Category: Idiocy

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Mini-Me: NCAA fines Penn State $60M, vacates wins from 1998-2011

Academia, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Culture, Ethics, Idiocy
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

NCAA fines Penn State $60M, vacates wins from 1998-2011

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) — The NCAA crippled Penn State football for years to come and practically tore Joe Paterno's name out of the record books Monday, erasing 14 years of victories and imposing an unprecedented $60 million fine and other punishment over the child sexual abuse scandal.

“Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people,” NCAA President Mark Emmert declared in announcing the penalties.

The governing body of college sports shredded what was left of the Hall of Fame coach's legacy – the sanctions cost Paterno 111 wins and his standing as the most successful coach in the history of big-time college football – while dealing a severe blow to the university's gold-plated gridiron program.

The NCAA ordered Penn State to sit out the postseason for four years, slashed the number of scholarships it can award and placed football on probation, all of which will make it difficult for the Nittany Lions to compete at the sport's highest level.

Raising the specter of an exodus of athletes, the NCAA said current or incoming football players at Penn State are free to immediately transfer and compete at another school.

For a university that always claimed to hold itself to a higher standard – for decades, Paterno preached “success with honor” – Monday's announcement completed a stunning fall from grace.

Read full article with video and photos.

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Chuck Spinney: Amateur Hour at White House and Department of State

02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, Idiocy
Chuck Spinney
This classic case of blowback ought to give pause to those advocating intervention/regime change in the Syrian Civil War or in Iran — but if history tells us anything it won't change any minds in Versailles on the Potomac.
Chuck Spinney
La Grazie, Italia

STEPHEN KINZER, Boston Globe, July 15, 2012

News from Timbuktu is rare, but these days there is too much of it.

Religious fanatics have been destroying exquisite ancient tombs that are cultural icons of universal value. Women who used to walk freely now fear to leave their homes without veils. Schools, clinics, and banks have been looted and burned.

Militants who embrace the rigid Salafi brand of Islam are on a rampage in Timbuktu and other parts of Mali, an ancient, landlocked North African nation that was once the seat of a trading empire. They are allied with Al Qaeda.

Already they control a thinly populated region larger than Texas. It is not difficult to imagine this region becoming an incubator of terrorism and transnational crime — or to imagine that the United States will react by making Mali the newest front in its ever-expanding drone war.

This catastrophe did not “just happen.” It is the direct result of an episode that may at first seem unrelated: the US-led intervention in Libya last year. Rarely in recent times has there been a more vivid example of how such interventions can produce devastating unexpected results.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Amateur Hour at White House and Department of State”

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Worth A Look: Marijuana Movie Mania

Commerce, Corruption, Culture, Government, Idiocy, Knowledge

YouTube (2:52)  The Union: the business behind getting high

YouTube (1:32:11) The Union: The Business Behind Getting High – Full Movie – High Quality

YouTube (1:27:15) Marijuana a Chronic History (Full Version)

YouTube (2:05:19) THE BEST MARIJUANA SPEECH EVER! (MARC EMERY)

YouTube (21:32) The War on Drugs is A Epic Failure!

Phi Beta Iota:  The decriminalization of marijuana is the one ace left in the Obama Administration's scattered desk of cards.

See Also:

DVD: American Drug War: The Last White Hope (2008)

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NO LABELS Tries Again — Still Corrupt, Still Clueless

Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Politics
Two Parties, One Idiot Idea

Phi Beta Iota:  they have been scorned out of existing twice now, but evidently Mike Bloomberg and his friends have not given up kludging together three failures to try to make lemonade, all three corrupt to the bone:

Independent Voters / Jackie Salit, well-funded stalking horse for Bloomberg, does not play well with others and specifically ignores both grass-root Independents and the six small parties.

Americans Elect, despite a great deal of money, could not overcome the abject obviousness of its internal corruption and the abysmal even shocking ineptitude of its web design and content management teams.

No Labels —  the  cartoon says it all.  These people really do not “get” the travesty of their dismissal of the six small parties that have been blocked from ballot access, or the shallowness of their general intellect.  No Labels, No Brains, No Balls.

Below the line is the email that went out across the land today.  What is shocking is the number of progressives angry at Obama who really think No Labels might be on to something.  For an example of what an honest viable alternative to the two-party tyranny might look like, see We the People Reform Coalition.  We can still save 2012, but it will require organized people, not organized false flag money.

ON A CONSTRUCTIVE NOTE:  If NO LABELS and Americans Elect would come together to sponsor an Electoral Reform Summit in early September 2012, they could restore the integrity of America.  They are probably not capable of making that ethical and intellectual leap, but if they did, they would in one instant achieve their alleged goals dishonored behind closed doors, and open the way for the Second Republic.  Add the six small parties, Occupy and the Tea Party and the Independents without Jackie Salit playing games, and it is “game over.”  There is NOTHING stopping the election of a coalition cabinet and a reform ticket in November 2012 except a lack of FOCUS by all those who share the same desire: to create a prosperous America at peace, to restore America the Beautiful.  We are the passive silent majority at this time.  We need to be the active vocal majority for the next 90 days.  90 days.

See Also:

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

Steele at Hackers on Two-Party Tyranny & Battle for the Soul of the Republic

Continue reading “NO LABELS Tries Again — Still Corrupt, Still Clueless”

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Chuck Spinney: The Truth About West versus Iran

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency
Chuck Spinney

At a time when pressures to punish Iran with more sanctions or perhaps even war (I still consider the latter unlikely), it might pay to try to understand things from the Iranian point view.  Attached below  is an excellent essay in the London Review of Books analyzing Iran's recent history.  It puts the CIA/MI6 overthrow of the popularly elected Muhammad Mossadegh (1953) in a historical context of the preceding 75 years as well its ramifications for the present crisis.  Note how the author, Pankaj Mishra, also shows how the poisonous roles played by the Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal in the heinous warmongering against Iraq is part of much longer tradition of yellow journalism in this part of the world.

Chuck Spinney
San Remo, Italia

Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, 20 July 2012

Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup by Christopher de Bellaigue
Bodley Head, 310 pp, £20.00, February, ISBN 978 1 84792 108 6

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York) has it exactly right… When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.  The U.S. Government in particular, all Western governments generally (including the Nordics) have been so busy lying to their publics that they have not been able to connect to the truth.  As Robert Steele likes to say, “The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.”

See Also:

Phi Beta Iota About (Other Quotations)

2012 PREPRINT AS SUBMITTED: The Craft of Intelligence

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO – Transparency, Truth, & Trust . . . the meme, the mind-set, and the method

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Winslow Wheeler: Common Defense Quarterly Article on Drones

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military
Winslow Wheeler

The Summer 2012 issue of Common Defense Quarterly is running my article, “MQ-9 Reaper: Not the ‘Revolution in Warfare' You've Been Told.”  To sum it up, I conclude “The proclamation of drones, such as Reaper, to be the future of warfare, a revolutionary transformation, is an empty, data free proclamation. The MQ-9 neither saves money nor improves performance compared to analogous, even primitive, aircraft. Such equipment only has a future in a defense system that prefers to degrade combat performance while increasing cost.”

To see the article and its data and arguments, find the complete magazine at http://www.commondefensequarterly/CDQ13/CDQ13.pdf.  The article starts on page 27.

If you want to review still more data, references, and of my analysis, find a five part series I wrote for Time's Battleland blog at http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2012/03/02/5-revolutionary-or-routine/.