The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Taxpayers should get a receipt so they know what they're paying for, a think tank called Third Way argues in a new paper.
Here's a sample from the group. It includes federal income tax and FICA, which funds Medicare and Social Security. Details are here.
See Also:
India-Russia: India will buy 250 to 300 advanced stealth fighter aircraft from Russian, according to Defence Minister A.K. Antony, as he announced the deal worth nearly $30 billion. Antony and Russian Defense Minister Serdyukov said Russia would supply the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) as well as 45 transport aircraft. India also will jointly manufacture the fighters under license for ten years.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: The future of the Indian Air Force appears to be linked primarily to Russian rather than US firms. This agreement thinly hides an Indian strategic judgment about the threats it faces from China and Pakistan, about the US as a supplier for coping with those threats compared to the Russians.
India is making long term preparations to be ready for a major war after ten years that will require fifth generation fighters because the most likely enemy – presumably China – also will have those air capabilities. The Russians are willing to sell India the aircraft and to license the technology. The US is not building significant numbers of fifth generation fighters and will not sell them even to Israel.
The Indians, Russians and Chinese do not share the US strategic outlook favoring small wars and counterinsurgency forces.
Phi Beta Iota: Since the mid-1990's, when the best minds associated with the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute turned decisively away from the two-major theater war model, and we presented the 1+iii (One Plus Triple Eye) strategy, the US has been incoherent with respect to strategic policy, acquisition, and operations. Ideology is not a substitute for intelligence, and technology is not a substitute for thinking.
Graphic: Four Forces After Next (from 1993-1995)
2009 Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A Twenty-Year Restrospective
2001 Threats, Strategy, and Force Structure: An Alternative Paradigm for National Security
2000 Presidential Leadership and National Security Policy Making
1998 JFQ The Asymmetric Threat: Listening to the Debate
1995 GIQ 13/2 Creating a Smart Nation: Strategy, Policy, Intelligence, and Information
1993 On Defense & Intelligence–The Grand Vision
and some graphics….
Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH Extract: East Prepares for Big War”
The Huffington Post is doing a very fine job of raising key issues, but in isolation and out of context. Here is one story they have brought forward. As Cleveland found out when they had to raze to the ground 11,000 abandoned units, foreclosures come with very heavy social and financial costs. It is not to late to stop all foreclosures and evictions as we recommended in October 2008, to no effect. America is going through a multi-dimensional crisis without any leadership whatsoever. One way to understand the crisis is to study the Revolution Matrix and the Negative Book List. The Positive Book List requires some semblance of leadership and legitimacy, at this time not to be found in America, outside of the Virtual Cabinet at The Huffington Post, which does not really exist–it could, but it does not.
Algeria-Russia: For the record. Russian President Medvedev and Algerian President Bouteflika signed a joint statement on 6 October for more coordination and communication between the two countries, Itar-Tass reported. The statement said the two countries' heads of state will meet regularly and that their foreign ministers will hold at least one meeting a year. The statement also said that there will be more coordination in the energy sector between the nations, considering the problems of energy security and resources in the world. Defense technology and military coordination were also mentioned in the statement.
Russia-Vietnam: For the record. The Russian Navy has proposed to re-establish a logistics base for Russian warships in the Vietnamese port of Cam Rahn Bay, formerly the largest Russian base outside Russian territory, Interfax reported 6 October. The Navy completed a report justifying the base's restoration, the completion of which could be finished within three years should a political decision be made, a source in the navy command said.
The primary purpose of the base is to support Russian naval vessels combating piracy in the Indian and Pacific oceans, former chief of the navy's General Staff Viktor Kravchenko said, adding if Russia still considers itself a maritime power, the restoration of such bases is “inevitable.”
Russia-India: For the record. Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov began a two-day visit to India on 6 October to attend the Russian-Indian intergovernmental commission on military-technical cooperation, Itar-Tass reported. A protocol will be signed that will address military-technical cooperation.
