Islamophobic parties in Europe have established a tight network, stretching from Italy to Finland. But recently, they have extended their feelers to Israeli conservatives, enjoying a warm reception from members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition. Some in Israel believe that the populists are Europe's future.
Phi Beta Iota: Politicians and “leaders” have been grossly negligent about population policies including assimilation of legal immigrants, stopping illegal immigrants, educating the population, enforcing cultural expectations (e.g. not allowing women to be abused, part of assimilation). Both Europe and the USA have been mis-managed by lowest common denominator “leaders.”
The FBI was telling new bureau recruits as recently as Jan. 2009 that Islam “transforms [a] country's culture into 7th Century Arabian ways” and recommending a book written by one of Norwegian terrorism suspect Anders Behring Breivik's favorite authors as well as the Complete Idiot's Guide To Understanding Islam.
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It's been well established that anti-Muslim self-proclaimed counterterrorism experts — often times funded by federal grants — have been giving advice to state and local law enforcement officers for years. But the fact that the nation's top law enforcement agency was pointing new federal agents to bigoted material as recently as 2009 came as a surprise to those who have seen this stuff before.
It was a financial storm that even an economics professor could see coming. The debt crisis that had gripped Washington for a month came to a sudden, horrifying climax that left America’s economy looking like a nuclear wasteland. Credit markets suffered life-threatening seizures as the stock market dropped a staggering 25 percent. U.S. Treasuries plummeted as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the United States’ credit rating — instantly adding trillions of dollars in interest costs to the national debt. Only gold was on the rise, and its price exploded past $2,000 an ounce.
Phi Beta Iota: The only people who benefit from raising the debt ceiling are the banks that destroyed the economy in the first place, and the industrial complexes from medical to military that have grown the profligate entitlement and earmark society. Nationalizing the banks and closing down the Federal Reserve are both viable alternative strategies. The fact of the matter is that the truth is not on the table. To WHOM does the US Government owe money in violation of the Constitutional mandate that it be the steward of the full faith and credit of the Republic? Triage among sovereign powers, banks, and individual investors should reveal a wealth of alternatives. This is, as one TV commentator called it, a “food fight.” Intelligence and integrity are lacking within Washington–neither the Republicans nor the Democrats, the Congress nor the Executive, are demonstrating the needed character during this time of tribulation.
JOURNAL: Central Planning and The Fall of the US Empire
Here's some thinking that draws on decision making theory. It's very much in line with how the late John Boyd (America's best strategist) would approach it.
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One of the most interesting underlying reasons for the decline of the Soviet Union, and soon the US, is misallocation of resources due to central planning.
Misallocation in this context means that year after year, decade after decade, the wealth of a nation is spent on the wrong things. The wrong projects are funded. The wrong things are built. The wrong things were bought and so on. Eventually, the accumulation of bad investment made them so fragile that even the smallest shock could topple them. The reason for this the Soviet's reliance on central planning. A system of economic governance where small group of people — in the Soviet Unions case bureaucrats — had all the decision making power. They decided what was spent and where. They decided badly.
Why did they decide badly? The massive economy of a modern superstate is too complex for a small group of people to manage. Too much data. Too many uncertainties. Too many moving parts.
The only way to manage an economy as complex as this is to allow massively parallel decision making. A huge number of people making small decisions, that in aggregate, are able to process more data, get better data (by being closer to the problem), and apply more brainpower to weighing alternatives than any centralized decision making group.
Of course, the misallocation due to centralized decision making wasn't supposed to be a vulnerability of the West. To allocate resources in our economy, we had a more efficient mechanism: markets. Markets are supposed to be a mechanism that allows massively parallel decision making.
Those assumptions are proving false. The succession of market bubbles and finally, the global financial collpse of 2008 is prima facie that gross misallocation is occurring. The wealth of the West, particularly the US, is being spent on the wrong things year after year, decade after decade. We are now as fragile as the Soviet Union in the late 80's.
This story is completely false. NightWatch's compilation of data reveals that “March saw the highest level of fighting up to March 2011 and May was higher still. July looks down, but much more focused and lethal against senior officials.”
Just more of the aversion of truth that permeates Washington…..it also goes against all the previous reporting of having the Taliban on the ropes…..
For the first time in five years insurgent-initiated attacks in Afghanistan have not increased with the start of a new fighting season, suggesting that a surge of U.S. forces has blunted Taliban momentum, according to the coalition forces.
The times they are a' changing. I was asked to comment on the recently published Reference: Protecting Sensitive “Open” Information and do so gladly. The author of that work means well, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with the substance of what he expouses. It is simply not reasonable nor feasible in context.
I know this better than most because I have been here before. In 1990-1994 Winn Schwartau sparked a public debate and ultimately testified to Congress on the likelihood of an “electronic Pearl Harbor.” Congress chose to ignore him just as it had ignored all the well-documented warnings on Peak Oil, Peak Water, AIDS, and so on in the late 1970's. Peter Black and I and others published articles outlining how easily America could be taken down, and how irresponsible the government and the private sector were being about the fundamentals of information security and data integrity.
“A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush,” according to Bob Fitrakis, columnist at http://www.freepress.organd co-counsel in the litigation and investigation.
If you recall, Ohio was the battleground state that provided George Bush with the electoral votes needed to win re-election. Had Senator John Kerry won Ohio's electoral votes, he would have been elected instead.
Evidence from the filing suggests that Republican operatives — including the private computer firms hired to manage the electronic voting data — were compromised.
