Category: Government

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Integrity, lacking in the White House…..

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Media
DefDog Recommends....

Original Story:

The hip, transparent and social media-loving Obama administration is showing its analog roots. And maybe even some hypocrisy highlights.

White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news.

The Chronicle's Carla Marinucci – who, like many contemporary reporters, has a phone with video capabilities on her at all times –shot some protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel.

Read more….

UPDATE:

Update: In a pants-on-fire moment, the White House press office today denied anyone there had issued threats to remove Carla Marinucci and possibly other Hearst reporters from the press pool covering the President in the Bay Area.

Chronicle editor Ward Bushee called the press office on its fib:

Read more….

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Chuck Spinney: Obama’s Failure of Intelligence & Integrity

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Policies
Chuck Spinney

My friend Jeff Madrick, and old fashioned liberal democrat in the best sense of the term, has penned a pithy analysis of the anti-empirical madness now dominating the contemporary American political economy.  Jeff concludes that the Right ignores its track record, particularly regarding the clear economic effects of tax cuts, and is rarely challenged on the issue.  Madrick is correct.  The question is why?

More precisely, why is political debate shaped more by a new dark age of irrational romantic ideology than the by the rationality and empiricism bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution?

For what it worth, here is my answer:  Money.  (What follows is my view, and should not be attributed to Jeff.)

Look no further than at a Democratic Party that has sold out, and in so doing, forgot its roots, having grown arrogant, effete, and soft in the comfortable aftermath of its dominance under Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson, each of whom, whatever his faults, was at least a fighter.  The real problem corrupting our warped politics has less to do with the Right Wing Wrecking Crew than with the rise of wimpish neo-liberal and pro-defense Democrats (e.g., like Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama), who are now being reinforced by the so-called progressives, who are willing to go along with Obama's strategy of appeasing the right wing wreckers, rationalizing that any alternative to Obama will be worse.  A more reliable pathway to strategic defeat is hard to imagine.   Maybe the wrecking crew's winner-take-all politics of fang and claw ought to be answered by a more principled politics of fang an claw.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Obama's Failure of Intelligence & Integrity”

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Four Weapons Against Humanity

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), IO Secrets, Military, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

 

Venessa Miemis

The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the commons,
But lets the greater villain loose
That steals the commons from the goose.
– 16th century English rhyme

March 23, 2011

Four weapons

Posted by leavergirl under civ, problem of power, traps

Anthropologists have noted three main pathways to power. I say there are four. And out of these pathways come four types of weapons used against us, and four types of weapon industries. One of these has been obvious to all, two became more and more visible as the 20th century progressed, and the last needs far greater exposure than it has received. What are those weapons? What are the main ways to inflict damage on human beings by those who seek to dominate?

Read concise elegant discussion of each of the following:

1.  Physical Weapons  ..  2.  Economic Weapons  ..  3.  Ideological Weapons including Religion & Rote Education  ..  4.  Government as a Weapon

Phi Beta Iota: There are two literatures that are relevant here, the first represented by such books as Tragedy & Hope and its introductory companion the Naked Capitalist, and the second by a less well known but amply robust literature on the sovereign individual.  A general strike and a refusal to pay taxes are the legitimate last resort of an abused public.  Similarly, a public demand for Electoral Reform, absent which the legitimacy of any government is ended in the eyes of all, can be equally compelling.  The times they are a'changing.  We have high hopes for 2012 as the year of awakening and reconciliation based on truth.

See Also:

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)

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9/11 Questions Linger Ten Years Later

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Secrets, Military

For Activists, Architects, 9/11 Questions Linger Ten Years Later

GLORIA TATUM 4-30-2011 Atlanta Progressive News

Click on Image to Enlarge

With additional reporting by Matthew Cardinale, News Editor.

[The purpose of this article is not to hypothesize what the real story behind the Towers' collapse is, but to address what we find to be reasonable and compelling questions about the government's official account.]

