Stefan Hartmann of Overunity.com has posted two videos of a Russian group (friends of Tariel Kapanadze) apparently powering a stand-alone engine on water. They drink from a bottle of water (of course, it could be Vodka), then pour the liquid into what appears to be a fuel tank. Then they start up the engine.
As it's running, they show the exhaust being clean. As they hold a cup at the exhaust, it collects liquid (assumed to be water), which they then drink.
Phi Beta Iota: Imagine the good we could have done if the banks and energy, health, military, prison consortiums did not own our crooked politicians. Open Source Everything is leading toward an Autonomous Internet, an end to mega-corporations, and Panarchy. Slowly. These things have come up before, but in the prior era the powers could kill the inventor and steal the idea in order to lock it up. Now there are too many of us, ideas are moving fast and replicating, we are in for an agonizing transition period, but absent the deliberate unleashing of plagues and the deliberate poisoning of food such as may have been tested on the European cucumbers, in the end a new era will begin. The real challenge now is to keep the 1% from freaking out and lashing out — they need to understand a commitment to non-violent change and to truth & reconciliation rather than revenge. They remain the biggest threat to all of us.
About 11 years ago, James K. “Jamie” Galbraith recalls, hundreds of his fellow economists laughed at him. To his face. In the White House.
It was April 2000, and Galbraith had been invited by President Bill Clinton to speak on a panel about the budget surplus. Galbraith was a logical choice. A public policy professor at the University of Texas and former head economist for the Joint Economic Committee, he wrote frequently for the press and testified before Congress.
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But MMT’s own relationship to real-world cases can be a little hit-or-miss. Mosler, the hedge fund manager, credits his role in the movement to an epiphany in the early 1990s, when markets grew concerned that Italy was about to default. Mosler figured that Italy, which at that time still issued its own currency, the lira, could not default as long as it had the ability to print more liras. He bet accordingly, and when Italy did not default, he made a tidy sum. “There was an enormous amount of money to be made if you could bring yourself around to the idea that they couldn’t default,” he says.
Later that decade, he learned there was also a lot of money to be lost. When similar fears surfaced about Russia, he again bet against default. Despite having its own currency, Russia defaulted, forcing Mosler to liquidate one of his funds and wiping out much of his $850 million in investments in the country. Mosler credits this to Russia’s fixed exchange rate policy of the time and insists that if it had only acted like a country with its own currency, default could have been avoided.
But the case could also prove what critics insist: Default, while technically always avoidable, is sometimes the best available option.
Phi Beta Iota: Russia defaulted and is better than ever. Iceland defaulted and is taking the perpetrators to court while roaring ahead. When you are in a rigged game, default is always better than a growing deficit. Especially if you can jail or kill the crooked bankers. We're having a real hard time wondering why European leaders are so reluctant to play their strong suit — the public and the armed force of the sovereign nation — against the unsecured debt documents. Could it be that the bankers are threatening to expose the corrupt politicians? No problem. Time for new politicians that can apply intelligence with integrity. Now.
It feels like everything is happening exponentially.
In the last 30 days, our community has grown by 2.5 million people. We were already the largest political web movement ever, and yet we're growing faster than anyone has seen before! We're taking more actions, winning more victories, donating more and generating thousands more media hits in one month than we used to in a year. It's thrilling, even a little scary, especially when we see that the pace is still accelerating…
Just to give a snapshot of the last few weeks —
5 million of us stood up to the ACTA and SOPA internet censorship bills, helping to put SOPA on ice, and putting ACTA under threat, with the President of the European Parliament and Germany, Poland and many other countries reconsidering their positions.
we smuggled $1.8 million worth of medical supplies into Syria when no one else could, and raised $1.5 million more in donations, while our citizen journalists provided much of the world media's information and images.
we generated thousands of news articles on 20 different campaigns.
our sex trafficking hotline generated information that will result in a major set of arrests this week (can't say which country yet).
we raised over 4 million dollars/euros/yen online to supercharge our work, and are growing our staff team like mad to keep up with the need.
we ran over 40 campaigns, took over 10 million actions and told 25 million friends about campaigns we care about, on everything from deforestation in Brazil to the Murdoch scandal in the UK — and made a serious impact on many of these.
If all that wasn't enough, we're about to launch a couple of big projects (stay tuned) that will take our community to a whole NEW level!
It's a thrilling privilege to serve this amazing community, and while the challenges we face are growing, the surge of spirited people rising to meet these challenges is growing even faster and stronger. We've come together and built something special, and it's taking off. Let's shoot for the stars.
