The myths behind the spending — disavowed by true subject-matter experts, manipulated by the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) to spend more on vaporware….
Talk of an impending ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor’ is not an uncommon image evoked during discussions of cyber threats to the critical infrastructure of the United States. But the countries with the most capability do not necessarily have the most interest in launching the types of attacks against the United States that make for movie plots, a panel of experts said at the RSA Conference Wednesday.
“There are nation-states that absolutely have the capability (to launch a major attack), but they don’t have the intent – mostly because it wouldn’t be in their own interest, and the spillover effects would be very damaging to the world economy and a lot of other things,” said Eric Rosenbach, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy in the Department of Defense. “The other reason is, that type of attack, contrary maybe to what the conventional wisdom is, I think would be very difficult to disguise.”
Phi Beta Iota: The alarm was sounded — and the solution proffered — in 1994. What we should have been doing all this time is going with full open source software across the board, and an end to buggy irresponsible proprietary code and even worse, buggy irresponsible secret code. It now appears that intelligent cities and states are going to have to take matters into their own hands — this is consistent with what some states are already doing (planning for federal collapse, refusing corporate business absent a waiver of corporate personality).
If the events in EU nations such as Greece, Spain, and Italy are any indication, the U.S., with its massive debt to GDP ratio (real debt includes entitlement programs), is looking at one of two possible scenarios: default, austerity measures, and high taxes, or, hyperinflation, and then default, austerity measures, and high taxes.
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Black markets give the citizenry a means to protest the taxation of a government that no longer represents them. In a country stricken with austerity, these networks allow the public to thrive without having to pay for the mistakes or misdeeds of political officials and corporate swindlers.
Syria has a secular government as did Iraq prior to the american invasion. Secular governments are important in Arab lands in which there is division between Sunni and Shi’ite. Secular governments keep the divided population from murdering one another.
When the american invasion, a war crime under the Nuremberg standard set by the US after WWII, overthrew the Saddam Hussein secular government, the Iraqi Sunnis and Shi’ites went to war against one another. The civil war between Iraqis saved the american invasion. Nevertheless, enough Sunnis found time to fight the american occupiers of Iraq that the US was never able to occupy Bagdad, much less Iraq, no matter how violent and indiscriminate the US was in the application of force.
The consequence of the US invasion was not democracy and women’s rights in Iraq, much less the destruction of weapons of mass destruction which did not exist as the weapons inspectors had made perfectly clear beforehand. The consequence was to transfer political power from Sunnis to Shi’ites. The Shi’ite version of Islam is the Iranian version. Thus, Washington’s invasion transferred power in Iraq from a secular government to Shi’ites allied with Iran.
Now Washington intends to repeat its folly in Syria. According to the american secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, Washington is even prepared to ally with al-Qaeda in order to overthrow Assad’s government. Now that Washington itself has al-Qaeda connections, will the government in Washington be arrested under the anti-terrorism laws?
Washington’s hostility toward Assad is hypocritical. On February 26, the Syrian government held a referendum on a new constitution for Syria that set term limits on future presidents and removed the political monopoly that the Ba’ath Party has enjoyed.
The Syrian voter turnout was 57.4%, matching the voter turnout for Obama in 2008. It was a higher voter turnout (despite the armed, western-supported rebellion in Syria) than in the nine US presidential elections from 1972 through 2004. The new Syrian constitution was approved by a vote of 89.4%.
But Washington denounced the democratic referendum and claims that the Syrian government must be overthrown in order to bring democracy to Syria.
Washington’s allies in the region, unelected oil monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have issued statements that they are willing to supply weapons to the Islamist rebels in order to bring democracy–something they do not tolerate at home–to Syria.
For Washington “democracy” is a weapon of mass destruction. When Washington brings “democracy” to a country, it means the country’s destruction, as in Libya and Iraq. It doesn’t mean democracy. Libya is in chaos, a human rights nightmare without an effective government.
