Officials at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada knew for two weeks about a virus infecting the drone “cockpits” there. But they kept the information about the infection to themselves — leaving the unit that’s supposed to serve as the Air Force’s cybersecurity specialists in the dark. The network defenders at the 24th Air Force learned of the virus by reading about it in Danger Room.
Phi Beta Iota: This is perfectly illustrative of the total lack of integrity that appears to prevail across the U.S. Government, but it is especially costly in the defense and intelligence worlds.
October 3, 2011
Contact: Glenn Turner, 917-817-3396
glenn@ripplestrategies.com
Corn vs. Sugar Industries Legal Battle Heats Up Over “High Fructose Corn Syrup” Name Change
New Website FoodIdentityTheft.com Provides Background for Reporters and Consumers
Expert Legal Spokesperson Available For Interviews
WASHINGTON, October 3, 2011 High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is a man-made sweetener used in thousands of grocery store products and it has a serious image problem. Consumers are avoiding it. Food companies are taking it out of the products they make. Some supermarkets have banned it. Demand for this highly-processed ingredient is falling fast.
The Corn Refiners Association comprised of corporations that make HFCS -decided that changing the name was a way to fix this problem. They are petitioning the FDA so that HFCS can legally be called “corn sugar” and ultimately just “sugar². An official decision hasn¹t yet been made, but in 2008 the Corn Refiners Association began a $50 million dollar marketing campaign labeling HFCS as ³corn sugar². They are now being sued by a group of sugar farmers and refiners who believe the name change will confuse consumers and harm the sugar industry.
This morning, Mitt Romney used his foreign policy address at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina to criticize what he called the Obama administration's “feckless policies of the last three years.”
“I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world,” Romney said, with an audience of cadets sitting behind him. “Not exceptional, as the president has derisively said, in the way that the British think Great Britain is exceptional or the Greeks think Greece is exceptional. In Barack Obama’s profoundly mistaken view, there is nothing unique about the United States.”
Romney criticized the president on cutting the defense budget, as well. “I will reverse President Obama’s massive defense cuts,” he said. “I will begin reversing Obama-era cuts to national missile defense and prioritize the full deployment of a multilayered national ballistic missile defense system.”
According to a spokesman of the Libyan National Transitional Council Qadhafi is believed to be holed up near the western town of Ghadamis near the Algerian border under the protection of Tuareg tribesmen. Qadhafi supported Tuareg rebellions against the governments of Mali and Niger in the 1970s and allowed them to settle in Libya.
The Algerian Foreign Minister announced last week that his country was ready to work closely with the new Libyan authorities, adding that Algeria would eventually recognise the National Transitional Council.
We circulate below an article published by Al Jazeera which attempts to consider the many and confusing factors which influence developments in the Sahara including the position of Niger, Chad and Mali as well as Algeria and Libya, the Tuareg and other Saharan people, al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), American pursuit of the “global war on terror” GWOT, and most recently the possibility that Qadhafi or his supporters will continue disruptive activity after their defeat in Libya itself. The author is a professor of social anthropology at the London School of Oriental and African Studies who seems to be the only analyst of the area writing in English.
Libya's uprising is causing turmoil in amid its neighbours and speculation of a Tuareg rebellion has emerged.
Jeremy Keenan
Aljazeera, 28 Sep 2011
EXTRACT:
Prior to the start of Libya's revolution in February, the Sahelian regions of Niger and Mali had already suffered eight years of increasing political instability and insecurity. The reasons for this are complex:
First, having partially recovered from the Tuareg rebellions of the 1990s, the rulers of both Niger and Mali became willing, pliant and corrupt partners in the global war on terror (GWOT). This transformation occured following the complicity between the US and Algeria's mukhabarat [security services] and the Departement du Renseignement et de la Securite [DRS – Department of Intelligence and Security] in fabricating terrorism in the region in order to justify the launch of the 2003 second front in the GWOT in the Sahel/Sahara. That alone brought an almost instant decimation of the predominantly Tuareg tourist industry and an annual loss of an estimated $50m.