With hope and excitement,
Ricken, Stephanie, Wen, Emma, Wissam, Veronique, Heather and the entire Avaaz team
PS – here's some recent features on our community in the Economist, Times and Guardian. And here's a radio piece by NPR on our work in Syria, and an LA Times article on our Internet freedom campaign.
The Andrew J. Bacevich article, “Slouching Toward Persistent War” (NYT 19 Feb 2012) points among other things to the rise of Special Operations Forces (SOF) as the instrument of choice to carry out clandestine warfare against individual and groups designated enemies of the U.S. (or close U.S. allies i.e. Israel). It also cited the rise of Michael Vickers to be Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence as further evidence of the growing importance of SOF.
Vickers is a ten year veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces and then served three years at CIA as principal logistic manager for support going to the anti-Soviet Taliban resistance fighters in Afghanistan. These experiences along with a PhD apparently were felt to qualify Vickers to head up DOD intelligence.
What Bacevich failed to take note of was a new and successful tactical concept that was developed by the U.S. Forces, mainly Army and Marine infantry, in the course of the counter insurgency (COIN) operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This concept has been the subject of a careful study by two researchers at the Institute of National Strategic Studies of the DOD’s Defense University: Dr. Christopher Lamb and Mr. Evan Munsing produced a study titled, “Strategic Perspectives entitled “Secret Weapon: High-value Target Teams as an Organizational Innovation.” In the study they examined the repeated successes of the High-value Target Teams in eliminating al Qaeda and insurgent Taliban leaders. The secret according to the two authors was the combination of special operations forces fighters with military and civilian intelligence analysts into tightly net teams in which immediate tactical intelligence was essential to guiding the fighters to their targets. This apparently was not a case of intelligence support being provided by folks sitting far from the action phoning in information, but of intelligence support being very much part of the operation itself with the war fighters. CIA has increasingly become part of this new concept and the move of General David Petraeus to be Director of CIA may reflect this involvement of the agency with real time support to military operations.
Of course this also means that the probability is that CIA will continue to ignore strategic intelligence or what Robert Steele describes as Whole of Government Decision-Support and also multinational information-sharing and sense-making. In other words, CIA has become MIA (pun intended).
Startling, Offers a Wealth of New Information, February 19, 2012
EDIT of 6 May 2012 to acknowledge fixed made by publisher for new edition after review, change title, and increase to five stars.
I was given this book as a gift. I do not normally seek-out conspiracy literature, but in the aftermath of 9/11 and all I have learned about that (search for < 9/11 books dvd source=phibetaiota >, I am now shifting from my long held view that given a choice between incompetence and conspiracy, one should go with incompetence every time. This book brings me closer to a 50-50 split, but I am still on the 70-30 side giving incompetence the edge.
The best thing I can say about this book is that while there are others addressing Gladio (the Italian secret unit), this may be the first book that really strings everything together, adds, connects, spreculates, in a more thorough way going beyond Italy to include the rest of Europe and to my surprise, Sweden, than the few prior books. This book is also the most current, to include the Libya take-down and to warn that Turkey is next. The book does not address Syria.
Perhaps the most substantive point in favor of the book's value is the detailed and documented manner in which it outlines how Italy spawned the most active secret campaign because it is the one place where the Catholic Church and the Mafia have their homes, and can come together with NATO, big business, the neo-Nazi extreme right, and the intelligence and security services whose budget inevitably benefit from false flag attacks in the absence of real threats.
As much as the book troubles me with detailed documented examples of a long series of false flag attacks including assassination of leaders in Sweden and elsewhere (and at one time targeting Charles DeGaul), I am inclined to think that the author makes an unwarranted assumption that the “legitimate” stay-behind networks created after World War II morphed into a “killer / false flag” network over time everywhere. While this is absolutely proven beyond a doubt for Italy, it is not proven for the rest of Europe.
Because the author relied on second-hand quotes and did not read the original, this book has a poor misrepresentation of the findings of my friend Cees Wiebes' book, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia: 1992-1995 (Studies in Intelligence History). The focus of Cee's book was on the inadequacy of convention intelligence services with respect to peacekeeping intelligence; and that the rest of the mess was a mix of sheer incompetence within the UN, big power politics, and bureaucratic in-fighting in Washington, D.C. That sounds righter to me and is consistent with my own review of the English-language version that I link to here.
I am constantly astonished as I read this book, finding nuggets of documented information that I had no idea were out there. I think frequently while reading this book that it would be truly wonderful to have the ability to ingest this and many other books like it into a professional intelligence evaluation facility, create the maps that connects the dots — people, places, organizations, dates, and such — and get to the bottom of so many crimes against humanity that have been carried out by order of Western powers — certainly co-equal to the crimes against humanity from the “lesser” powers in Rwanda and Burundi.
