The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Lauren Anderson: the “We” of the our collaborative age will replace the “Me” of the industrial age
“Is this shift from the Me to the We as significant as the industrial revolution? And should we welcome this revolution with, so to speak, open arms?”
Lauren Anderson is the Innovation Director for Collaborative Lab, interviewed here by Andrew Keen:
As originally posted by Michel Bauwens.
Iran Reportedly Arrests Twelve CIA Agents
EXTRACT:
US officials confessed on Tuesday that Iranian intelligence forces and Hezbollah have unraveled the CIA’s spy network in Iran and Lebanon and arrested dozens of informants, severely damaging the intelligence agency’s reputation and ability to gather vital information on the two countries at a sensitive time in the region.
A CIA-led program in the Middle East is up in the air after officials confirmed to news organizations today that paid informants in Iran and Lebanon working for the US government have disappeared while attempting to infiltrate Hezbollah.
Steele Sends: For DECADES I and others have been pointing out, in legal, ethical, public terms, the incapacity of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) across all fronts – clandestine operations, covert operations, analysis, administration, and what passes for management, which is merely a conventionally-dressed clown show. We have been called “lunatic fringe,” disgruntled, and worse. The fact of the matter is that I am probably more loyal to the Constitution and more loyal to the Republic and more loyal to the TRUE mission of US Intelligence than anyone now serving. CIA lives immunity, not cover, and that immunity is now over. CIA is incapable of conducting more than a handful of “denied area” clandestine operations, and they are now being confronted with the reality that the entire world is a denied area where they will be held accountable for being inept and where they might even be held accountable for crimes against humanity. Without intelligence and integrity, the US government is nothing more than a front for Congressional looting, and everyone now serving should be deeply ashamed of their role in perpetuating Versailles on the Potomac.
In Passing: I did not want to do a separate post on the reprehensible manner in which CIA is exploiting the death of Mike Spann in Afghanistan. He was totally unqualified to be doing what he was sent to do, and inept CIA managers sent him to his death. When you combine that with Khost Kathy, you get a better appreciation of the utter incompetence, arrogance, hubris, and general pasty-faced bloated psychopathology of CIA management, nowhere more ingained and out of control than in the Directorate of Operations. CIA never had a strong bench to begin with. Today they are, in my view, a danger to themselves and a danger to the Republic.
Footnote: Mike Spann's widow has been in dire financial straits in part because of the self-serving idiocy of CIA managers more interested in putting on a show hiding behind the flag, than in helping her remain employed and sustain her family.
Executive Summary:
Occupy has three demands:
1. Get money out of politics
2. Reverse the legalization of the corruption and crime in both banking and related industries (e.g. military-industrial complex.
3. Close loopholes that allow Congress to legally cheat the public at every turn by passing laws favoring their own investments.
Federal Government has federalized state and local law enforcement against its own citizens, and this endeavor is being run by NY Representative Peter King.
The “third rail” of the two-party tyranny has been exposed. A Civil War has begun, between the 99% and the 1%. With the exceptions of Kucinich and Paul Sr., Congress is with the 1%.
The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy
The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality
Naomi Wolf
The Guardian, 25 November 2012
US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.
Phi Beta Iota: Occupy must focus on King and burn him (metaphorically speaking) out of office. Then it must read/listen to the Open Letter to Occupy /* and place its full attention on the Electoral Reform Summit that will take place, it now appears that event will occur in Washington DC is a very prominent place easily accessible to broadcast television networks. The lines are drawn. Congress has turned against its own people, publicly.
Tip of the Hat to Josh Kilbourn.
See Also:
How Ignorance, Greed and Ideology Are Warping Science and Hurting Democracy
“Whenever the people are well informed” an optimistic Thomas Jefferson wrote, “they can be trusted with their own government.” Sure – but what if the people have no clue?
Most of the big challenges facing America and the world today – from climate change to disease to population growth – revolve around science and technology. If we – We, the People – are going to make smart decisions on what to do about these problems, we need to have at least a rough understanding of the basic science involved. Problem is, we don't.
As science writer Shawn Lawrence Otto points out in a tough-minded new book, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, too many Americans are either plain ignorant of science or actively hostile to it, or both.
A Collection of Moving #Occupy Videos
Most of the Occupy videos circulating lately are of massive demonstrations, police abuse of protesters, and various Occupy encampments being removed or resisting removal. For this remarkable visibility we can thank cell phones, powerful cheap video cameras, and the Web – from YouTube to live feeds.
There have been earlier periods of video visibility in the US – for example, TV coverage of the Vietnam War helped stimulate rising public resistance and a bystander's video of Rodney King being beaten by LA police in 1991 had a profound impact on the country. But for the last decade or so, images of our wars have been more thoroughly controlled by the government and mass media have often ignored major demonstrations, so today's renewed video visibility is refreshing. The effort to prevent video and other press coverage of the recent trashing of the Zuccotti Park encampment was so unusual and broadly offensive that it incited widespread comment.
One of the videos of this type that most impressed me recently showed the silent vigil that met University of California Davis chancellor Linda Katehi as she walked to her car. I don't know who thought of it, but I see this response by UC Davis students to the brutal pepper-spraying of peaceful student demonstrators on the ground as a profoundly important development in the Occupy movement's evolution. A small group of Great Peace Marchers in 1986 passed out tiny cards to their fellow marchers saying “We are walking in silence on behalf of the silent dead of Hiroshima and the silent unborn future” and silence spread through the crowd of over 1000 as we entered Washington DC, with comparable powerful effect. I hope the use of moral silence as a tactic spreads in Occupy. Here's the video:
However, I want to mainly use this message to highlight another type of OWS videos showing up in my emails – the ones made to inspire us.
Consider the moving videos below – and enjoy them.
Coheartedly,
Tom
See original post, links, descriptions of all links.
See Also:
David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street
Meet the anthropologist, activist, and anarchist who helped transform a hapless rally into a global protest movement
Check out the music of this Youtube video, which features a song written by Woody Guthrie and sung by Billy Bragg/Wilco.
A possible anthem for the Occupy movement?
I like it a lot, it's a feel-good and hopeful song, more relevant now than when Guthrie wrote it in the 1940's:
This just doesn't apply to lawyers, but most college grads are ill
prepared to enter the work force….
What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering
New York Times, November 19, 2011
EXTRACT:
What they did not get, for all that time and money, was much practical training. Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.”
So, for decades, clients have essentially underwritten the training of new lawyers, paying as much as $300 an hour for the time of associates learning on the job. But the downturn in the economy, and long-running efforts to rethink legal fees, have prompted more and more of those clients to send a simple message to law firms: Teach new hires on your own dime.
“The fundamental issue is that law schools are producing people who are not capable of being counselors,” says Jeffrey W. Carr, the general counsel of FMC Technologies, a Houston company that makes oil drilling equipment. “They are lawyers in the sense that they have law degrees, but they aren’t ready to be a provider of services.”
Phi Beta Iota: The entire US educational system is hosed. From college students who graduate with no more capability than high school graduates to half century ago, to “professional” degrees that do not teach how to “do” only how to take tests, the disconnect from reality is huge. While some intelligence studies have emerged, after the pioneering effort of Mercyhurst under Bob Heibel, they do not actually teach the craft of intelligence or how to do holistic analytics or create workable open source information technology support packages — they simply prepare rounded cogs for the secret intelligence world.
See Also:
Education (General) (128)
