foreign military assistance program, a primary motivation for the annual one trillion dollars a year borrowed by the US Government acting “in our name.”

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Chuck Spinney: Obama’s Failure of Intelligence & Integrity

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Policies
Chuck Spinney

My friend Jeff Madrick, and old fashioned liberal democrat in the best sense of the term, has penned a pithy analysis of the anti-empirical madness now dominating the contemporary American political economy.  Jeff concludes that the Right ignores its track record, particularly regarding the clear economic effects of tax cuts, and is rarely challenged on the issue.  Madrick is correct.  The question is why?

More precisely, why is political debate shaped more by a new dark age of irrational romantic ideology than the by the rationality and empiricism bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution?

For what it worth, here is my answer:  Money.  (What follows is my view, and should not be attributed to Jeff.)

Look no further than at a Democratic Party that has sold out, and in so doing, forgot its roots, having grown arrogant, effete, and soft in the comfortable aftermath of its dominance under Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson, each of whom, whatever his faults, was at least a fighter.  The real problem corrupting our warped politics has less to do with the Right Wing Wrecking Crew than with the rise of wimpish neo-liberal and pro-defense Democrats (e.g., like Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama), who are now being reinforced by the so-called progressives, who are willing to go along with Obama's strategy of appeasing the right wing wreckers, rationalizing that any alternative to Obama will be worse.  A more reliable pathway to strategic defeat is hard to imagine.   Maybe the wrecking crew's winner-take-all politics of fang and claw ought to be answered by a more principled politics of fang an claw.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Obama's Failure of Intelligence & Integrity”

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Four Weapons Against Humanity

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), IO Secrets, Military, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

 

Venessa Miemis

The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the commons,
But lets the greater villain loose
That steals the commons from the goose.
– 16th century English rhyme

March 23, 2011

Four weapons

Posted by leavergirl under civ, problem of power, traps

Anthropologists have noted three main pathways to power. I say there are four. And out of these pathways come four types of weapons used against us, and four types of weapon industries. One of these has been obvious to all, two became more and more visible as the 20th century progressed, and the last needs far greater exposure than it has received. What are those weapons? What are the main ways to inflict damage on human beings by those who seek to dominate?

Read concise elegant discussion of each of the following:

1.  Physical Weapons  ..  2.  Economic Weapons  ..  3.  Ideological Weapons including Religion & Rote Education  ..  4.  Government as a Weapon

Phi Beta Iota: There are two literatures that are relevant here, the first represented by such books as Tragedy & Hope and its introductory companion the Naked Capitalist, and the second by a less well known but amply robust literature on the sovereign individual.  A general strike and a refusal to pay taxes are the legitimate last resort of an abused public.  Similarly, a public demand for Electoral Reform, absent which the legitimacy of any government is ended in the eyes of all, can be equally compelling.  The times they are a'changing.  We have high hopes for 2012 as the year of awakening and reconciliation based on truth.

See Also:

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)

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9/11 Questions Linger Ten Years Later

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Secrets, Military

For Activists, Architects, 9/11 Questions Linger Ten Years Later

GLORIA TATUM 4-30-2011 Atlanta Progressive News

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With additional reporting by Matthew Cardinale, News Editor.

[The purpose of this article is not to hypothesize what the real story behind the Towers' collapse is, but to address what we find to be reasonable and compelling questions about the government's official account.]

(APN) ATLANTA — It will be ten years since September 11, 2001, in just a few months.  And yet some of the most basic and fundamental questions about what happened that day–based upon physics and the forensic science of structural engineering–in the collapse of three towers at the World Trade Center in New York, still linger.

Groups such as Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (A&E), founded by Richard Gage; and We Are Change Atlanta want to re-examine the evidence regarding the collapse of all three buildings.

Continue reading “9/11 Questions Linger Ten Years Later”