Government – Page 716 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/04/252012/04/25

Chuck Spinney: US Senate Notices Next Atomic Disaster in Japan

05 Energy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency

Warning Signs for the US

Why Fukushima is a Greater Disaster Than Chernobyl

by ROBERT ALVAREZ,

Counterpunch, APRIL 24, 2012

In the aftermath of the world’s worst nuclear power disaster, the news media is just beginning to grasp that the dangers to Japan and the rest of the world posed by the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site are far from over. After repeated warnings by former senior Japanese officials, nuclear experts, and now a U.S. Senator, it is sinking in that the irradiated nuclear fuel stored in spent fuel pools amidst the reactor ruins may have far greater potential offsite consequences than the molten cores.

After visiting the site recently, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote to Japan’s ambassador to the U.S. stating that, “loss of containment in any of these pools could result in an even greater release than the initial accident.”

This is why:

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: This is a classic illustration of how dangerously useless it is to have a massively expensive secret intelligence and “heavy metal” military, without capacity for global coverage, true cost economics, and so on. Until governments make the shift toward future-oriented hybid governnance — embracing the core ideals of clarity, diversity, and integrity — it will not be possible to get a grip on the challenges and the possibilities facing the human species on Earth. We have been here before: in the 1970's when Peak Oil, Peak Water, and AIDs were all briefed to the US Senate and to the White House. The reality is that the corruption characteristic of those bodies then is still with us–there is only ONE serious approach to this and all other issues, and that is the creation of the World Brain and Global Game and a commensurate commitment to integrate true cost economics into every decision, and to make every decision as indigenous communities have done for thousands of years: future-oriented — Seventh Generation.

2012/04/252012/04/25

Yoda: Thinking in a Foreign Language Improves Decisions

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call, Policies

yoda with light saber — Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Maybe we should stop worrying about analysts w second language capabilities and insist that policymakers have a second language.

Thinking in foreign language makes decisions more rational

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.

A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the US and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

“Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study.

“It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases,” wrote Keysar’s team.

Psychologists say human reasoning is shaped by two distinct modes of thought: one that’s systematic, analytical and cognition-intensive, and another that’s fast, unconscious and emotionally charged.

In light of this, it’s plausible that the cognitive demands of thinking in a non-native, non-automatic language would leave people with little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately increasing their reliance on quick-and-dirty cogitation.

Equally plausible, however, is that communicating in a learned language forces people to be deliberate, reducing the role of potentially unreliable instinct. Research also shows that immediate emotional reactions to emotively charged words are muted in non-native languages, further hinting at deliberation.

. . . . . . .

The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Integrity is not just about people making decisions. It is about the whole — the context, the clarity of communication, the diversity of views, the integrity of all feedback loops. Today there is very little integrity in the process of intelligence – on those rare occasions when it actually exists — and there is zero integrity in the policy process, something Paul Pillar and Morton Halperin (among many others) have documented nicely.

See Also:

Morton Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Brookings, 2006)

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

Paul Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (Columbia, 2011)

Phi Beta Iota: Journal: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both

2012/04/24

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

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement

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.

Owl: 63 Drone Launch Sites Across the USA

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

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.

2012/04/24

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

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

2012/04/242012/04/24

DefDog: Cyber-Idiocy Rules

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

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

2012/04/212012/04/21

Josh Kilbourn: “we are this far from a turnkey totalitarian state”

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, DHS, DoD, Government, Law Enforcement

NSA Whistleblower Speaks Live: “The Government Is Lying To You”

Just a month ago we raised more than a proverbial eyebrow when we noted the creation of the NSA's Utah Data Center (codename Stellar Wind) and William Binney's formidable statement that “we are this far from a turnkey totalitarian state”. Democracy Now has the former National Security Agency technical director whistleblower's first TV interview in which he discusses the NSA's massive power to spy on Americans and why the FBI raided his home. Since retiring from the NSA in 2001, he has warned that the NSA’s data-mining program has become so vast that it could “create an Orwellian state.” Today marks the first time Binney has spoken on national TV about NSA surveillance. Starting with his pre-9-11 identification of the world-wide-web as a voluminous problem since the NSA was ‘falling behind the rate-of-change', his success in creating a system (codenamed Thin-Thread) for ‘grabbing' all the data and the critical ‘lawful' anonymization of that data (according to mandate at the time) which as soon as 9-11 occurred went out of the window as all domestic and foreign communications was now stored (starting with AT&T's forking over their data). This direct violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in the country was why Binney decided he could not stay (leaving one month after 9-11) along with the violation of almost every privacy and intelligence act as near-bottomless databases store all forms of communication collected by the agency, including private emails, cell phone calls, Google searches and other personal data.

There was a time when Americans still cared about matters such as personal privacy. Luckily, they now have iGadgets to keep them distracted as they hand over their last pieces of individuality to the Tzar of conformity.

In four parts: read on….

Phi Beta Iota: Neither NSA nor DHS are inherently evil — they are merely expensive, inept, and out of control. They are staffed by good people who mean well, led by good people who mean well, but in the aggregate they are so unAmerican and unConstitutional as to deby belief that they could actually exist and thrive.

See Also:

The Battle for the Soul of the Republic (Reality Sandwich)