This is the latest on the major trend concerning the American media. Not a happy story. A democracy requires a healthy functional objective media to be healthy itself. The trend seems to be moving against this.
Click through to see the excellent clarifying graphs.
This adds up to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands. And findings from our new public opinion survey released in this report reveal that the public is taking notice. Nearly one-third of the respondents (31%) have deserted a news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to.
Cyprus: Comment. International press outlets have provided detailed reporting on the so-called tax Cypriot leaders have proposed imposing on bank deposits to help pay for an international bailout. Cyprus is the fifth European Union country to request a bailout. The issues are complex and not relevant to this brief discussion.
NightWatch sees three threats in the situation.First is the breakdown of public confidence in the government and public financial institutions.That is already manifest in the run on ATMs. Banks on Cyprus were closed on the 18th, but the run on the banks should continue when they open on the 19th. There will not be enough cash to service the customers. Civil disorders should be expected.
The breakdown in confidence feeds the second threat which is the breakdown in respect for law and order. Cyprus is one step away from widespread rioting and a serious breakdown in public order. Rioting is likely when ordinary citizens conclude that they are powerless to protect what they have earned and no amount of effort on their part ensures their property rights.
The third threat is that the fear of losing everything will spread to other countries.
The country's soya industry is booming, but what is the impact on Argentinians and their land?
Filmmakers: Glenn Ellis and Guido Bilbao
For much of the past decade Argentina has seen a commodities-driven export boom, built largely on genetically-modified soy bean crops and the aggressive use of pesticides.
Argentina's leaders say it has turned the country's economy around, while others say the consequences are a dramatic surge in cancer rates, birth defects and land theft.
People & Power investigates if Argentina's booming soy industry is a disaster in the making.
By Glenn Ellis
As I flew in to Buenos Aires to make this film, all the talk was of President Cristina Kirchner’s latest gambit. Her foreign minister had pulled out of a meeting with the British foreign secretary to discuss the Falklands (or the Malvinas depending on your outlook). And for the people I rubbed up against in Argentina’s smart and chic capital, on discovering I was English, this, along with Maradona’s ‘hand of god’ moment, was the topic on everybody’s lips. “We won the war”, they would say. “After the fighting we got rid of our dictators but you had another 10 years of Thatcher.”
When I explained I was in the country to cover the soya boom, which has given Argentina the fastest growth rate in South America, but also allegedly caused devastating malformations in children, there was a look of disbelief. “Here, in Argentina? Why haven’t we heard about it?”
As bad as sequestration is now and is going to be — and that's much worse than some of you have told me you think — in the interest of truth, everyone should remember that the Chairman, before he was Chairman, before he was even Chief of Staff, Army, was railing, picking up the ADM Mullen line that deficits were the worst threat to national security and that DoD should be a part of deficit reduction. That, IMHO, undercuts his moral authority to do anything other than embrace sequestration, which is having impacts you wouldn't believe if we were allowed to discuss them with you. Folks, on a day to day basis, every day gets “suckyer” than the previous day. Sequestration is creating monumental diversions of key leader and staff attention from the real business of national defense. Most of the specifics are classified and/or “predecisional.”
Military officials are reassessing the national defense strategy in light of spending cuts that will force the Pentagon to reduce its budget by $500 billion over the next decade, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says.
A template for the story of our mis-steps as it will be told for generations.
Phi Beta Iota: The complete story has been posted below. Technology is not a substitute for thinking. US policymakers, driven by the arm sales imperative and its 5% kick-backs, have refused to be educated by intelligence professionals that do know what they are doing, but cannot be heard. It is time we begin serving the public with public intelligence — an Open Source Agency (OSA) whose finished decision-support cannot be ignored precisely because it is public.
For the United States and its allies, the tribes across the Muslim world remain a mystery. Because they were outside the realm of globalization, they were easy to see as natural allies of al Qaeda. Without an understanding of these tribes' social and religious values, writes Akbar Ahmed, the U.S.-led war on terror will not end in any kind of recognizable victory.