Discussions will touch on repairs and upgrade of the aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov; production of Su-30MKI aircraft and T-90C tanks in India; the joint development and production of fifth-generation fighter aircraft and of multipurpose transport aircraft; and the joint development and production of BrahMos cruise missiles. Serdyukov will meet with Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: The timing of the Vietnam, India and Algeria initiatives, infra, indicates the Russians are making a bid to rebuild the weapons client base of the Soviet Union.
Phi Beta Iota: What is striking to us is the obvious evidence every day that both China and Russia have a global strategy and the USA does not. Extending from that thought, one sees in the USA a government of incoherent stove-piped, ill-informed, over-manned and over-funded, with the Pentagon driving both the budget and the behavior abroad, while the Department of State mutters gloomily to itself (no one really listens to the Americans anymore–they just game them for money).
History:
1) 9-11 known to have been at a minimum allowed to happen.
2) CIA known to have sponsored terrorism in Philippines, Indonesia, Viet-Nam, and Italy as pretext.
Review: Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War) (Paperback)
Reference: US Responsibility for Atrocities in Indonesia
3) Underpants Bomber very likely to have been a US-Israeli deception operation against the US public and Congress (never mind the Constitution, Bush-Cheney buried it, Obama-Biden have carried on in that tradition).
Journal: Underpants Bomber Saved Worthless NCTC [with other links]
Current Situation:
1) This rumor has been around before; and the chatter sounds American in origin.
December 20, 2009 Police expect Mumbai-style terror attack on City of London
2) This time, the “threat” is based on a single US-controlled captive being held in Afghanistan.
Thursday, 30 September 2010 Mumbai-style commando raid plan ‘uncovered in Pakistan'
3) The threat appears to have been originally aimed at silencing critics of the widespread drone attacks inside Pakistan.
Wed Sep 29 Terror plot in Europe prompted drone strikes
4) British reinforcement of the US claims suspect
Al Qaida's Mumbai-style attack plot could have been hatched in Rochdale
Our group bottom line: Not even close. This is very likely a fraud, most certainly over-reaction hyped for political purposes, and the evidence has not been collected, processed, analyzed, and presented properly. This is bogus. What is really scary is that in order to “prove” it, a crime against humanity may be ordered, a bombing or shooting spree of sorts using either a false flag recruit set in motion by covert action operators, or a bombing by a contractor such as Xe/Blackwater.
The below linked article in the 2 October 2010 edition of the New York Times [Attachment 1] is a good example of the pro-Israeli bias in the US mainstream media when it comes to portraying Israel's relations with the Palestinians.
Note the paragraph I marked in bold which says unequivocally that “Israel halted most settlement construction for 10 months last November …” This statement is clearly central to the reader's understanding of the questions of whether or not Israel has been negotiating with good will and who is responsible for the crisis in the peace talks. It is also outrageously wrong, and that crucial fact was known at least five days before it was written. That this is indisputably true can be seen in Attachment 2 beneath it, a 28 September 2010 report in Ha'aretz, perhaps Israel's most prestigious newpaper — ironically, Ha'aretz is often referred as the New York Times of Israel. Ha'aretz tells the reader that the Israeli government's own official statistics show that the settlement freeze was barely a slowdown.
There is no way the author of the NYT report, Ethan Bonner, the senior New York Times reporter based in Israel, could have been unaware of the Ha'aretz report, and his (or his editor's) countenancing such an unequivocal statement, without at least a caveat, can only be construed to be a deliberate attempt to mislead the reader with respect to the nature of the settlement freeze, and by extension, the good will in Israel's negotiating stance vis a vis that of the Palestinians. His biased outlook becomes transparently clear when one compares the tone and context to the two reports.
