Month: April 2012

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Chuck Spinney: Open Science or Corrupt Science?

Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
Chuck Spinney

Add to this idea a more open “peer review” process in place of the present obscure, back-scratching, club-based peer review process, and climate science might be well on its way to depoliticization.

Making research papers freely available is about much more than breaking the monopoly of rich academic publishers

Peter Coles is professor of theoretical astrophysics at Cardiff University, The Guardian, 20 April 2012

The Guardian's recent articles about the absurdities of the academic journal racket have brought out into the open some very important arguments that many academics, including myself, have been making for many years with little apparent effect.

Now this issue is receiving wider attention, I hope sufficient pressure will develop to force radical changes to the way research is communicated, not only between scientists but also between scientists and the public, because this is not just about the exorbitant cost of academic journals and the behaviour of the industry that publishes them. It's about the much wider issue of how science should operate in a democratic society.

Read full story.

See Also:

Open Source Agency: Executive Access Point

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

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David Swanson: What Bradley Manning Means to Us All…

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, Blog Wisdom, IO Secrets
David Swanson

What Bradley Manning Means to Us

By David Swanson

Chase Madar's new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning, pulls together the essential facts that we should try to somehow deliver to television viewers and victims of our education system.  The subtitle is “The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History.”

The book looks at Manning's life story, his alleged action (leaking voluminous materials to Wikileaks), the value of the material he made available to us, the status of whistleblowers in our country, the torture inflicted on Manning during his imprisonment, the similar treatment routinely inflicted on hundreds of thousands of U.S. prisoners without the same scandal resulting, and the value of running a society in accordance with written laws.

The table of contents sounds predictable, but the most valuable parts of Madar's book are the tangents, the riffs, the expansions on questions such as whether knowing the truth does or does not tend to set us free.  Does learning what our government is up to help to improve our government's behavior?  Has the rule of law become an empty phrase or worse?  Who is standing up for Bradley Manning, and who should be?

Read full essay. 

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Mini-Me: To Legalize Marijuana or Criminalize Government Misbehavior – That Is the Question

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Hundreds Of Economists Agree Marijuana Legalization Could Save US Taxpayers $13.7 Billion Per Year

(NaturalNews) Marijuana prohibition currently costs taxpayers billions of dollars a year to enforce, and it accomplishes little or nothing beneficial in terms of economic benefits. On the contrary, legalizing marijuana would not only save taxpayers billions of dollars a year in unnecessary costs, but it would also jumpstart the economy to the tune of $100 billion a year or more, say some economists.

Read more.

The Top Five Special Interest Groups Lobbying To Keep Marijuana Illegal

Last year, over 850,000 people in America were arrested for marijuana-related crimes. Despite public opinion, the medical community, and human rightsexperts all moving in favor of relaxing marijuana prohibition laws, little has changed in terms of policy.

There have been many great books and articles detailing the history of the drug war. Part of America’s fixation with keeping the leafy green plant illegal is rooted in cultural and political clashes from the past.

However, we at Republic Report think it’s worth showing that there are entrenched interest groups that are spending large sums of money to keep our broken drug laws on the books:

1.) Police Unions: Police departments across the country have become dependent on federal drug war grants to finance their budget. In March, we published a story revealing that a police union lobbyist in California coordinated the effort to defeat Prop 19, a ballot measure in 2010 to legalize marijuana, while helping his police department clients collect tens of millions in federal marijuana-eradication grants. And it’s not just in California. Federal lobbying disclosures show that other police union lobbyists have pushed for stiffer penalties for marijuana-related crimes nationwide.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: To Legalize Marijuana or Criminalize Government Misbehavior – That Is the Question”

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Owl: 63 Drone Launch Sites Across the USA

Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Commerce, Government, Law Enforcement, Military
Who? Who?

The maps in this web page are astonishing – it shows the sites of 63 active drone sites in the US. Officials were forced to reveal it after a FOIA lawsuit.