Drone launched from the USS Lassen in September 2010. Credit: Roberto Ruvalcaba/US Navy-Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
By 2012, the United States, in a move typical for its propensity to opt for excess in any matter of security, had commissioned just under 20,000 drones. About half of these are in use.
Ignoring the moral debate, drone operators are equally infatuated with the weapon and the sense of power it gives them. It leaves them “electrified” and “adrenalized.” Flying a drone is said to be “almost like playing the computer game Civilization,” a “sci-fi” experience.
A U.S. drone operator in New Mexico revealed the extent to which individuals across the world can be observed in their most private moments. “We watch people for months,” he said. “We see them playing with their dogs or doing their laundry. We know their patterns, like we know our neighbors' patterns. We even go to their funerals.”
Another drone operator spoke of watching people having sex at night through infrared cameras. The last statement, in particular, has to be read keeping in mind the importance Muslim tribal peoples give to notions of modesty and privacy.
The victims of all drone attacks are, in effect, treated like insects. That description is not my invention, but a reflection of the military slang for a successful strike. The victim that is blown apart on the screen in a display of blood and gore is called “bug splat.”
Muslim tribesmen were reduced to bugs or, as David Ignatius put it in a Washington Post op-ed, cobras to be killed at will. Any compromise with the Taliban in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan, officially designated as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), is “like playing with a cobra,” he wrote. And do we “compromise” with cobras? Ignatius rhetorically asked. “No, you kill a cobra.”
Bugs, snakes, cockroaches, rats — such denigration of minorities has been heard before, and as recent history teaches, it never ends well for the abused people.
WARNING NOTICE. The latest printer update for HP OfficeJeg J4680 All-In-One immediately decommissions perfectly good, full, and genuine HP print cartgriges as being “incompatible” with your printer. It FORCES you to go buy a new one and start fresh.
Recommendation if this happens to you: pull the cartridge that has been incorrectly blocked, go buy an exact replacement, and work with the store to do an instant switch out. Staples etc loses nothing, and they can return it to HP for full credit. We need to FLOOD HP with the fruits of their ineptitude.
There really ought to be a quality control center outside of HP, they have lacked integrity on printer cartridges for over a decade. Generally when HP says your cartridge is low, you still have a third of the ink left.
Working Hypothesis – AQ and the Muslim Brotherhood
Ayman al-Zawahiri, current head of AQ, was an instrumental figure of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), the armed wing of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Zawahiri was imprisoned following the assassination of Anwar Sadat. He came to power within AQ following the death of Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (for which he has been occasionally implicated). With the death of bin Laden, he assumed the role of leader of AQ.
My hypothesis is that Zawahiri was instrumental in developing AQ toward its global stature, although bin Laden had always said that America was his primary focus. Bin Laden, however, was targeting America's economic stature more than anything else, with the current economic status of the US, it would seem he may have succeeded. The hypothesis continues that Zawahiri wanted to hijack the movement and use it as a tool to re-establish the Caliphate. The attached document, prepared prior to the turn of the century, suggests that the Arab Spring and all other efforts have been closely orchestrated to bring down those governments that have failed in their Islamic duties……..
Still working this line, however, nobody believes it. I have passed the attached around folks within the IC, nobody has seen it….their take, propaganda more than anything else. I found the document while downloading the current version of AQ's English language magazine from the IntelCenter….so I would think that it should be taken at face value. Further, it was published on IntelCenter's website in 2008, so if it is propaganda it still mirrors current activities….another reason most in the IC rejected it, it is Open Source and therefore suspect. Of course nobody can tell me why something obtained through second parties (clandestine activities) makes it more reliable…..
This is the latest on the major trend concerning the American media. Not a happy story. A democracy requires a healthy functional objective media to be healthy itself. The trend seems to be moving against this.