Washington installed Nouri al-Maliki as president of Iraq. He lost an election, but remained in power. He has declared his vice president to be a terrorist and ordered his arrest and is using the state police to arrest Sunni politicians. Syria’s Assad is more democratic than Iraq’s Maliki.
For a decade Washington has misrepresented its wars of naked aggression as “bringing democracy and human rights to the Middle East.” While Washington was bringing democracy to the Middle East, Washington was destroying democracy in the US. Washington has resurrected medieval torture dungeons and self-incrimination. Washington has destroyed due process and habeas corpus. At Obama’s request, Congress passed overwhelmingly a law that permits american subjects to be imprisoned indefinitely without a trial or presentation of evidence. Warrantless searches and spying, illegal and unconstitutional at the turn of the 21st century, are now routine.
Obama has even asserted the right, for which there is no law on the books, to murder any american anywhere if the executive branch decides, without presenting any evidence, that the person is a threat to the US government. Any american anywhere can be murdered on the basis of subjective opinion in the executive branch, which increasingly is the only branch of the US government. The other two “co-equal” branches have shriveled away under the “war on terror.”
Why is Washington so determined to bring democracy to the Middle East (with the exception of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Emirates), Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, and China, but is hostile to constitutional rights in america?
The rights that americans gained from successful revolution against King George III in the 18th century have all been taken away by Bush/Obama in the 21st century. One might think that this would be a news story, but it isn’t.
Don’t expect the Ministry of Truth to say anything about it.
WASHINGTON – As the Pentagon has sought to sell wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to often-hostile populations there, it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on poorly tracked marketing and propaganda campaigns that military leaders like to call “information operations,” the modern equivalent of psychological warfare.
From 2005 to 2009, such spending rose from $9 million to $580 million a year mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon and congressional records show. Last year, spending dropped to $202 million as the Iraq War wrapped up. A USA TODAY investigation, based on dozens of interviews and a series of internal military reports, shows that Pentagon officials have little proof the programs work and they won't make public where the money goes. In Iraq alone, more than $173 million was paid to what were identified only as “miscellaneous foreign contractors.”
“What we do as I.O. is almost gimmicky,” says Army Col. Paul Yingling, who served three tours in Iraq between 2003 and 2009, including as an information operations specialist. “Doing posters, fliers or radio ads. These things are unserious.”
Phi Beta Iota: The real issue here is the lack of “management” across the entire US Government. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) does not manage anything. There are no standards for return on investment, inter-agency collaboration, even justification in the public interest. Budgeting is a corrupt political “game” in which the Cabinet Secretaries represent the recipients of taxpayer funds, not the taxpayers. Were OMB serious, intelligence, information operations, and public diplomacy would be managed as one account, an Open Source Agency under diplomatic auspices would establish the gold standard for truth, and no money would be invested in contractors whose primary qualifications consist of contributing to Congressional political action campaigns and playing golf. The truth at any cost lowers all others costs. We are nowhere near getting a grip on the truth.
Good things do come out of the Virginia state legislature. That normally reprehensible body has just stood up to the federal outrage that has come to be known as the NDAA. The letters stand for the National Defense Authorization Act, but at issue here is not the bulk of that bill. Virginia's state government has no objection to dumping our grandchildren's unearned pay into the pockets of war profiteers while our schools lack funding. At issue is the presidential power to lock people up without a trial, which was slipped into the latest military funding bill late last year and signed into law by President Barack Obama on New Year's Eve. In fact, Virginia's legislature does not object to that abuse except in one particular circumstance, namely when the victim of it is a U.S. citizen. But in that circumstance, Virginia says Hell No.
