Category: Corruption

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Chuck Spinney: Denial & Ignorance in America

Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Media
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

For America, Denial Is a River in Iraq

by JP Sottile, Antiwar.com, January 18, 2014

Americans don’t know much about geography.

In 2006, three years into the bloody War on Iraq, 63% of Americans aged 18-24 couldn’t find the “target-rich” nation on a map.

To be fair, only half could find New York State on a map, so it is unsurprising that, in spite of its then-dominance of the news cycle, they couldn’t locate the principal fixation of American foreign policy on a map that still brims with U.S. military bases and deployments.

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Owl: Corry Doctorow – Is 2014 the Death of the Web to DRM and Government-Corporate Collusion and Corruption?

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, IO Impotency
Who? Who?
Who? Who?

Doctorow: 2014 is When We Lose the Web

Writer Corry Doctorow may be just suffering from deep winter blues, but if not, and he's correct, his brief musings on the near future of the net are ominous:

“Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. The W3C push for DRM in all browsers is going to ensure that all interfaces built in HTML5 (which will be pretty much everything) will be opaque to users, and it will be illegal to report on security flaws in them (because reporting a security flaw in DRM exposes you to risk of prosecution for making a circumvention device), so they will be riddled with holes that creeps, RATters, spooks, authoritarians and crooks will be able to use to take over your computer and f*ck you in every possible way.”

More:

We are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell.

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SchwartzReport: West Virginia Atrocity Spill Shows Zero Safety Oversight in 20 Years

12 Water, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude
Stephan A. Schwartz
Stephan A. Schwartz

Here is a very important essay about the lessons to be learned from the West Virginia spill, a story that has gotten remarkably little in-depth coverage by the corporate media. I read today that the supposedly safe water trucks that have been bringing water to the people in fact having been filling from the same river downstream from where the leak occurred.

This disaster, like the Texas explosion that destroyed a town a few months back, occurred because there had been no regulatory oversight of this facility in over two decades. It is a Goebbels' Big Lie to say we have too much regulation in this country. The problem is exactly the opposite.

West Virginia’s Message to the Nation
ALAN FARAGO, President of Friends of the Everglades – Counter Punch

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Berto Jongman: British Amateur Whistleblower Exposes Fraud Among American Psychologists

Academia, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Ineptitude
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Interesting bit:

“The answer,” says Brown when I meet him in a north London cafe, “is because that's how it always happens. Look at whistleblower culture. If you want to be a whistleblower you have to be prepared to lose your job. I'm able to do what I'm doing here because I'm nobody. I don't have to keep any academics happy. I don't have to think about the possible consequences of my actions for people I might admire personally who may have based their work on this and they end up looking silly. There are 160,000 psychologists in America and they've got mortgages. I've got the necessary degree of total independence.”

The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness

The astonishing story of Nick Brown, the British man who began a part-time psychology course in his 50s – and ended up taking on America's academic establishment

Andrew Anthony

The Observer, Saturday 18 January 2014

Read full account.

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Jon Rappoport: Obama: one if by land, two if by sea, three if by metadata

Corruption, Government
Jon Rappoport
Jon Rappoport

Obama: one if by land, two if by sea, three if by metadata

In his Friday speech, Obama ignored the essence of the FISA Court, the secret body that’s rubber-stamped warrants to do surveillance for the past 35 years.

Most of these requests for warrants come from NSA and the FBI, and only government attorneys may appear before the Court, none of whose decisions are made public. Therefore, the Court is a de facto piece of the Executive Branch, and as such its existence violates the separation of powers principle of the Constitution.

One of Snowden’s documents revealed that FISA had approved a blanket warrant requiring Verizon to make available, to NSA, records of all daily phone calls in its system.

No, President Obama said nothing about this. Instead, he led off his speech on the NSA and national security with these words:

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Betty Boop: Tomgram on Nick Turse, Secret Wars, & Black Ops Blowback — US Government Learning Impaired & Morally Challenged

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Peace Intelligence

betty boop hotTomgram: Nick Turse, Secret Wars and Black Ops Blowback

Nick Turse is the author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, just now out in paperback.

Tom: These days, when I check out the latest news on Washington’s global war-making, I regularly find at least one story that fits a new category in my mind that I call: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

 

EXTRACTS:

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