The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Bin Laden’s “Killing”
Darth Vader In The White House
De-Americanization Of The World
The Man Who Usurped The Constitution
Worse Is To Come
All stories with links accessible via A Potpourri of Exciting Reading — Paul Craig Roberts
Here is what I believe is a correct assessment concerning the creation of the national security state in which we live today. Absurd amounts of money have been spent, and civil liberties abridged to an unprecedented degree, on the basis of a threat consisting of little gangs. It is transparently disproportionate, there has to be something underneath that.! I believe it results from a long-term strategic assessment of what is going to happen with climate change. Since 1991 I have been following and publishing stories on this trend. It's very clear, on the basis of the scientific research in the open literature, that it is going to cause massive disruption, and social disorder. I am sure there are lots of other studies that are classified that say the same thing, perhaps in greater detail, and with a security perspective not usually found in open research literature
NSA Spying Did Not Result In a SINGLE Foiled Terrorist Plot
WashingtonsBlog
Entire article with links below the line.
Continue reading “SchwartzReport: NSA Has Not Foiled a SINGLE Terrorist Plot + NSA Meta-RECAP”
Protecting the Victims of the Privatization of War
Over the years we have seen numerous cases of various abuses and outright crimes by private military and security contractors (PMSC). True, they don’t happen every day, and don’t reflect the actions of the vast majority of the contractors working overseas but it would be foolish to say it is just the actions of a few bad apples either. Why these crimes happen says as much about the overall framework of accountability that various governments have set up and, with varying degrees of effort and resources, have enforced. But that is not the point of this post.
What is the point is this. When, in the past, crimes have become public, governments have brought cases against the accused offenders with varying degrees of success. To name a few:
the killings of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater contractors at Nisoor Square in 2007, the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by Titan reportedly aided by Titan and CACI contractors, DynCorp contractors, being accused of rape and running underage prostitution networks in association with their security duties under contract with the US military in Bosnia; PMSCs accused of killing Ecuadorian peasants by spraying their villages with toxic defoliants and accidentally shooting down a missionary plane incorrectly suspected of drug trafficking.
But it is still fairly rare for the perpetrators to get convicted and go to prison. Why is that?
The paper Protecting the Victims of the Privatization of War by Willem van Genugten, Marie-José van der Heijden, and Nicola Jägers, published earlier this year by the Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands offers some answers.
Continue reading “David Isenberg: Protecting Victims of the Privatization of War”
Please note Army Chief of Staff General Raymond T. Odierno‘s updated strategic priorities for the US Army, arranged in five (5) categories. PDF Slide Show: CSA Strategic Priorities vFinal 16Oct13
From those, here is an extract .
EXTRACTS:
[DOWNSIZED ARMY; EXPEDITIONARY]
– Downsize, transition, and then sustain a smaller, but ready and capable Total Army that provides Joint and Combined forces with expeditionary and enduring landpower for the range of military operations and features unique competencies such as operational leadership, mobility, command and control, and theater logistics at all echelons.
Phi Beta Iota: To downsize effectively you have to have ethical evidence-based decision-support immediately applicable to strategy, policy, acquisitions, and operations. This does not exist. NGIC once upon a time had Tim Hendrickson and GRAND VIEW but they never made the leap to holistic analytics and true cost economics. Army flags — including the very best of them — simply do not know what they need to know to demand of the intelligence “professionals” what the latter have no clue how to produce. We have not seen a single useful strategic, policy, or acquisition document come out of DIA in the past twenty years…nor CIA. All these people are still in the cut and paste fluff mode that Col Mike Pheneger, USA (SOF) blew the whistle on in 1988. Nothing has changed in substance — just more people, more money, more (retarded) technology, and much less useful thinking.
[ENABLERS; EXPEDITIONARY; UNIFIED ACTION PARTNERS (UAPs)] – Support the Joint Force with critical enablers such as aviation, intelligence, engineers, logistics, medical, signal, and special operations, both while enroute to, and operating within, expeditionary environments alongside Unified Action Partners.
Phi Beta Iota: The Marine Corps led the way with Planning and Programming Factors for Expeditionary Operations in the Third World, and then lost its integrity and started chasing money instead of producing ethical evidence-based decision-support relevant to what General Al Gray wanted in the first place, compelling support for honest light-footprint low-cost acquisition (something the other four services need but refuse) along with strategic and operational support to what he called “peaceful preventive measures.” The Navy has imploded — as many Admirals as ships, and the whole lot of them are not worth anything in terms of rapid precision response, this leaves the Marine Corps both 4-6 days away from anywhere, and totally exposed (e.g. no Naval Gunfire, rotten CAP) once they get there. Army cannot do what it wants to do without an honest long-haul Air Force and a complete make-over of close air support (to include transfer of CAS to the Army) as well as reconnecting to reality at the geospatial, cyber, and cultural levels.
Put another way, the 1% have so thoroughly screwed the system that one adults working full time (or two adults working part-time four times) cannot support their children at the same time that social and other state services are collapsing.
Alan Milburn says child poverty ‘no longer problem of the workless and work-shy'
Working parents in Britain “simply do not earn enough to escape poverty”, the government's social mobility tsar Alan Milburn has warned.
Two-thirds of poor children are now from families where an adult works, his report found.
Are We Approaching Peak Retirement? (October 15, 2013)
If stocks, bonds and real estate all decline going forward, where are pension funds going to earn their 7+% annual yields?If we look at the foundations of retirement–Social Security, stocks, bonds and real estate–it seems we may have reached Peak Retirement. Let's start the discussion by noting that the primary Federal retirement programs–Social Security and Medicare–are “pay as you go,” meaning the checks sent out to beneficiaries this year are funded by payroll tax revenues collected this year from workers.
As Mish and I (as well as others) have tirelessly pointed out, the “trust funds” for these programs are phantoms of imagination. When these programs run deficits, the government raises the money to fund the deficit the same way it funds all its deficit spending–by selling Treasury bonds.
These programs were founded on a demographic illusion, i.e. that the number of retirees (beneficiaries) would magically remain a small percentage of the workforce paying payroll taxes. Alas, the number of beneficiaries is rising fast while the number of full-time workers is stagnating.
Full-time employment and the number of Social Security beneficiaries: the ratio of full-time workers to beneficiaries is already 2-to-1, and set to decline. Below 2-to-1, either payroll taxes will have to icnrease or benefits will have to be trimmed, or some of both.
The elite television anchor: mouthpiece for the Matrix
Most of America can’t imagine the evening news could look and sound any other way.
That’s how solid the long-term brainwashing is.
The elite anchors, from Douglas Edwards and John Daly, in the early days of television, all the way to Brian Williams and Scott Pelley, have set the style. They define the genre.
The elite anchor is not a person filled with passion or curiosity. Therefore, the audience doesn’t have to be passionate or filled with curiosity, either.
The anchor is not a demanding voice on the air; therefore, the audience doesn’t have to be demanding.
The anchor isn’t hell-bent on uncovering the truth. For this he substitutes a false dignity. Therefore, the audience can surrender its need to wrestle with the truth and replace that with a false dignity of its own.
The anchor takes propriety to an extreme: it’s unmannerly to look below the surface of things. Therefore, the audience adopts those manners.
Continue reading “Jon Rappoport: The elite television anchor: mouthpiece for the Matrix”
