The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (Conscience Over Career)
Corruption, Government, Peace Intelligence, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Videos/Movies/DocumentariesJournal: Over $1 trillion Wasted on Wars, Veterans and Families of Veterans Vocal Against Both Elective Wars
02 China, 02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Iran, 10 Security, Civil Society, Government, Military
$1 trillion wasted on wars
By KEVIN RAFFERTY
Aug 4, 2010
Special to The Japan Times
Special to The Japan Times
HONG KONG — The calculator busily counting out how much money the United States has spent on wars since 2001 has raced past $1 trillion — $1,024 billion plus at the start of August. There is little point in trying to give a more refined figure since the clock ticks remorselessly on, mesmerizingly faster than you can write the sum down, about $260,000 blown away in each passing minute.*
Meanwhile, the wars are being lost rather than won, U.S. and allied soldiers are dying and being maimed every day, tens and sometimes hundreds of innocent civilians are killed daily, and billions of dollars are being wasted and millions of lives being destroyed for no good reason apart from the overweening egos of politicians who are not prepared to admit that they are wrong.
The grim bottom line is that American military and foreign policy is bust and the greatest imperial power the world has ever known is failing. U.S. President Barack Obama promised to be different, but he has become trapped as a gear-lever in the same broken machine.
Phi Beta Iota: Apart from the stunning graphics, click on the photo of the two faces stitched together to get to a compelling article on veterans and families of veterans being against both elective wars, both wars of the rich of no benefit to the public.
Who is Aware, Talking, & Testing Receipts for Bisphenol-A, not just Food & Beverages?
07 Health, Civil Society, Commerce, Government, True CostPaper receipts also seen as source of BPA exposure
July 27, 2010 By LYNDSEY LAYTON. The Washington Post
WASHINGTON – As lawmakers and health experts wrestle over whether a controversial chemical, bisphenol-A, should be banned from food and beverage containers, a new analysis by an environmental group suggests Americans are being exposed to BPA through another, surprising route: paper receipts. The Environmental Working Group found BPA on 40 percent of the receipts it collected from supermarkets, automated teller machines, gas stations and chain stores. In some cases, the total amount of BPA on the receipt was 1,000 times the amount found in the epoxy lining of a can of food, another controversial use of the chemical. Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst with the environmental group, says BPA's prevalence on receipts could help explain why the chemical can be detected in the urine of an estimated 93 percent of Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Full article here
Concerned about BPA: Check your receipts
By Janet Raloff, Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Some — but not all — cash-register and credit-card receipts can be rich sources of exposure to BPA, a hormone-mimicking pollutant.
While working at Polaroid Corp. for more than a decade, John C. Warner learned about the chemistry behind some carbonless copy papers (now used for most credit card receipts) and the thermal imaging papers that are spit out by most modern cash registers. Both relied on bisphenol-A.
Event: 10-12 Sept 2010, Berlin, Interdependence Day
02 Diplomacy, 10 Security, Academia, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Government, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence
Berlin, Germany 2010
In 2010 Interdependence Day will be celebrated in a dynamic global city and cultural melting pot at the heart of Europe.
> INTERDEPENDENCE DAY
In a world where global interdependence is not simply an aspiration of idealists, but a brute fact of the forces that bind us together— global warming, financial capital, AIDS, telecommunications, crime, migration, and terrorism—many people still think in narrow, insular terms.
Reality is global, but consciousness too often remains local — constrained by town and nation.
In the year 2000, a small group of scholars, civic and political leaders, and artists from a dozen nations met to design a program that might help raise consciousness around the realities and possibilities of interdependence. Their efforts were given impetus by the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and the group created a project that would:
> Make September 12, the day following the memorial of 9/11, an international celebration of interdependence “Interdependence Day”
> Draw up a “Declaration of Interdependence”, making clear that both liberty and security require cooperation among peoples and nations and can no longer be secured by sovereign nations working unilaterally;
> Develop a Civic Interdependence Curriculum that would make interdependence a central concept in Civics and Social Studies programs in middle and high schools in as many schools around the world as possible.
Journal: Wikileaks Afghan Collection Assessed
02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Corruption, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Media, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda
Below is a good summary of the wikileaks database. It is also a good example of how the secretive conspiratorial mind, trained in the wilderness of mirrors that is the US intelligence establishment, conjures motivations out of the ether. The author builds a an inferential case to insinuate the massive leak of intelligence data via the wikileaks website was an orchestrated info-operation aimed at influencing the American polity by building the case for leaving Afghanistan. Left unsaid, but dangling tantalizingly in the last two paragraphs, is a subtle (and unsubstantiated) suggestion that this leak came from very high levels, perhaps the highest level, of the Obama Administration. Too clever by a half?????? Chuck
By George Friedman, Asia Times, 29 July 2010
On Sunday, The New York Times and two other newspapers published summaries and excerpts of tens of thousands of documents leaked to a website known as WikiLeaks. The documents comprise a vast array of material concerning the war in Afghanistan. They range from tactical reports from small unit operations to broader strategic analyses of politico-military relations between the United States and Pakistan. It appears to be an extraordinary collection.
Tactical intelligence on firefights is intermingled with reports on confrontations between senior US and Pakistani officials in which lists of Pakistani operatives in Afghanistan are handed over to the Pakistanis. Reports on the use of surface-to-air missiles by militants in Afghanistan are intermingled with reports on the activities of former Pakistani intelligence chief Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who reportedly continues to liaise with the Afghan Taliban in an informal capacity.
Related:
Wikileaks Afghanistan files: every IED attack, with co-ordinates
Bringing Martin Luther King to China (and back)
01 Poverty, 02 China, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, Videos/Movies/Documentaries
Gandhi’s movement for non-violent social change challenged America. Can Martin Luther King, Jr. do the same for China?
Bringing King to China is a documentary film about culture, race and human rights. The film takes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of equality and peace to China—and then brings it back to the U.S. It's the story of a young American teacher in Beijing, whose failed protests against the Iraq war inspire her to produce a play in Chinese about Martin Luther King, Jr. Her journey begins after worldwide demonstrations fail to stop the invasion of Iraq and she learns (mistakenly) that her father, an ABC journalist covering the war, has been killed by a suicide bomber.
Video Trailer
Continue reading “Bringing Martin Luther King to China (and back)”
Journal: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring
Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Mapping, Methods & ProcessThe investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.
Phi Beta Iota: Both CIA and Google (as well as DoD/USDI) are treating OSINT as a technical processing problem. They will fail for lack of focus on human intelligence–all humans, all minds, all the time; and for lack of respect of the four quadrants cubed (knowledge, new craft, spivak). When they can overcome the web of fragmented knowledge, and get a grip on all information in all languages all the time (the information cube), we will be impressed. Right now, Google is nowhere near getting a grip on everything digital, let alone analog or unpublished.
