Pentagon Supplier for Rifle Sights Says It Has ‘Always' Added New Testament References
By JOSEPH RHEE, TAHMAN BRADLEY and BRIAN ROSS
Jan. 18, 2010
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Note: the below report, which appears to be well sourced, does not rebut the Global Warming hypothesis per se, but it highlights the shoddy political character of the IPCC, together with its bias to hype the threat of global warming.
It also makes the revelations in the hacked emails all the more salient to the GW debate, especially those emails which reveal the organized efforts of suppress the opposing views of those scientists labeled disparagingly as “climate deniers” (an obscene, almost subliminal, reference to holocaust deniers) in peer reviewed journals.
Phi Beta Iota: The report observes that we lack both indicators and the ability to share information about indicators across boundaries. More disturbing to us from a public intelligence perspective is the report's unwillingess to address the cognitive dissonance that led to the break-down of an educated multi-cultural field grade officer in the U.S. Army.
Darpa’s worried that America’s “ability to compete in the increasingly internationalized stage will be hindered without college graduates with the ability to understand and innovate cutting edge technologies in the decades to come…. Finding the right people with increasingly specialized talent is becoming more difficult and will continue to add risk to a wide range of DoD [Department of Defense] systems that include software development.”
Phi Beta Iota: Great insight….only 16 years behind the point made by the opening speaker at Hackers on Planet Earth 1994. He said “When the Israeli's catch a hacker, they give him a job. When we catch a hacker, we kick them in the teeth and throw them in jail.” We wait with bated breath for DARPA to reach 1998.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the section that got our attention:
The information revolution, he said, has not raised the level of publicintelligence. It is no secret, he continued, “that the public knows less about public affairs than it used to know. Millions of Americans cannot begin to tell you what is in the Bill of Rights, what Congress does, what the Constitution says about the powers of the presidency, how the party system emerged or how it operates. A sizeable majority, according to a recent survey, believe that Israel is an Arab nation.”
Our Revolting Elites
by J. R. Nyquist
Weekly Column Published: 1.15.2010
In 1995 Christopher Lasch came out with The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. The introduction was titled “The Democratic Malaise” and included chapters like “Does Democracy Deserve to Survive?” and “The Lost Art of Argument.” The threat to our civilization, said Lasch, does not come from the masses. The threat comes from the elite.
. . . . . . .
According to Lasch, there are far worse problems facing America than racism: “the crisis of competence; the spread of apathy and a suffocating cynicism; the moral paralysis of those who value ‘openness' above all.” . . .
Tiny but powerful: Malalai Joya speaks and the women listen
Malalai Joya is only 32, but she has been an exile, a refugee, a teacher of girls in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, and now that country’s youngest member of parliament. She’s still on the run though, and still threatened with assassination
“After 9/11, they occupied my country under the banner of women’s rights and human rights and democracy, but they bring into power this photocopy of the Taliban,” she told supporters in New York. “That’s why today, the situation in Afghanistan is a disaster.”
Israel's recent aggressions look ominously like the 4 November 2008 attack on Gaza, which killed six persons and shattered the four-month-long truce meticulously respected by Hamas. Predictably, Hamas and other factions retaliated for that Israeli provocation and then Israel used their response to justify its massacre of 1,400 people in Gaza this time last year.
Israel's recent assassinations of Palestinian resistance activists look ominously like the aggression that preceded last winter's attacks in Gaza. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)
There were reports that the airport at Port-au-Prince had run out of aviation fuel, one of the factors that is understood to have led the US military to close it. . . . The scene at Santo Domingo airport was one of chaos, uncertainty and often despair for aid workers.
Ethno-Colonial BIG Africa
Phi Beta Iota: Lesson learned by the USMC the hard way (as of 1992): need Forward Area Refueling Points (FARP) in the FIRST lift.
“Africa’s not high on America’s priority list these days.
Sometimes I feel like the Lone Ranger trying to get people to bring resources to bear out here.”
I had pointed out in an earlier interview that U.S. Army Africa and Africa Command in general are notably absent from the wars in Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, conflicts Garrett said are “currently the world’s two deadliest.”
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For Israel, a Reckoning
A new global movement is challenging Israel's violations of international law with the same strategies that were used against apartheid
Phi Beta Iota: Israeli influence on the US Government has been as bad as post-war Nazi influence on the Cold War ubbas–both have spawned policies that have murdered and displaced millions, with attendant atrocities.
Recent Pakistani military operations in insurgent strongholds in Pakistan also have driven greater numbers of Pakistan-based Taliban back into Afghanistan, the officer said.
UK plans ‘trust fund' to woo Taliban fighters
Phi Beta Iota: Turn in one weapon, get enough money for two…or go enlist and training and food along with a new weapon. Money corrupts and it is not a substitute for Whole of Government Stabilization & Reconstruction accomplishments.
Developing a coherent strategy focused on the right objectives is important, and hard to do. The country team in any normal American embassy (like the one in Sana) does not have the staff, resources or experience to do so. The limited American military presence in Yemen does not either. Despite years of talk about the need to develop this kind of capability in the State Department or elsewhere in Washington, it does not exist. It must be built now, and quickly.
How easily we forget the balance books of history. Below are two pieces, one from the colonial era written in 2006, the other from the recent “neo-colonia” era in which the author examines the specifics of the Clinton Administration's policies toward Haiti. Chuck
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America's Historic Debt to Haiti
By Robert Parry February 10, 2006
As Haiti intrudes again on the U.S. consciousness with a new round of troubled elections, Americans see a violent, backward, poverty-stricken country run by descendants of African slaves. There are feelings of condescension mixed with a touch of racism.
But what few Americans know is that they owe this Caribbean nation a profound historical debt. Indeed, perhaps no nation has done more for the United States than Haiti and been treated as badly in return.
If not for Haiti – which in the 1700s rivaled the American colonies as the most valuable European possession in the Western Hemisphere – the course of U.S. history would have been very different. It is possible that the United States might never have expanded much beyond the Appalachian Mountains.
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Before and After the Quake
The Incapacitation of Haiti
By ASHLEY SMITH January 14, 2010
Why were 60 percent of the buildings in Port-au-Prince shoddily constructed and unsafe in normal circumstances, according to the city's mayor? Why are there no building regulations in a city that sits on a fault line? Why has Port-au-Prince swelled from a small town of 50,000 in the 1950s to a population of 2 million desperately poor people today? Why was the state completely overwhelmed by the disaster?
To understand these facts, we have to look at a second fault line–U.S. imperial policy toward Haiti. The U.S. government, the UN, and other powers have aided the Haitian elite in subjecting the country to neoliberal economic plans that have impoverished the masses, deforested the land, wrecked the infrastructure and incapacitated the government.
The fault line of U.S. imperialism interacted with the geological one to turn the natural disaster into a social catastrophe.