(APN) ATLANTA — It will be ten years since September 11, 2001, in just a few months.  And yet some of the most basic and fundamental questions about what happened that day–based upon physics and the forensic science of structural engineering–in the collapse of three towers at the World Trade Center in New York, still linger.

Groups such as Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (A&E), founded by Richard Gage; and We Are Change Atlanta want to re-examine the evidence regarding the collapse of all three buildings.

Continue reading “9/11 Questions Linger Ten Years Later”

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Bin Laden Show 75: Bin Laden Transfigured

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency

Phil Giraldi

Osama bin Laden Transfigured

by Phil Giraldi, 12 May 2011

AntiWar.com

The execution-style slaying of Osama bin Laden has been touted as a great success for United States intelligence operatives and also for the special operations soldiers, sailors, and airmen who executed the plan. But it also leaves one feeling a bit uneasy about where this is all going now that the world’s most wanted fugitive is dead. A retrospective look at the fifteen year manhunt mounted by the US government estimates that it cost something like $3 trillion to kill him. An effort is being made to confirm that bin Laden was still a very dangerous man, plotting with his associates and “coming up with ideas” about attacking transportation hubs in the US, but there is little to suggest that the aging terrorist was well positioned to mount any effective operations against anyone. As he relied on couriers to communicate his wishes he was not even able to send instructions or advice to his remaining associates in under a week, hardly qualifying him as a hands-on master of terror.

. . . . . .

But what is particularly disquieting about the bin Laden story is how it is being used by some media commentators and politicians to support the reactionary war on terror policies of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In the press and on Capitol Hill there have been suggestions that the successful tracking of bin Laden came about because of torture, that the key information that led to his hideout in Pakistan was developed in a CIA secret prison. Demagogic politicians like congressman Peter King are extolling the virtues of enhanced interrogation and calling for more of it.

Read full article….

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D. is a contributing editor to The American Conservative and executive director of the Council for the National Interest He is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served 18 years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain.

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Bin Laden Show 74: More Doubts

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Military
Click on Image to Enlarge

AP Sources: Raiders Knew Mission A One-Shot Deal

By KIMBERLY DOZIER

Sacramento Bee, May 17, 2011

WASHINGTON — Those who planned the secret mission to get Osama bin Laden in Pakistan knew it was a one-shot deal, and it nearly went terribly wrong.

The U.S. deliberately hid the operation from Pakistan, and predicted that national outrage over the breach of Pakistani sovereignty would make it impossible to try again if the raid on bin Laden's suspected redoubt came up dry.

Once the raiders reached their target, things started to go awry almost immediately, officials briefed on the operation said.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: None of this makes sense and it includes some deliberate lies–for example, the military phonetic for G is Golf, not Geronimo, these people are making stuff up as they go along.  We still do not understand the five helicopters when five special operations officers with silenced weapons coming in through  the front door would have been more than enough, using a single stealth helicopter for extraction only.  The CIA observation post combined with micro-drone surveillance was more than enough to get to an accurate assessment of numbers and weapons.  With Blackwater blown in Abbottabad a full year prior to this operation, it all simply does not add up.

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Bin Laden Show 73: One Skeptic’s Summary

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency

The Ongoing bin Laden Saga: Can Americans Be Unplugged?

by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, 16 May 2011

Global Research.ca

“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

The ever-changing, ever-growing bin Laden story becomes ever more preposterous. The cowardly bin Laden is now the vain bin Laden, the terror mastermind who has nothing to do but to sit and watch videos of himself.

Washington released a video of an alleged bin Laden indulging in self-admiration, but there is no sound. Why? Was the video made without sound? Did Washington delete the audio? The video seems to show the alleged bin Laden speaking to someone in the room. Is the voice not bin Laden’s? Is the alleged bin Laden referring to the image on the screen in the third person, as not himself? Why would bin Laden have a video made of himself watching videos of himself? Why is a video of bin Laden watching bin Laden a headline story? Is it meant to substitute for the absence of a corpse?

As one reader put it, “The government is playing with us, experimenting to see if there is any tall tale we won’t believe.”

Read rest of article….

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