The real question, which the article does not explore much, is what kind of drone missions will these sites support? Will they support another leg in the elite's plan to conduct population reduction, sending out killer drones to cull the overeaters?  Given the military and federal locations of some drone sites, such an impression is strengthened  by an interesting fact revealed in one of the descriptions of the map for the DC area: “The Beltway around Washington DC has the highest concentration of urban and suburban drone sites, including the U.S. Marine Corp base as Quantico Station, Virginia.” Perhaps drone-generated genocide is too over-the-top. Maybe they are using them to merely assert much more control and oversight of the population, gathering much more private information  more cheaply and effectively.

Is there a drone in your neighbourhood? Rise of spy planes exposed after FAA is forced to reveal 63 launch sites across U.S.

Phi Beta Iota:  Highly recommended — full story with a number of very explicit locational maps.

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Josh Kilbourn: US Leads Developed Nations In Percent of People In ‘Low Wage Work’

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government
Josh Kilbourn

US Leads Developed Nations In Percent of People In ‘Low Wage Work'

Research shows the US is a low wage country
By Mark Thoma
April 23, 2012

(MoneyWatch) – Recent research from John Schmitt of the Center for Economic Policy Research shows that the US leads developed countries in the share of workers earning low wages. The research also shows that increased wage polarization over the last several decades is one of the reasons for the large share of low wage-work in the US. The bars in this graph represent the share of workers in low wage work, where low wage work is defined as employees earning less than 2/3 of the median wage (approximately $10 per hour or $20,000 per year). In this category, the US leads among developed nations…

Research Shows that US is a ‘low wage' country

Click on Image to Enlarge
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DefDog: Counter-IED Network Analysis – Works for Law Enforcement, Ignored by US Military

09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, Ethics, Intelligence (government), IO Sense-Making, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Military, Officers Call
DefDog

When we worked on the Manhunting Project for SOCOM, the US Marshall's Service said that fugitive hunting was all about network analysis. The IC doesn't understand network analysis as the bean counters push for numbers….they focus on low hanging fruit and as a result there is always some guy out there ready to step up and take the foot soldier's place (not so much the upper echelons). Try to tell an IC drone that it is all about the network and you will get a deer in the headlight look….

The REAL Jack Bauer

Contributor:  Louis DeAnda

Police forces have spent decades combating organised crime with well-practised techniques, but can the same tactics be the key to defeating insurgencies on the front line? Former police officer, federal marshal, and JIEDDO FOX team member Louis J. DeAnda tells Defence IQ how we need to take a holistic strategy to IED network attack…

Phi Beta Iota:  Completely apart from the corruption at the top of both the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense, this is an extraordinary–a gifted–contribution to the literature.  It is reproduced in full below the line to preserve it as a reference.

Continue reading “DefDog: Counter-IED Network Analysis – Works for Law Enforcement, Ignored by US Military”

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DefDog: Cyber-Idiocy Rules

Commerce, Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Law Enforcement, Military
DefDog

Still fixation on monolithic threats…..where are errors and ommissions, poor coding, etc?

Rethinking cyber warfare

Scott Borg:  Cyber warfare will require us to rethink every aspect of defence.  Our current weapons and defence systems will still be needed, but the way we use them will become very different.  A major cyber assault could completely bypass our military forces.  It would not require incoming airplanes, missiles, ships, or troops.  The attack could suddenly appear inside the computerized equipment of our major industries.  The identity of the country or organization that was responsible could be impossible to determine quickly or with complete confidence.  The cyber assault could cause almost any kind of damage that could be produced by the human operators of computerized equipment.  In fact, a cyber attack could cause many kinds of damage that the human operators of industrial equipment could only achieve by reprogramming their controls.

Phi Beta Iota:  Nobody has learned anything since NSA first learned about hackers and then was told to focus on both the security of corporation communications and the need for a national secure information infrastructure.  The above perspective is uninformed, and also dangerous for its idiotic suggestion that we should militarize all domestic systems.

See Also:  Graphic: Cyber-Threat 101