IO Impotency – Page 231 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/03/042012/03/04

Koko: Iowa passes outrageous law demanding total secrecy over factory meat filth and cruelty practices

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency

Iowa passes outrageous law demanding total secrecy over factory meat filth and cruelty practices

Ethan A. Huff

Natural News, 4 March 2012

(NaturalNews) Capturing undercover footage of extreme animal abuse at factory farms is soon to be illegal in Iowa, thanks to the passage of a new bill that squelches First Amendment protections for agricultural whistleblowers. In one of the fastest legislative rush-throughs in history, the “American Heartland” state's House and Senate recently passed House File 589, also known as the “ag-gag” bill, which redefines undercover filming and various other whistle-blowing activities as “agricultural production facility fraud” punishable under the law.

Prior to the passage of the bill, which now sits on Republican Governor Terry Branstad's desk for signing, exposing the horrific conditions in many of Iowa's factory farms was a legally-protected free speech right. Once signed into law, however, H.F. 589 will make Iowa the first state in America to actively muzzle individuals from exposing the ugly truth about what takes place at chicken farms, animal processing plants, and even behemoth genetically-modified (GM) crops farms across the state.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The truth at any cost lowers all others costs. This is the worst possible step Iowa could take.

2012/03/032012/03/03

Robert Steele: Japan Connects with the Truth

05 Energy, 08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, IO Impotency

Steele smiling head shot — Robert David STEELE Vivas

The truth about what happened in Japan will not be known for some time. Remarkable, however, is the below admission of two key attributes for successful governance: first, share all information broadly and quickly; and second, do not believe ignorant over-confidence (if not outright lies) told by “experts” from both the public and private sector. The Japanese government may not be practicing complete openness, for example, with respect to the radioactive contamination of the Tokyo suburbs, but this is a step in the right direction. “The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.”

Japan’s government failed responding to earthquake, tsunami: PM

Japan's prime minister acknowledged Saturday the government failed in its response to last year's earthquake and tsunami, being too slow in relaying key information and believing too much in “a myth of safety” about nuclear power.

“We can no longer make the excuse that what was unpredictable and outside our imagination has happened,” Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said. “Crisis management requires us to imagine what may be outside our imagination.”

Read full article.

2012/03/03

Chuck Spinney: The Arrogance of Ignorance Plus Meta-RECAP

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Military

We are fighting Islamism from ignorance, as we did the cold war

The west wasted trillions in needless conflict with the USSR. Now we are being brainwashed into confrontation with Iran

Simon Jenkins, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 March 2012 20.00 GMT

Were we wrong? I have lived through two global conflicts: the west against Russian communism and now the west against political Islam. The latter was caused by western leaders exaggerating a threat from a tiny group of terrorists to win popularity in war. But the former? Surely the cold war was a good war, a Manichean struggle between competing visions of how to order humanity. If not, then it must have been one of the great mistakes of all time, and a horrific waste of resources.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Brother Spinney knows full well that there is no ignorance among the “leaders” who make it so. They are in this for the money. The ignorance is our own, as a public. Absent an educated engaged public, public policy is a tool for enriching the few, not the many.

2012/03/02

DefDog: $15 Billion for Cyber-Command, Zero for Actual Needs + Meta-RECAP

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Military

The myths behind the spending — disavowed by true subject-matter experts, manipulated by the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) to spend more on vaporware….

RSA Conference: On the Subject of Cyber War and Industrial Espionage

Talk of an impending ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor’ is not an uncommon image evoked during discussions of cyber threats to the critical infrastructure of the United States. But the countries with the most capability do not necessarily have the most interest in launching the types of attacks against the United States that make for movie plots, a panel of experts said at the RSA Conference Wednesday.

“There are nation-states that absolutely have the capability (to launch a major attack), but they don’t have the intent – mostly because it wouldn’t be in their own interest, and the spillover effects would be very damaging to the world economy and a lot of other things,” said Eric Rosenbach, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy in the Department of Defense. “The other reason is, that type of attack, contrary maybe to what the conventional wisdom is, I think would be very difficult to disguise.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The alarm was sounded — and the solution proffered — in 1994. What we should have been doing all this time is going with full open source software across the board, and an end to buggy irresponsible proprietary code and even worse, buggy irresponsible secret code. It now appears that intelligent cities and states are going to have to take matters into their own hands — this is consistent with what some states are already doing (planning for federal collapse, refusing corporate business absent a waiver of corporate personality).

