The after effects of the Arab Spring, good or bad for Israel?
Jamime Ortega aka Arizona
The Daily Journalist, 13 Aug 2012
Countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen had recently civil confrontations to push out their tyrant rulers out, in order to construct a new state. Many of these countries are still under the ‘after effects’ of these Arab Spring revolutions. Many critics point that ‘Sharia Law’ could be established in these countries as an alternative for a democratic reformation. For example, many experts believe groups like the ‘Islamic Brotherhood’ that once fought alongside the ‘libertarian secularist in Egypt’ to dethrone Mubarak’s regime, will eventually turn their backs on the “young progressive movement” and fight instead for an Islamic state.
The questions are how will Israel cope with the transformations of these countries? And how many of these Arab countries except for Tunisia and Libya (Not Arab) will become Islamic states?
Romney’s choice of the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Congressman Paul Ryan, as his running mate mirrors John McCain’s disastrous choice of Sarah Palin four years ago, although Ryan is probably a more able politician. Being smarter than Palin, Ryan’s plutocracy-enriching budget proposals suggest he is also a more hypocritical politician, although such a distinction in Versailles on the Potomac during the summer of 2012 may be a case of splitting hairs.
It is a well known fact that like his predecessor candidate for President, John McCain, Romney will never be trusted by hard-right populists energizing the looney base of the Republican Party. So, like McCain, Romney has picked a superficially attractive hard-right nutcase as a running mate in a forlorn attempt to energize his party’s crazy base. Once again the mainstream media is going gah gah over the brilliance of the choice. If you doubt this, google the choice of Palin and compare that gushing to today’s gushing. In so doing, Romney, like McCain, is setting himself up for a slaughter by Mr. Obama, whose historical role is rapidly becoming one of being the Great Enabler of the oligarchy that is taking over the United States.
Obama, if nothing else, has proven himself to be a brilliant exploiter of his opponent’s political weaknesses. Barring some unforeseen exogenous disaster, like a terrorist attack or another Wall Street collapse, Mr. Obama’s looming slaughter of Romney is almost a certainty.
I am not saying that Obama deserves to be elected, only that he will be elected. Why do I say this? Consider please the following:
Damon Horowitz, a philosophy professor and “serial entrepreneur,” recently joined Google as an In-House Philosopher/Director of Engineering. Prior to his work at Google, Horowitz co-founded Aardvark, Perspecta, and a number of other tech companies. In this talk at Stanford University’s 2011 BiblioTech conference on “Human Experience,” Horowitz explains why he left a highly-paid tech career, in which he sought the keys to artificial intelligence, to pursue a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Stanford (the text of the talk is available here).
Horowitz offers fellow techies a formidable challenge, but a worthwhile one. In saying so, I must confess a bias: As a student and teacher of the humanities, I have watched with some dismay as the culture becomes increasingly dominated by technicians who often ignore or dismiss pressing philosophical and ethical problems in their quest to build a better world. It is gratifying to hear from someone who recognized this issue by (temporarily) giving up what he admits was a great deal of power and societal privilege and headed back to the classroom.
Horowitz describes his intellectual journey from “technologist” to philosopher with passion and candor, and concludes that as a result of his academic inquiry, he “no longer looks for machines to solve all of our problems for us,” and no longer assumes that he knows what’s best for his users. This kind of humility and intellectual flexibility is, ideally, the outcome of a higher degree in the humanities, and Horowitz uses his own trials to make a case for better critical thinking, for a “humanistic perspective,” in the tech sector and elsewhere. For examples, see Horowitz’s TED talks on a “moral operating system” and “philosophy in prison.” Complicating Google’s well-known, unofficial slogan “don’t be evil,” Horowitz, drawing on Hannah Arendt, believes that most of the evil in the world comes not from bad intentions but from “not thinking.”
ROBERT STEELE: The IC, DoD, and oversight agencies such as OMB and GAO have not sought to audit government spending on OSINT and probably could not do so effectively with the combination of ignorance on the part of the auditors and recalcitrance on the part of those who should be audited. The closest anyone came to setting the stage for this was in 2000 when Sean O'Keefe, DD/OMB, established code M320 to tag all spending by the US Government on contractor provision of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). When O'Keffe moved to NASA, the impetus for getting OSINT right died. More recently, Joe Markowitz and Robert Steele met with senior civil servants at OMB and got a second approval for the Open Source Agency (OSA) contingent on a Cabinet secretary asking for it. There was universal agreement the OSA should not be under secret community management but rather under diplomatic and/or commercial agency auspices. Joe Markowitz and Robert Steele continue to favor Markowitz's original idea, that the OSA be a sister-agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). It would of course provide near-real-time feed of all OSINT to the high side, the secret side, but all OSINT would remain outside the wire for liberal sharing with any other actor US or foreign.