To those readers, who think I am nitpicking, I would urge them to think about the wisdom embodied in the following two quotes: The first is by James Madison, the father of the US Constitution, describing the importance of popular information to effective functioning of a representative democracy. The second is Edward Gibbon's assessment of how ignorance and fanaticism sapped the cognitive faculties of the Roman peoople:
“A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” – James Madison, from a letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822
”Their credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.” – Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Chuck Spinney
NEW YORK TIMES DECEPTION AND DECEIT
October 2, 2010
Palestinian Leaders Urge End to Talks With Israel
By ETHAN BRONNER, New York Times, 2 October 2010
RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinian leadership said Saturday that four-week-old direct talks with Israel should be suspended if Jewish settlement construction resumed in the West Bank. It called on the international community to pressure Israel to stop the building but withheld a final decision on the talks until an Arab League meeting on Friday.
Read rest of this dramatically unprofessional and deceptive article…
HA'ARETZ CLARITY AND INTEGRITY
Settlement freeze? It was barely a slowdown
What took place in the past few months is, in the best case scenario, not more than a negligible decrease in the number of housing units that were built in settlements.
The official statistics supplied by the Central Bureau of Statistics describe the story behind the 10-month construction moratorium in the West Bank. The story can be called many things but “freeze” is certainly not one of them. What took place in the past few months is, in the best case scenario, not more than a negligible decrease in the number of housing units that were built in settlements.
Read the rest of this honest factual article…
Phi Beta Iota: Apart from facts in isolation, context matters. The Israeli settlements are unsustainabile in relation to available water and the continuing atrocities against the Palestinian people on their own land is an ongoing crime against humanity that is easily, in today's context, as terrible as the Holocaust was in Hitler's time. None of this has entered the human consciousness of the US public because their leaders lack integrity, as do the corporate media led by the New York Times.
See Also:
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Disinformation, Other Information Pathologies, & Repression
Wanna know how incestuous amplification works in the politico's OODA loop … or put another way, why the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac has become so disconnected from reality? … See if you have the stomach to read this disgusting drivel.
Truth in advertising: I did not have the stomach to finish it, but you don't need to finish it to appreciate the sicko psychology of worshipping at the altar of inside-the-beltway
April 21, 2010
The Man the White House Wakes Up To
Before he goes to sleep, between 11 and midnight, Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, typically checks in by e-mail with the same reporter: Mike Allen of Politico, who is also the first reporter Pfeiffer corresponds with after he wakes up at 4:20. A hyperactive former Eagle Scout, Allen will have been up for hours, if he ever went to bed. Whether or not he did is one of the many little mysteries that surround him. The abiding certainty about Allen is that sometime between 5:30 and 8:30 a.m., seven days a week, he hits “send” on a mass e-mail newsletter that some of America’s most influential people will read before they say a word to their spouses.
EXTRACT:
“The people in this community, they all want to read the same 10 stories,” he said, table-chopping in the Hay-Adams. “And to find all of those, you have to read 1,000 stories. And we do that for you.”
As a practical matter, here is how Allen’s 10 stories influence the influentials. Cable bookers, reporters and editors read Playbook obsessively, and it’s easy to pinpoint exactly how an item can spark copycat coverage that can drive a story. Items become segment pieces on “Morning Joe,” the MSNBC program, where there are 10 Politico Playbook segments each week, more than half of them featuring Allen. This incites other cable hits, many featuring Politico reporters, who collectively appear on television about 125 times a week. There are subsequent links to Politico stories on The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post and other Web aggregators that newspaper assigning editors and network news producers check regularly. “Washington narratives and impressions are no longer shaped by the grand pronouncements of big news organizations,” said Allen, a former reporter for three of them — The Washington Post, The New York Times and Time magazine. “The smartest people in politics give us the kindling, and we light the fire.”
Phi Beta Iota: We read the whole thing, and here is the bottom line–Washington is incest on steroids. It has little to do with reality, with the needs of the public, with balancing the books, or with actually engaging in public service. It has become its own bog, Of, By, and For Washington. And that does, as Brother Chuck suggests, make one sick with shame.