The author provides details on the Russians using a PSYOP at the end of WWII, creating the myth of the Hitler redoubt, with the specific intent of distracting General Eisenhower and gaining time to take Berlin — their plan worked.
I read with amusement the author's assessment of the National War College as the place where we park right-wing nutcases/neocons, and knowing some of them myself, cannot disagree–that is however a disservice to the 90% of NDU that is solidly in the middle.
The author is provocative as he weaves his documented tale about the degree to which all left of center groups were penetrated in the aftermath of WWII, and I see how easily the intelligence and security services might have found it to manipulate groups into doing violence — or into taking the blame for false flag violence. On the basis of this book as well as others, I speculate that at least half the “threat” against which the USA has devoted considerable time, treasure, and trust, has been FALSE — self-made.
The death of most significant Swedes standing up for Palestine gets my attention.
The “coincidence” of police training exercises in both London and Madrid, each closely associated with the actual train bombing that takes place in and around the exercise area, is profoundly disturbing — we now know that Dick Cheney scheduled the counter-terrorism exercise MONTHS before “the day,” and as I write this, I marvel at the ignorance of the public and the perhaps justified arrogance of those who create false terror to advance their own selfish ends.
I learn that Steve Pieczenik, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, was a Carter trouble-shooter, and I find this fascinating because the same Dr. Pieczenik came on record to call the CIA-JSOG raid to kill Bin Laden a false operation (Bin Laden having died a decade ago, a patsy was killed instead) and to say that there is new evidence against Dick Cheney in relation to 9/11.
I put the book down a bit frustrated — it is hard to make sense of so much detail, it really needs to be visualized with timelines and so on. However, this is a world-class book in terms of documentation, and setting aside the hyperbole, assumptions, and many small mistakes, I certainly recommend it.
We are all beginning to learn that governments lie to their publics as a matter of routine; that banks and corporations lie, cheat, and steal more more than the Mafia; and that the Catholic Church may be the world's primary money-laundering network. It is in the context of a public slowly awakening to reality that I recommend this book as an excellent place to begin exploring and raise it to five stars.
I am limited to ten links. Here are two more, to browse my other 1,700 plus reviews visit Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, where all reviews link back to their book's Amazon page.
Cyber criminals no longer target your computer – they threaten society itself. This is the story of how a few self-selecting techno geeks fought the most devious and destructive attack ever launched on the web.
Mark Bowden
The Observer, 18 February 2012
A computer attack could compromise nuclear reactors, electrical grids, transportation networks and pipelines. In America this would be considered an act of war that would justify a military response.
Amazon Page
EXTRACT:
They eventually succeeded in getting reps from the alphabet soup – NSA, DOD, CIA, FBI, DHS, etc – to sign on as members of the private chat channel where they co-ordinated strategy, but throughout the effort the feds would remain lurkers; they logged in and listened, but rarely made a peep. Over four months in December 2008 and January, February and March 2009, as Conficker assembled the largest botnet in the world, government, which would seem to have had the largest share of overarching responsibility, played a shockingly minor role.
Phi Beta Iota: Back in the day when Clifford Stohl battled the East German worm, CIA could do its own cyber-espionage but knew nothing about cyber-counterintelligence. Today, despite $12 billion a year being spent on the Cyber-Command, the persistent ignorance and arrogance of the government persists. Cyber-Command would rather pretend to be competent than admit that it does not have a clue. What Bowden (who has a stellar reputation for intelligence and integrity within the Special Forces world) has done is demonstrated in detail where the real expertise is, and how irrelevant the US Government is to protecting the USA from cyber-attacks. What is needed is a much more pro-active integrated hybrid network that brings together the best of the best from across the eight communities and across the multinational spectrum. An Open Source Agency under diplomatic auspices is the place to start, with a Treaty for Information-Sharing and Sense-making being its first task.
(PhysOrg.com) — In the United States, ultrafast trading in financial markets between 2006 and 2011 was the underlying factor for over 18,000 extreme price changes, according to a new study. Neil Johnson, a professor in the physics department of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, one of the authors of the study, thinks that a buildup of such “fractures” can destabilize the market. This study, “Financial Black Swans Driven by Ultrafast Machine Ecology” was submitted to arXiv earlier this month, suggesting the link between extreme-change fractures and market crashes.
Phi Beta Iota: Computational mathematics is light years ahead of government oversight, never mind the control fraud inherent in that putative oversight. Who is representing the public interest here? Nobody. This would be an excellent focus for the first true multinational multiagency intelligence and counterintelligence centre….however, such a centre would be even better if it were “whole.”
Startling, Offers a Wealth of New Information, February 19, 2012
