The most persistent and pernicious Big Lie regarding the so-called “Civil War”— more properly called the “War to Prevent Southern Independence”— is this:
Noble and saintly yankees fought the war to abolish slavery; evil Confederates fought to preserve it.
The historical record incontrovertibly refutes this Big Lie and yet it lives on, repeated incessantly by many who know better, and by many, many more who accept without challenge what they were taught in government schools.
The PR disasters over the last three months — including pictures of American troops urinating on Afghan corpses, the burning of Qurans, and the massacre of Afghan civilians, including women and children, by at least one deranged American soldier — have morphed into a grand strategic debacle. From the perspective of the Afghan insurgency, these are gifts that will keep on giving.
Why do I use the modifier grand strategic?
Because these incidents have (1) increased the moral strength of the Afghan insurgents by handing them a coup to rally supporters and attract the uncommitted to their cause. They also widen the existing rift between the United States military and the Karzai government, which in any case is viewed by many Afghans as a corrupt, illegitimate, quisling lapdog of the US. And (2), they are visibly weakening the rapidly crumbling solidarity at home. Recent polls in America, for example, suggest the already overwhelming majority of Americans who now think it is time to exit the Afghan enterprise is growing again. Moreover, an increasing number of politicians and editorial boards are now beginning to reflect the views of the majority of American people. These incidents have magnified the already widespread perceptions among Afghans of a grotesque mismatch between the ideals we profess uphold and what we do.
To American Jews, the sound of this has to be strange. 78% support Obama but only 5% of Jewish donations go to him and his supporters.
The big money, Koch Brothers, Wall Street and the AIPAC spies and their supporters go to the Republicans, lifelong enemies of the Jewish people, in fact, the source of the huge upsurge of antisemitism in America.
Here is a video funded by the ADL and AIPAC attacking President Obama. Problem is, in most of the world and much of America, this “attack piece” is seen as a poorly done pro-Obama video. We aren’t kidding, things have gone that far.
Phi Beta Iota: We have been calling for religious counterintelligence since at least 2003, generally focused on the very negative, unlawful, and often treasonous misbehavior of US citizens with top secret/special compartmented information known to hold dual citizenship with Israel. Anyone with a security clearances that holds dual citizenship with Israel should be given a choice: lose the Israeli citizenship, or lose the clearances. They should all be subject to oversight by a highly specialized religious counterintelligence unit with divisions for Opus Dei, the Mormons, the Pentecostals, and others that preach higher loyalties justifying treason to the Republic. With respect to the current stories, there is no open evidence that the Administration is doing anything serious with respect to containing Israel government covert operations in the USA. As long as a Goldman Sachs lobbyist is in the position of National Security Advisor (hereafter, Nanny to the President), and Goldman Sachs owns both the Fed and the Secretary of the Treasury positions, Obama would appear to be quite helpless and inconsequential, bracketed as he is by the the huge financial services industry syndicate and the combination of entitlement and national security stakeholders.
On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.
New report released by the Institute for Economics & Peace analyses the macroeconomic effects of US government spending on wars and the military since World War II.
The report studies five periods – World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Afghanistan/Iraq wars – exposing the effect of war financing on debt, consumption, investment, jobs, taxes, government deficits, and inflation.
The findings of the report show devastating trends for US tax, debt and deficit debates.
The U.S. has paid for its wars either through debt [World War II, Cold War, Afghanistan/Iraq], taxation [Korean War] or inflation [Vietnam]. In each case, taxpayers have been burdened, and private sector consumption and investment have been constrained as a result.
Report highlights
The report shows the following economic indicators experiencing negative effects either during or after the conflicts:
Public debt and levels of taxation increased during most conflicts
Consumption as a percent of GDP decreased during most conflicts
Investment as a percent of GDP decreased during most conflicts
Inflation increased during or as a direct consequence of these conflicts
The higher levels of government spending associated with war tends to generate some positive economic benefits in the short-term, specifically through increases in economic growth occurring during conflict spending booms. However, negative unintended consequences occur either concurrently with the war or develop as residual effects afterwards thereby harming the economy over the longer term.
Phi Beta Iota: There appears to be a continued reluctance to address the real causes of our terrible situation: corruption across the board. No amount of intellectual posturing, whether in a book or in a conference, is a substitute for full transparency and the truth — the whole truth. The lack of integrity across all eight tribes — academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit — is the ROOT CAUSE of our collapse.
Ten days into the uprising in Benghazi, Libya, the United Nations’ Human Rights Council established the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya. The purpose of the Commission was to “investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law in Libya.” The broad agenda was to establish the facts of the violations and crimes and to take such actions as to hold the identified perpetrators accountable. On June 15, the Commission presented its first report to the Council. This report was provisional, since the conflict was still ongoing and access to the country was minimal. The June report was no more conclusive than the work of the human rights non-governmental organizations (such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch). In some instances, the work of investigators for these NGOs (such as Donatella Rovera of Amnesty) was of higher quality than that of the Commission.
Due to the uncompleted war and then the unsettled security state in the country in its aftermath, the Commission did not return to the field till October 2011, and did not begin any real investigation before December 2011. On March 2, 2012, the Commission finally produced a two hundred-page document that was presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. Little fanfare greeted this report’s publication, and the HRC’s deliberation on it was equally restrained.
Nonetheless, the report is fairly revelatory, making two important points:
Okay. You got me. I can’t really tell you everything you need to know about big data. The one thing I discovered last week – as I joined more than 2,500 data junkies from around the world for the O’Reilly Strata conference in rainy Santa Clara California—is that nobody can, not Google, not Intel, not even IBM. All I can guarantee you is that you’ll be hearing a lot more about it.
What is big data? Roughly defined, it refers to massive data sets that can be used to predict or model future events. That can include everything from the online purchase history of millions of Americans (to predict what they’re about to buy) to where people in San Francisco are most likely to jog (according to GPS) to Facebook posts and Twitter trends and 100 year storm records.
Phi Beta Iota: Big data is most important for what it can tell you about true cost and whole system cause and effect, inclusive of political corruption and organizational fraud. These are past and present issues, not future issues. We design the future based on the integrity present today. This is why “open everything” matters.
With that in mind, here’s the three most important things you need to know about big data right now:
