The President calls them a threat to national security. the Internet calls them heroes. A new wave of hacktivists is changing the way we handle secrets.
By Michael Scherer
Time, June 24, 2013, Pg. 22
The 21st century mole demands no payments for his secrets. He sees himself instead as an idealist, a believer in individual sovereignty and freedom from tyranny. Chinese and Russian spooks will not tempt him. Rather, it's the bits and bytes of an online political philosophy that attract his imagination, a hacker mentality founded on message boards in the 1980s, honed in chat rooms in the '90s and matured in recent online neighborhoods like Reddit and 4chan. He believes above all that information wants to be free, that privacy is sacred and that he has a responsibility to defend both ideas.
(Reuters) – Moderate cleric Hassan Rohani won Iran's presidential election on Saturday with a resounding defeat of conservative hardliners, calling it a victory of moderation over extremism and pledging a new tone of respect in international affairs.
Offering praise for Iranians and reproaching their government, the Obama administration said Saturday it respected the results of a presidential election conducted under restrictive conditions.
Americans were largely ignorant of the Muslim faith prior to 9/11, but in the years since we have at least learned that there are two major branches and that not all Muslims are Arab. I came across this graphic of global Muslim sects in other reading a few days ago and saved it for an opportune moment, not realizing how quickly I would need it.
The geographic display of the divide between Sunni and Shia is a fair match for the count of adherents – about 85% of all Muslims are Sunni. There are several conflicts where the sectarian differences are important. These include:
Alawite Syrians on the coast, terrified of the coming Sunni majority government
Majority Shia Bahrain chafing under a Sunni monarchy
Yemeni Shia fighting to restore the North/South Yemen divide
Click on Image to Enlarge
One bright spot has been NATO relations with the ethnic Hazara minority in Afghanistan. They are clearly visible in the global sects map as a yellow Jafari Shia donut hole in the middle of what is otherwise Hanafi Sunni territory.
In 1984 — the year not the book, but it was fitting — and five years before she died, Barbara Tuchman published a book called The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. In one part of the book she looked at the destructive work of a series of a half-dozen popes, work destructive of the papacy, work that brought into being the protestant secession from the Catholic church. This was offered as an example of folly, of rulers acting against the interest of their own institution. It was also an example of what we so casually label “the imperial presidency.” That is, in these popes we watched the mad and cumulative concentration of power and normalization of abuses that Tuchman almost certainly was aware she was living through again — along with the debasement of an institution previously imagined to embody certain principles and integrity.
Does history repeat itself?
Is the Pope Catholic?
. . . . . . . . .
Clement VII, Pope from 1523 to 1534 / Barack Obama, President since 2009
“The new Clement's reign proved to be a pyramid of catastrophes. Protestantism continued its advance. . . . Supreme office, like sudden disaster, often reveals the man, and revealed Clement as less adequate than expected. Knowledgeable and effective as a subordinate, Guicciardini writes, he fell victim when in charge to timidity, perplexity, and habitual irresolution. . . . By 1527, hardly a part of Italy had escaped violence to life and land, plunder, destruction, misery, and famines. Clement's misjudgments having prepared the way, Rome itself was now to be engulfed by war.”
“The folly of the popes was not pursuit of counter-productive policy so much as rejection of any steady or coherent policy either political or religious that would have improved their situation or arrested the rising discontent. Disregard of the movements and sentiments developing around them was the primary folly. . . . When private interest is placed before public interests, and private ambition, greed, and the bewitchment of exercising power determine policy, the public interest necessarily loses, never more conspicuously than under the continuing madness from Sixtus to Clement. The succession from Pope to Pope multiplied the harm. Each of the six handed on his conception of the Papacy unchanged. . . . St. Peter's See was the ultimate pork barrel. Their three outstanding attitudes — obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status — are persistent aspects of folly. While in the case of the Renaissance popes, these were bred in and exaggerated by the surrounding culture, all are independent of time and recurrent in governorship.”
George thought you might be interested in the op-ed below published today by Guinean President Alpha Condé. President Condé writes about the struggle to reform business practices in Guinea’s mining sector so all the people of Guinea can benefit from the country’s immense mineral wealth. The op-ed comes in the context of Conde’s participation in this year’s G8 meeting, which is focusing on trade, taxes, and transparency. OSF has been in the forefront of promoting transparency particularly in the governance of natural resources. President Condé is emerging as a champion of these values in Africa. His op-ed is an elegant statement of why the issue is so vital to the continent’s development.
We need G8 support for transparency and good global business governance so that our assets can be used to benefit everyone rather than just a few greedy mining companies and politicians.
In December 2010, I was elected president of Guinea in its first truly open and democratic elections. I said then that I had inherited a country, not a state. Our economy was in ruins, our people among the poorest on the planet and our political system weakened by decades of corruption, dictatorship and misrule.
It needn't be so. Guinea has vast mineral wealth, the world's largest reserves of bauxite and some of the highest grade iron ore deposits.
Making these assets work for all our people rather than a few unscrupulous international mining companies and politicians means confronting the deeply ingrained corruption in our politics and business. But uprooting such corruption can be painfully slow, and is often dangerous. After all, vested interests do not welcome challenge.
On 22 November 2013, the Oswald Innocence Campaign will be hosting the premiere event to commemorate the 50th observance of the JFK assassination. Presenting cutting-edge research on the death of our 35th President that holds the keys to understanding what took place, it will feature some of the best authors on some the most important evidence that clarifies and illuminates that tragic event in Dallas, 50 years ago.
The research presented will advance extensive, detailed evidence establishing that the assassination of JFK was a “national security event”, which involved crucial elements of the most powerful institutions in the American government, including the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, the FBI and the Secret Service, who conspired with the Mafia, anti-Castro Cubans and Texas oil men to remove JFK from office and replace his policies with those of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
As Ralph Cinque has observed, this November 22nd, the government and the media are going to be going all out with the official lie about JFK–and with extreme prejudice. They are going to pull all the stops to promote the indefensible and long-disproven lie–one more stomach-churning time. What can we do to stand up to this evil pomposity? We can literally stand together–in Santa Barbara. We can come together and evoke the call for JFK truth. A coup d-etat took place in 1963, and we have been living with the results of it for half a century–with millions of dead across the globe. With the death of John Kennedy, the US became a perpetual warfare state, and we live every day of our lives with the consequenes of that monstrous fact. So, join us on this very special day to find strength in numbers, to make a blip on the national radar and take personal responsibility for disseminating the truth about JFK.
What you weren’t supposed to ever know
The evidence that substantiates the scenario of the assassination as a national security event is extensive and compelling. It has generate enormous resistance even within the JFK community, where several of those who will present their findings have been banned in a massive effort to suppress the truth and preserve the illusion that it was an event of a different kind, where the view that “the Mafia did it” or “the Cubans did it” or “the KGB did it” are frequently advanced, but where none of them could have effected the cover-up that was indispensable to convey the false impressions this conference will correct:
* Lee Harvey Oswald was working for the government when he was framed for the death of JFK
* Photos and films allegedly taken during the assassination were altered to conceal the truth
* Autopsy photos and X-rays were altered and faked to support a false account of the murder
* LBJ was a pivotal player–perhaps the pivotal player–who brought about the assassination
* George H.W. Bush was not only in Dealey Plaza but took an active role in carrying out the plot
* There were multiple shooters who tied the conspirators together to insure their mutual silence
* They included a Deputy Sheriff, an Air Force expert, an anti-Casto Cuban, a Police Officer and a Mafia shooter
* LBJ’s personal hit-man, who killed a dozen people for Lyndon, also appears to have been directly involved
* The Mafia could not have extended its reach into Bethesda Naval Hospital to alter X-rays and photographs
* Anti-Castro Cubans would have been unable to substitute someone else’s brain for that of JFK
* While the KBG had the capability to alter films, it could not have gained access to the Zapruder film
The experts assembled for this unique conference–which will explain how it was done, who was responsible and why, and how it was covered up–have invested decades upon decades of their lives to research on crucial aspects of the case, including the medical, the ballistic, and the film and photographic evidence. They include the leading authorities on the role of Lyndon Baines Johnson, on the involvement of George H.W. Bush, on the management of the cover-up, on the death of key witnesses intimately related to JFK and by others who personally knew the man accused of killing him. If you are there, you will understand what went down.
As Ralph Cinque has observed, this November 22nd, the government and the media are going to be going all out with the official lie about JFK–and with extreme prejudice. They are going to pull all the stops to promote the indefensible and long-disproven lie–one more stomach-churning time. What can we do to stand up to this evil pomposity? We can literally stand together–in Santa Barbara. We can come together and evoke the call for JFK truth. A coup d-etat took place in 1963, and we have been living with the results of it for half a century–with millions of dead across the globe. With the death of John Kennedy, the US became a perpetual warfare state, and we live every day of our lives with the consequenes of that monstrous fact. So, join us on this very special day to find strength in numbers, to make a blip on the national radar and take personal responsibility for disseminating the truth about JFK.
