Marcus Aurelius: Government is Pissing Off Its Young Veterans – a Key Demographic for the 2016 Revolution

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Military
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius

It's all about I-N-T-E-G-R-I-T-Y.

Younger military veterans are angered by budget cuts to their pension benefits

By ,

Washington Post, December 30

After 25 years of service, including combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, Lt. Col. Stephen Preston retired from the Army and began collecting a pension of nearly $55,000 a year. The money made it possible for Preston to go back to college, get his MBA and embark on a second career in corporate strategy.

So it happened that Preston was sitting in his new office shortly before Christmas when he heard on the radio that he had become the latest target in Washington’s war on spending.

“I’m not an angry man, but I was very, very angry,” Preston, 51, said in a telephone interview from his home in Tampa. “This is a pact between the greater population of the United States and the fraction of people who served and sacrificed. If you didn’t want to pay us what you promised us, then you probably shouldn’t have promised it.”

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Stephen E. Arnold: NSA as Poster Child for the Problem of Big Data

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Impotency, Military
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

NSA drowns under an ocean of data

Would rather drown in rising tide of pornography

All is not well in the land of US spooks despite them having access to all the data on citizens that they can eat.

William Binney, creator of some of the computer code used by the National Security Agency to snoop on Internet traffic around the world, has warned that the agency knows too much.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the NSA can't understand the data it has because it has too much to do anything useful with it.

Binny said that the NSA's addiction to data had made it dysfunctional and the agency is drowning in useless data.

He described an agency where analysts are swamped with so much information that they can't do their jobs effectively, and the enormous stockpile is an irresistible temptation for misuse.

His warning mirrors concerns shown in the Snowden documents. An internal briefing document in 2012 about foreign mobile phone location tracking by the agency said the efforts were “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” data.

In March, some NSA analysts asked for permission to collect less data through a program called Muscular because the “relatively small intelligence value it contains does not justify the sheer volume of collection”.

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Chuck Spinney: Peter Van Buren – Any More U.S. “Stabilization” and Africa Will Collapse

08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

Any More U.S. “Stabilization” and Africa Will Collapse

By: Peter Van Buren Monday

December 23, 2013 10:39 am

South Sudan is at the brink of civil war and societal collapse

History is just one of those hard things to ignore, especially in South Sudan.

In 2011, the U.S. midwifed the creation of a new nation, South Sudan. Though at the time Obama invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King speaking about Ghana (“I knew about all of the struggles, and all of the pain, and all of the agony that these people had gone through for this moment”) in officially recognizing the country, many were more focused on the underlying U.S. motives,

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Steve Aftergood: Orgs ask DNI to Preserve Access to World News Connection — Comment on OSC in AF by Robert Steele

Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Impotency
Steven Aftergood
Steven Aftergood

ORGS ASK DNI TO PRESERVE ACCESS TO WORLD NEWS CONNECTION

More than a dozen professional societies and public interest groups wrote to the Director of National Intelligence last week to ask him to preserve public access to foreign news reports gathered, translated and published by the Open Source Center and marketed to subscribers through the NTIS World News Connection.

The CIA, which manages the Open Source Center for the intelligence community, intends to terminate public access to the World News Connection at the end of this month. (CIA Halts Public Access to Open Source Service, Secrecy News, October 8.)

Among other things, the groups said that this move is inconsistent with the President's Open Government National Action Plan.

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Stephen E. Arnold: Big Data Falls Down…Way Down…

Commerce, Idiocy, IO Impotency
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Big Data Fans: The Nitty Gritty

Love talking about Big Data? I recommend doing a bit of reading. I found “What I Learned from 2 Years of Data Sciencing” refreshing. Quotes I noted were:

  • With reference to Big Data projects where the author worked: “None of these projects gained traction within the company and became abandoned.”
  • With reference to the work required: “Much of the efforts spent for those projects were in getting the right data into the right shape.”
  • “Little did I know that we’ll be cleaning and shaping data for most of my second year at uSwitch.”
  • “In practice, I was just cleaning and shaping data.”
  • “Figuring out the right work to do is one of the most difficult tasks for a data science team. It doesn’t help with the fact that the data science role is so vague.”
  • “Figuring out where to devote our time and effort is not as easy as it sounds.”
  • “Unless someone or something can act on the data, results can only satisfy intellectual curiosity. A business can’t survive on funding people to carry out academic studies forever.”
  • “If cleaning vast amount of data, being clueless as to what to do, and debating with colleagues sound like a challenge that you want to take on, I know a company in London that’s looking for a data scientist!”

Is there a message about the nuts and bolts of data? Is analytics repeating the sins of the first enterprise search vendors? It is so much easier to sell sizzle than focus on the basics like figuring out what’s important and getting valid data. Let’s just take the easy path seems to be one risk for analytics cheerleaders.

Stephen E Arnold, December 22, 2013

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Berto Jongman: Pentagon’s Top Three Threats

Government, Idiocy, Military
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Pentagon's top three threats in the ‘deep future'

What sorts of threats will the US military face in the “deep future”?

That was the topic of a panel at the Association of the US Army (AUSA) conference this week, the heavily attended annual trade show that draws top Pentagon officials and defense contractors.

It's a tricky proposition for the Pentagon, since making the wrong predictions means squandering scarce funds in a time of intense budget pressure. The Pentagon was forced to cancel the Future Combat System in 2009, for example, when the military tried to predict where the future was headed “more than a few years out,” said Gen. Robert Cone, head of the US training and doctrine command. As a result, he told the panel, “We're a little gun-shy.”

Still, in a standing-room-only session, the discussion endeavored to come up with the most likely risks to the stability of the world – and most likely to challenge the US military – in 2030 and beyond. Here are their top three picks.

1. The growth of cities – and of slums

2. A ‘significant and lengthy' period of Sunni-Shiite violence in the Middle East

3. The revolution in personal communications, combined with cheap drones and robotics

Read full article.

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Mini-Me: USG Yard Sale in Afghanistan — Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Down the Drain

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military
Who?  Mini-Me?
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

The US Is Hosting A Giant Military Yard Sale In Afghanistan

It is a January sale with a difference. The American military is auctioning off millions of pounds of tankers, accommodation blocks, tents, generators and other “white goods” in Afghanistan ahead of next year’s deadline for the end of combat operations.

In a tender document published on Friday, buyers are invited to offer a percentage of the equipment’s original value by January 10 when sealed bids will be opened.

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