Robert Steele
What is known is that DoD treats OSINT as a technical processing challenge (this is ineffective since 80% or more of OSINT is not published, not digital, and not online); that ABLE DANGER was a very expensive program that included both digital OSINT and the digitization of visa application; that Document Exploitation (DOCEX) has received a great deal of investment within DIA, to the point that seriously silly claims have been made to justify new SES/DISL positions, e.g. that DOCEX is its “own” discipline. The two largest contracts in OSINT, both hosed by the client with the contractors going along, are the L-3 provision of OSINT technical and subject matter support to the CIA's Open Source Center (the latter is NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, a national capability, just an over-hyped internal capability whose budget has been cut in half since the conversation from being the Foreign Broadcast Information Service) and the SOS International contract with USSTRATCOM to provide butts in seats that pretend to do IO/online OSINT monitoring (more idiocy).
Over-all, including classified projects, including DARPA and IARPA and hidden relationships with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, among others, and including non-secret non-national security element spending on open sources and what pass for methods, is no less than one billion a year, probably around three billion a year, and when counting all the buried pieces (e.g. contractors doing Mission X and creating their own OSINT support that is still not available for the CIA OSC), perhaps as much as five billion a year. All out of control, lacking any combination of intelligence and integrity, as much if not more of a waste than the $80 billion plus spent on technical collection that is not processed, with little regard for human intelligence and advanced analytics, all to provide “at best” 4% of what the President or a major commander requires to make good decisions.
The data in this article is phenomenal – it shows tables of information containing test results for radioactivity in major foodstuffs in Japan, and it shows virtually all of it is contaminatedbeyond safe levels!
Don't Buy Anything Made in Japan!
“The Japanese people are beset by a food chain that has been thoroughly compromised by radioactive cesium. As a result, there is no longer any public confidence in the integrity of Japan’s food inspection system. Almost all edibles tested in Japan contain radioactive cesium, and it has now been verified that shiitake mushrooms in Miyoshi City, Hiroshima Prefecture have tested above the statutory limit for radioactive cesium. Thus, radioactive cesium has now spread far beyond Fukushima Prefecture. Like the HIV-tainted blood scandal of the 1980’s, Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has once again been blindsided due to the lack of a proactive plan…There is now virtually continuous testing of edibles in many prefectures of Japan, and more than 2,300 samples (as of August 2, 2012) have tested over the statutory limits for radioactive iodine and/or cesium. Radioactive cesium is also now being detected in food products manufactured in Japan. Therefore, there is extreme concern about short selling of food sector equities listed on Japanese stock exchanges.”
One wonders what else besides food is contaminated. Do automobiles, electronics (TVs, laptops, etc.) – which are exported to the US and elsewhere – have dangerous radioactive residues? What will happen if this is the case, and the rest of the world refuses to buy Japanese products and foodstuffs? It would collapse the Japanese economy, leading to possibly incalculable world-wide economic repercussions. Such a possibility or probability is the likely reason why the Japanese government has lied about the truly dire nature of the situation in Japan. In light of this, it seems the worst-case scenario of the entire Japanese population abandoning the island and moving elsewhere – China? or eastern Russia? – becomes much more likely.
(08/08/12) DENVER – Coloradans soon will have a new health insurance option – and this one is “owned” by consumers.
Called the Colorado Health Insurance Cooperative, it's based on models pioneered in other industries, such as farmers' co-ops for crops or
electricity, or member-owned businesses such as credit unions.
Editor's note: John Avlon is a CNN contributor and senior political columnist for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He is co-editor of the book “Deadline Artists: America's Greatest Newspaper Columns.” He is a regular contributor to “Erin Burnett OutFront” and is a member of the OutFront Political Strike Team. For more political analysis, tune in to “Erin Burnett OutFront” at 7 ET weeknights.
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(CNN) — One hundred years ago Monday, Theodore Roosevelt launched the most successful third party presidential bid in American history, declaring, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!”
It was the culmination of the Progressive Party Convention in Chicago on August 6, 1912. And its influence still echoes through our politics today.
Roosevelt, the former president, had tried and failed to wrest the GOP nomination from his successor, William Howard Taft. His supporters believed that the nomination had been stolen by the conservative power brokers and declared their independence.
Phi Beta Iota: It is not too late for 2012. An Electoral Reform Summit in September could blow open the ballot for all federal elections. Learn more at We the People Reform Coalition. Full CNN Op-Ed below the line.
