This methodology causes false facts to be considered truth. Briggs brings up the “Trust In Science Would Be Improved By Study Pre-Registration” signed by more than eighty signatories and for the scientific community to require pre-registration for publishing before results are in. The idea is that journals would publish whatever the results and reduce the amount of “making a piece publishable” thought processes. Read full post.
It can be hard to get any insider information out of Microsoft, but Ahmet Alp Balkan is a young software engineer working at the aforementioned company. He started working at Windows Azure as an intern and he was hired right after college. Since working there he was learned a lot, much of which he did not glean from college. He tells what he learned about the business world in, “8 Months In Microsoft, I Learned These.” Some of the items he learned are quite startling and others will not even make you blink. For instance, everyone learns at some point that they are working for someone else to earn their paycheck, they also have to step outside their specialty comfort zones, getting the job done, is the most important, and the latest upgrades are usually skipped.
Transparency lost? Or an admission that SEALS were theater for a CIA theatrical production?
The nation's top special operations commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public.
This obituary is of note because it is a rare example of that long-time media bedfellow of spooks, the Washington Post, telling a piece of the story of the long relationship between the corporate media and the spook world. Other examples follow.
Washington Post – Austin Goodrich, an undercover CIA officer during the Cold War who also worked for several years as a CBS television correspondent before his identity was unmasked, died June 9 at his home in Port Washington, Wis. He was 87…
While stationed in Oslo and Stockholm early in his clandestine career, he sought a suitable occupation to cover his true profession. He assumed a dual identity as reporter and spy.
At the same time that he was recruiting sources to provide information on the Soviet threat, Mr. Goodrich was meeting the deadlines of a working journalist. He reported on sports for the International Herald Tribune, contributed pieces to Swedish radio programs and, in the early 1950s, became a stringer for CBS News.
I am constantly amazed at the growing corruption of the American government. It is unlike anything I have seen in my lifetime. We have 17 millions children who go to bed hungry; we have elders who have lost even the one meal a day they could rely upon; we have 47 million people without health insurance. But we have plenty of money to throw at the mad scheme on our southern border. An utterly usele! ss waste of billions. But it is going to make a small group of corporations vastly richer. It is a disgusting trend illustrating the failure of both the Congress and the Presidency to serve the real interests of the people.
Last week, John McCain gleefully announced that the Senate immigration bill would result in the ‘most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Indeed, an amendment authored by Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and John Hoeven, R-N.D., authorizes a massive increase in border security dollars – including $30 billion for hiring and training 19,000 new border patrol officers over the next 10 years, and over $13 billion for a ‘comprehensive Southern border strategy” (including 700 miles of high-tech fencing).
What the senators didn’t tout was that the wall is both functionally useless – and will enrich some of the largest military contractors in the world.
This CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force warns that “escalating attacks on countries, companies, and individuals, as well as pervasive criminal activity, threaten the security and safety of the Internet.” The number of “state-backed operations continues to rise, and future attacks will become more sophisticated and disruptive,” argues the Task Force report, Defending an Open, Global, Secure, and Resilient Internet.
With the ideal vision of an open and secure Internet increasingly at risk, the Task Force urges the United States, with its friends and allies, “to act quickly to encourage a global cyberspace that reflects shared values of free expression and free markets.”
The Task Force concludes that “the most pressing current threat is not likely to be a single, sudden attack that cripples the United States,” but rather “a proliferation of attacks that steal strategically important or valuable data and destroy confidence in the safety and trustworthiness of the Internet.” The U.S. administration has named China as a major source of cyber espionage, and the Task Force also finds China to be a serious cause of concern.
As Balko demonstrates in a long excerpt from his book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, published in Salon, the incident described below, plus innumerable incidents of police extreme, overwhelming and excessive violence, are not rising due to a few bad apples and rogue cops, but rather to a much deeper “institutional” problem. That's one and polite way to put it. But it begs the question of why there is an “institutional” problem. Maybe this is a symptom of something deeper still: that the 1% who control the “institutions” want excessiveness from a highly militarized police who are officially directed to shoot first and ask questions later in order to condition the 99% to be intimidated and thus controllable as economic conditions the 1% created seriously deteriorate. A military and militarized police force's sole duty during economic collapse will be to protect the 1% from the 99%. But to do that job well requires training and conditioning, hence such incidents can be expected to occur for that purpose much more frequently.
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“Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.
Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team.
On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart.
Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?”
This Real News Network report discusses two human rights violations against Palestinian children that were first publicized by an Israeli organization and have since been investigated by the UN: abusive confinement and prosecution, and using them as human shields.
Phi Beta Iota: The US Media may well be the most corrupt in the world — apart from not being honest about war crimes, the mere fact that Bloomberg Business Week reports without question the false economic and employment statistics of the US Government should alarm all who hold the illusion that the US Media is worth anything at all.