Another factor contributing to instability in the region occured in 2005, following the political provocation of the Tuareg by the Niger government. This led to a short-lived rebellion, while in May 2006 the US and Algeria's DRS orchestrated a Tuareg rebellion in northeastern Mali. This was followed, four to five months later, by two contrived “terrorist” engagements designed to facilitate the name change of Algeria's GSPC into al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and its “insertion” into the Sahel.
Little coverage to begin with, then mostly negative following ….. indications that the “fat cats” are calling in favors to discredit this initiative. With the Transport Workers Union filing a complaint about the commandeering of buses to move the detained, word is spreading….time for social media to step up to the plate as it has
elsewhere?
And for sleet and torrential rains – anything that might convince the precious insufferables who have taken over Wall Street that they have had enough of exercising their First Amendment rights to the inconvenience of tens of thousands of people who actually have to work for a living.
This bunch ought to get down on their knees in thanks that America‘s capitalist Founding Fathers saw fit to protect the privileges of the dumb and obnoxious along with everyone else.
They should also salute the NYPD and all its officers for paying diligent attention to ensuring that peace and harmony reign in their daze of rage. But no.
Instead, in a disgraceful attempt at intimidation, partisans of Occupy Wall Street, as the micromovement calls itself, posted on the Internet the name, address and telephone number of a ranking cop who dosed a couple of upstarts with pepper spray – along with the same information about the officer's family members.
If the NYPD has made any tactical error in this episode, it was in being too tolerant.
Phi Beta Iota: Despite the topless bits and the strong flavor of 1960's emergence, the mob is disorganized and lacks both leadership and focus at the ground level. Strategicially there have been flashes of genius, including the recognition that Electoral Reform must be the core demand – all corruption stems from the corruption of the electoral system, and that the movement must be nation-wide. Lacking an intellectual framework for self-governance, and a means for bringing pressure to bear (such as calling for a general strike and a national sick-out in sympathy, while demanding that each Representative co-sponsor Electoral Reform Act 2.2), it is very possible they will be diminished by time as Wall Street waits for winter.
North Dakota is debt free with a surplus of cash that can only be spent with 66% of the legislature approving. Integrity seems to be plentiful there, but not in Washington, where Obama refuses to free up access to oil in our ground, at the same time that he is blowing taxpayer money on fraudulent green schemes.
How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia
Harold Hamm, discoverer of the Bakken fields of the northern Great Plains, on America's oil future and why OPEC's days are numbered.
Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be “completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century.”
“President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy,” he adds. We can't come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into “green energy” sources like wind and solar, he argues. It has to come from oil and gas.
Phi Beta Iota: The difference between North Dakota reserves and the Canadian oil tar scam is that the latter requires vast amounts of aquifer water to flush, a trade-off that no honest person would ever make. The Governor of North Dakota has every right to nullify federal interference with his state's natural resources.
Over the past few years, we have had a few cases were Google decided to censor a report of ours from their search results. We documented one case publicly here. We usually don’t make a big deal about it online because people tend to just dismiss us as “crazy” when we do. However, this latest case is blocking our new report on the #OccupyWallStreet movement and we would like to bring it to the attention of the many supporters within the movement. The post is entitled, “A Report from the Frontlines: The Long Road to #OccupyWallStreet and the Origins of the 99% Movement.” After we published it late yesterday afternoon, when we checked Google and typed in the full headline, it was featured at the top of their search results . However, as of this morning, Google has removed our post from their results.
Phi Beta Iota: Our operating assumption is that Google has joined NSA and CIA to create in internal version of “Total Information Awareness,” with the other side of the coin resident in Singapore, where the government very uncharacteristically (foolishly) bought into American snake oil offerings. Google is superficially nice to have, but at root it has become part of the larger evil.