2012/02/29

DefDog: DoD Information Operations Compromised

Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military

What a surprise!

U.S. ‘info ops' programs dubious, costly

Tom Vanden Brook and Ray Locker

USA TODAY, 29 February 2012

WASHINGTON – As the Pentagon has sought to sell wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to often-hostile populations there, it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on poorly tracked marketing and propaganda campaigns that military leaders like to call “information operations,” the modern equivalent of psychological warfare.

From 2005 to 2009, such spending rose from $9 million to $580 million a year mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon and congressional records show. Last year, spending dropped to $202 million as the Iraq War wrapped up. A USA TODAY investigation, based on dozens of interviews and a series of internal military reports, shows that Pentagon officials have little proof the programs work and they won't make public where the money goes. In Iraq alone, more than $173 million was paid to what were identified only as “miscellaneous foreign contractors.”

“What we do as I.O. is almost gimmicky,” says Army Col. Paul Yingling, who served three tours in Iraq between 2003 and 2009, including as an information operations specialist. “Doing posters, fliers or radio ads. These things are unserious.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The real issue here is the lack of “management” across the entire US Government. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) does not manage anything. There are no standards for return on investment, inter-agency collaboration, even justification in the public interest. Budgeting is a corrupt political “game” in which the Cabinet Secretaries represent the recipients of taxpayer funds, not the taxpayers. Were OMB serious, intelligence, information operations, and public diplomacy would be managed as one account, an Open Source Agency under diplomatic auspices would establish the gold standard for truth, and no money would be invested in contractors whose primary qualifications consist of contributing to Congressional political action campaigns and playing golf. The truth at any cost lowers all others costs. We are nowhere near getting a grip on the truth.

2012/02/292012/02/29

NIGHTWATCH: Syria Ground Truth vs. US Media

08 Wild Cards, Corruption, IO Impotency, Media

Syria: Special comment: Over the weekend, news video footage from Homs, the so-called center of the opposition uprising, raised questions about the actual effectiveness of the opposition. The videos showed Syrian police, firefighters and militia using fire hoses to disperse a major opposition rally in Homs. So who controls Homs? Apparently the government does, with the exception of a few photogenic neighborhoods.

A European news outlet published a city map that shows the neighborhoods of Homs based on sectarian residence patterns. The map shows that most of the videos of violent confrontations have been taken in two or three mostly Sunni neighborhoods in the south of the city.

Homs is a large city and most of it appears to experience little to no violence, based on the video footage and the map of neighborhoods. The vast majority of Sunni neighborhoods and the Christian and Alawite neighborhoods report no violence. Life goes on in most of Homs.

If the Homs firefighters and police retain the capability to use fire hoses against demonstrators, then the government remains in control in that city. That is a basic precept of internal instability analysis. Homs still has a functioning government that responds to orders from Damascus.

The point of this comment is that most US news reporting on the struggle in Syria appears aimed at grabbing headlines rather than at providing a balanced view of both sides of the struggle. Non-US news sources present a different view of the unrest. For example, it is difficult to maintain that the opposition dominates Homs, when the fire brigade is secure enough to turn hoses on an opposition rally there. US news analysts completely missed the significance of the fire brigade operations shown in their own videos..

The bottom line is that the opposition holds no ground that it does not physically occupy and then only when government forces are not present or chasing it. Homs does not appear to be under siege or under opposition control, based on German news reporting. Some neighborhoods are and that is worth further research. It also helps explain why the al Asad government exhibits no signs of panic or severe stress commensurate with the urgent statements by the UN, Arab League and US officials. More on this topic later.

Phi Beta Iota: The truth at any cost lowers all other costs. The US media is 65-95% owned by Wall Street, with the bulk of their revenues coming from advertising by corporations that profit from war and instability.

See Also:

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

NIGHTWATCH on Syria at Phi Beta Iota

Search: map of sunni and shiite muslim groups

2012/02/28