“After studying the controversial provisions and after hearing from many in the Fifth District, I concluded that the detainee provisions in the bill did not provide clear and unambiguous protection of the constitutional rights of American citizens. For this reason, I opposed the bill on final passage.” http://charlottesvillepeace.org/node/2635
Groups from across the political spectrum, including the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, urged passage of a bill in Virginia's state legislature to nullify the new provisions. http://charlottesvillepeace.org/node/2692
Phi Beta Iota: Nullification is the softer gentler preamble to secession. The states, many of them over-invested in Federal bonds and many of them facing their own financial crises, are now starting to plan for the collapse of the US Goverment or economy, and becoming more alert to opportunities of state nullification of federal mandates. During this transition period resilience and sustainability will be “bottom-up” in nature, and those states that “assume” a loss of all federal funding after 2013, and plan for it, will do better than those states that assume federal (borrowed) largesse will continue. This will impact heavily on universities that rely on federal funding for most of their research.
Syria: Special comment: Over the weekend, news video footage from Homs, the so-called center of the opposition uprising, raised questions about the actual effectiveness of the opposition. The videos showed Syrian police, firefighters and militia using fire hoses to disperse a major opposition rally in Homs. So who controls Homs? Apparently the government does, with the exception of a few photogenic neighborhoods.
A European news outlet published a city map that shows the neighborhoods of Homs based on sectarian residence patterns. The map shows that most of the videos of violent confrontations have been taken in two or three mostly Sunni neighborhoods in the south of the city.
Homs is a large city and most of it appears to experience little to no violence, based on the video footage and the map of neighborhoods. The vast majority of Sunni neighborhoods and the Christian and Alawite neighborhoods report no violence. Life goes on in most of Homs.
If the Homs firefighters and police retain the capability to use fire hoses against demonstrators, then the government remains in control in that city. That is a basic precept of internal instability analysis. Homs still has a functioning government that responds to orders from Damascus.
The point of this comment is that most US news reporting on the struggle in Syria appears aimed at grabbing headlines rather than at providing a balanced view of both sides of the struggle. Non-US news sources present a different view of the unrest. For example, it is difficult to maintain that the opposition dominates Homs, when the fire brigade is secure enough to turn hoses on an opposition rally there. US news analysts completely missed the significance of the fire brigade operations shown in their own videos..
The bottom line is that the opposition holds no ground that it does not physically occupy and then only when government forces are not present or chasing it. Homs does not appear to be under siege or under opposition control, based on German news reporting. Some neighborhoods are and that is worth further research. It also helps explain why the al Asad government exhibits no signs of panic or severe stress commensurate with the urgent statements by the UN, Arab League and US officials. More on this topic later.
Phi Beta Iota: The truth at any cost lowers all other costs. The US media is 65-95% owned by Wall Street, with the bulk of their revenues coming from advertising by corporations that profit from war and instability.
Several months ago, I was invited by Sean Park to be a Venture Partner with Anthemis Group, a new financial services group with an aim to totally reinvent finance from the ground up.
(Sean was a generous backer for the Future of Money Project I co-created for a SIBOS conference, and we’ve met up several times in the past few years for animated conversations about the changing nature of money, value and wealth.)
I was delighted to accept the offer, and be a part of this exciting initiative by bringing attention to financial startups that just might help change the world for the better. If this is you, let me know!
Check out the video above to hear more about the goals of Anthemis and an overview of our emerging global financial landscape – presented last week at the Lift12 conference. Below is a brief post Sean wrote up about his presentation, and a great prezi as well!
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Last Thursday I had the great privilege of having been invited by the remarkable Laurent Haug to present a snapshot of our vision of the new emerging universe of “digitally native finance” at the wonderful Lift12 conference in Geneva. Twenty minutes is not a long time (and thank goodness Laurent indulged me with a couple minutes more) to convey both the context and the substance of what we believe to be a fundamental shift in the paradigm of the financial services industry, but I hope I was able to give at least a good high-level overview. Most importantly, I hope I was able to convey the excitement we feel at the vastness of the opportunity and the win/win/win (for the customers/companies/economies) available to those who embrace the opportunity for technology-enabled disruption in financial services by introducing them – however superficially I’ll admit – to just a handful of companies who are at the vanguard of this wave of change.
For those that are interested, my presentation is below:
