a. BLUF: 11 days, 1 day per week, starting 08 Jul and continuing through end FY13.
b. Appeared to waffle by providing non-answer to employee's question as to whether mandated savings could be obtained by cutting contractors rather than direct-hire civil servants.
c. Never pinned blame where it belongs: catastrophic failure of 535 Members of Congress and POTUS to do their jobs.
Not to be outdone, Frontier Airlines announced that for tickets booked anywhere except on its Web site, it would raise its luggage charges and impose a fee of up to $100 for certain carry-on bags, the third U.S. carrier to do this. Most economy-class passengers will also have to pay $1.99 for coffee, tea, soda and juice.
You read correctly: That fee is for a carry-on bag, not a checked bag.
This email builds on the information in my 8 May email entitled, The Real Scare in Syria Is Not Chemical Weapons.” Attached below is a post from Joshua Landis’s Syria Comment blog. Landis is a professor at the University of Oklahoma and a specialist on Syria — his blog often provides useful, insightful information.
Particularly important, IMO, are Landis’ comments relating the conflict in this region to its spillover effects into Turkey (for more background see also: “Will Syria’s Revolt Disrupt the Turkish Borderlands?.”
Spillover is a very serious issue, because the Turkish province just north of the map below, Hatay Province, used to be part of Syria — it was in effect ceded to Turkey by France (and the UK and the League of Nation) in the late 1939s as part of a subtle deal to elicit Turkey’s neutral if they became involved in a war with Germany (WWII) — a promise Turkey kept.
The map herewith shows where Hatay is located:
Landis' comments, among other things, highlights some of the forces sucking Turkey may further into the Syrian quagmire. Note text marked in red below are my comments. The first half of this essay is a summary of Landis’ personal views on the situation in Levantine Syria, the second half is a series of essays outlining reasons why the US should not intervene militarily.
Here is another potential game changer in the transition to non-carbon energy. More and more breakthroughs are popping up. One can only wonder what it would have been like if we had put the trillions we have spent on war into eliminating carbon energy, and transitioning to energy technologies that were non-polluting.
Just a small thing, the Bloomberg privacy breach allegations. There are far weightier matters in search; for example, are evaluations and ratings of search vendors objective? Someone on the LinkedIn Enterprise Search Engine Professional Group even raised the possibility that vendors “pay” for coverage in some consultants’ evaluations of technology.
Well, on to the smaller thing which is labeled this way in the New York Times: “Privacy Breach on Bloomberg’s Data Terminals.” You can located the story in the May 11, 2013, edition of the newspaper. If you look online at http://goo.gl/oeMqA you may be able to view the news story. (Google, no promises because I know how you want every blog post to have continuously updated links, but that’s another issue.)
The main idea seems to have originated with a real journalism operation called The New York Post. This point appears in paragraph six, so it is definitely a subordinate point.
As I understand the allegation, Bloomberg tradition terminals had a function which allowed “journalists to monitor subscribers were promptly disabled.” I think that Bloomberg terminals generate some sort of report which allegedly allowed a journalist to determine if someone had used the terminal. The idea is that no use of a terminal suggests that the person has either moved on, lost his or her hands, or experienced an opportunity to find his / her future elsewhere.
How secure are secure systems. Image source: Sandia.gov at http://goo.gl/NaEBE. Modern methods for accessing digital information are difficult to depict. Paper is tangible. Digital data are just “out there.” Humans assume that if it cannot be seen, the problems associated with what’s “out there” are no big deal. Is this an informed viewpoint?
The Atlantic Wire covered the alleged breach in a story called “Why Billions Are at Stake in the Bloomberg Terminal Privacy Problem.” What I found interesting was that the Atlantic Wire pointed out that the breach allegedly allowed a journalist to determine the “news habits” of Bloomberg terminal users. Is this similar to the type of information which online services extract from users’ Web search histories?
“Does a compelling description of a terrorist attack, replete with ‘eyewitness accounts’ of the terrifying scene, and official pronouncements, constitute an actual event?” – Florida Atlantic University professor James Tracy.
By Sheila Casey (Special to Truth and Shadows)
The mainstream media story of the Boston Marathon bombing is of Chechen terrorists who unleashed weapons of mass destruction, killing four and wounding 264 in an unthinkable scene of “bodies flying into the street”, “so many people without legs” and “blood everywhere.”
For the vast majority of the American population, this is the truth and they feel no need to look further. Yet those who are willing to question the narrative we’ve been sold and take a hard look behind the curtain may be in for a surprise. Based on the video and photo record, it seems clear that the lead actor in this production—the most grievously wounded, as well as the man who fingered Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as the bomber—was faking his injuries, as were most of those allegedly hurt by the first bomb. We were told his name is Jeff Bauman, but since that can’t be verified and his survival is unbelievable to the point of being miraculous, we’ll simply call him Miracle Man.
