Corruption – Page 494 – Public Intelligence Blog

This a “three-fer” on leadership and officership. It provides some theory (from a Naval Special Warfare perspective), a media summary of how too many of our senior officers are not getting it right, and one officer's list of historical anecdotes when it was done right.

* The headliner, ADM McRaven's speech to USMA Class of 2015 500th Night, is the PDF file. He gives the theoretical overview.

* First below is the transmittal message for ADM McRaven's address.

* Second below is a counterpoint to ADM McRaven, a wave-top Washington Post summary of senior leader failures in leadership, judgment, and integrity. While I think it is error-free, my sense is that the reality is several orders of magnitude worse than the info Post provides suggests.

* Third below is an address by LTC(Ret) Guy Lofaro, a former instructor at West Point. From his own career, he provides some anecdotes that serve to provide illustrative examples to ADM McRaven's theory.

See Also:

Flag Treason @ Phi Beta Iota

Toxic Leaders @ Phi Beta Iota

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Leadership for Epoch B

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Military Leadership — the Many Failures and the Few Successes”

2014/02/022014/02/02

Jon Rappoport: Monsanto’s Round-Up THE Most Toxic — and False Testing by US Government…

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 06 Family, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government

Monsanto’s Roundup: new deadly scam exposed

Roundup is the Monsanto herbicide that is touted as the cornerstone of GMO food crops. Monsanto claims these crops are genetically engineered to withstand heavy spraying of Roundup.

Therefore, the crops live and the weeds die. Breakthrough.

There are several key lies associated with these claims—but a new one has surfaced.

A study to be published this month indicts Roundup and, in fact, the general class of insecticides and herbicides. On what grounds? When they’re tested for safety, only the so-called “active ingredients” are examined.

The untested ingredients are called “adjuvants,” and they are said to be inert and irrelevant. But the new study concludes this is far from true. The adjuvants are actually there to INCREASE the killing power of the active ingredient in the herbicide or insecticide.

Safety tests don’t take this into account. “Active ingredients” are already toxic, but the adjuvants ramp up their poisonous nature even higher.

And the worst offender is Roundup.

Continue reading “Jon Rappoport: Monsanto's Round-Up THE Most Toxic — and False Testing by US Government…”

2014/02/022014/02/02

Berto Jongman: The Year the USA (Courts, NSA, Google) Broke the Internet

#OSE Open Source Everything, Advanced Cyber/IO, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, IO Impotency

2014: The Year America Broke The Internet

A recent decision by a US Appeals court ended the regulation of the internet as we know it. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was deemed to have created a framework for ensuring the concept of “net neutrality” out-with the remit for the organisation it created itself. Now, a former FCC chairman has called for a “nuclear option” to reclassify Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as common carriers.

Doing so would force ISPs to be treated more like public utilities and subject them to FCC regulations over issues such as rate setting and universal service obligations. There has already been a lot of commentary and speculation about what the ruling means for the average user, and I don't want to add to the hyperbole all ready out there, but I think it is important to clarify a few things.

Net neutrality, or the end of it, has the potential to bring about the end of the internet as we know it. In a practical sense, it opens the doors for companies to manage the traffic across the network as they see most profitable, which means these companies can take measures that not only affect content creators, but end users. The ruling overturns the 20 years of treating the internet as a ‘dumb' network that processed packets of information without prioritising them.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: The Year the USA (Courts, NSA, Google) Broke the Internet”

2014/02/022014/02/02

4th Media: Predatory Capitalism Today

03 Economy, Academia, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government

1,400 Sue General Electric, Toshiba and Hitachi for Fukushima Disaster

We’ve previously noted that General Electric should be held partially responsible for the Fukushima reactor because General Electric knew that its reactors were unsafe: 5 of the 6 nuclear reactors at Fukushima are General Electric Mark 1 reactors. GE knew decades ago that the design was faulty.

Economics of the 1%: How Mainstream Economics Serves the Rich, Obscures Reality and Distorts Policy

This book exposes the myths of mainstream economics behind the public discourse and explains why current policies fail to serve the vast majority.

How much do economists really know? In most cases, they claim to have profound knowledge but in fact understand little and obscure almost everything. Most people are convinced that economics should be left to the ‘experts’, when they themselves are perfectly capable of understanding it. This book explains that mainstream economics serves the interests of the rich through its logical inconsistency and unabashedly reactionary conclusions. John F. Weeks exposes the myths of mainstream economics and explains in straightforward language why current policies fail to serve the vast majority of people in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Their failure to serve the interests of the many results from their devoted service to the few.

2014/02/022014/02/02

Stephen E. Arnold: Google Books Ruling — Just Wait…

Commerce, Corruption, IO Models

Google Books Ruling Appealed

It’s not over until it’s over. The long process of determining whether Google’s giant Books project counts as “fair use” continues, we learn from “Authors Guild Appeals Ruling in Google Books Case” at Phys.org. The Authors Guild would like to see limits on the herculean digitization project, which has scanned more than 20 million books to date.

The brief write-up reveals:

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Google Books Ruling — Just Wait…”

2014/02/012014/02/16

Berto Jongman: How Edward Snowden Went From Loyal Right Wing NSA Contractor to Whistleblower Extraordinare — Advance Extract from “The” Book

Corruption, Government, Media

The best account available to date.

UPDATE 16 FEB 14: Glenn Greenwald considers the book complete bullshit.

How Edward Snowden went from loyal NSA contractor to whistleblower

He was politically conservative, a gun owner, a geek – and the man behind the biggest intelligence leak in history. In this exclusive extract from his new book, Luke Harding looks at Edward Snowden's journey from patriot to America's most wanted

Luke Harding

The Guardian, Friday 31 January 2014

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: This is quite an extraordinary account — the detail is compelling. The extract from the new book has been very well chosen, this may become one of the most read Guardian articles in relation to the Snowden matter.

See Also:

NSA @ Phi Beta Iota

Snowden @ Phi Beta Iota

2014/02/012014/02/03

Berto Jongman: Capital Theft, Not Government Corruption, is Root of Poverty in Third World

Commerce, Corruption, Government

Flipping the corruption myth

Corruption is by far not the main factor behind persisting poverty in the Global South

John Hickel

Al Jazeera, 1 February 2014

Transparency International recently published their latest annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), laid out in an eye-catching map of the world with the least corrupt nations coded in happy yellow and the most corrupt nations smeared in stigmatising red. The CPI defines corruption as “the misuse of public power for private benefit”, and draws its data from 12 different institutions including the World Bank, Freedom House, and the World Economic Forum.

When I first saw this map I was struck by the fact that most of the yellow areas happen to be rich Western countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, whereas red covers almost the entirety of the global South, with countries like South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Somalia daubed especially dark.

This geographical division fits squarely with mainstream views, which see corruption as the scourge of the developing world (cue cliche images of dictators in Africa and bribery in India). But is this storyline accurate?

Many international development organisations hold that persistent poverty in the Global South is caused largely by corruption among local public officials. In 2003 these concerns led to the United Nations Convention against Corruption, which asserts that, while corruption exists in all countries, this “evil phenomenon” is “most destructive” in the global South, where it is a “key element in economic underperformance and a major obstacle to poverty alleviation and development”.

There's only one problem with this theory: It's just not true.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Capital Theft, Not Government Corruption, is Root of Poverty in Third World”