The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Harvard University says it can't afford journal publishers' prices
University wants scientists to make their research open access and resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls
Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.
Dmitry Orlov on Ebola and the Five Stages of Collapse
Orlov is one of the best futurists writing on society collapse, having witnessed and personally experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union. His book, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Collapse-Experience-American-Prospects/dp/0865716854, is one of the best ever written in the collapse genre and necessary reading for anyone who is interested in this theme.
In 2008 he came up the a taxonomy of collapse, which he says occurs in 5 stages. The full article is here, http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2008/02/five-stages-of-collapse.html and he has a book on it too.
Below is a summary of his five stages of collapse:
A little irony here — one of USG's premier spycatchers accused of committing espionage by flogging info about polygraph TTP and vulnerabilities.
Senior Official at Federal Polygraph School Accused of Espionage
Scott W. Carmichael, a recently retired counterintelligence investigator with the Defense Intelligence Agency, has accused Donald Krapohl, Special Assistant to the Chief, National Center for Credibility Assessment (NCCA) and longtime editor of the American Polygraph Association quarterly, Polygraph, of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. In an e-mail message to retired FBI polygraph examiner Robert Drdak dated 3 September 2014, a copy of which was received by AntiPolygraph.org, Carmichael alleges that Krapohl manipulated Drdak in an elaborate scheme to funnel classified information about polygraph countermeasures to the government of Singapore.
Carmichael theorizes that Krapohl encouraged Drdak to write a paper on polygraph countermeasures that was ultimately based on a classified study conducted in 1994 by Dr. Gordon H. Barland, then a researcher with the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute (now the NCCA), and to sell that paper to the Lafayette Instrument Company, knowing that the information in the paper would make its way to the Singaporean government.
Carmichael concludes his e-mail by urging Drdak to “[call] the FBI before they begin to look at you as a suspect.”
Carmichael played a key role in the investigation of Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes (who incidentally beat the polygraph), about which he has authored a book, True Believer.
The full text of Carmichael’s e-mail to retired FBI polygraph examiner Robert Drdak (with one redaction) follows:
FULL EMAIL BELOW THE FOLD
Maria Popova is a great curator. Brain pickings is a great infotention tool — she spends a lot of time and well-thought-out decision-making about what is good to share.
“We live in a world awash of information, but we seem to face a growing scarcity of wisdom,” states Maria Popova, Founder of the website Brain Pickings. Popova believes it’s the storyteller’s role to interpret information and shape it into wisdom for the rest of the culture to share.
See Also:
http://www.futureofstorytelling.org
http://www.brainpickings.org
From an expert observer upset with CDC's betrayal of the public trust. We believe the US Government should nationalize the patents on Ebola, and radically over-haul CDC as well. The nationalization of the atomic bomb patents provides a precedent.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines published for health care professionals attending to an Ebola, or suspected Ebola, patient, in a hospital or other healthcare setting, recommends a minimum of an N-95 mask during aerosol generating procedures [emphasis added] such as intubation.This recommendation may be dangerously inadequate and raises the specter of not only recklessly endangering health care workers, but also the public at large, undermining confidence in the health care system.
In the 24 hours since I wrote that opening paragraph, and submitted the first version of this article for publication, the Washington Post reported that a health care worker who attended to the Ebola patient in Dallas has since tested positive for Ebola. As further indictment of the dangerous insufficiency of the CDC guidelines, the article had this to say:
Google’s Cold Betrayal of the Internet
Harry J. Bentham
IEET, 10 October 2014
Google Inc.’s 2013 book The New Digital Age, authored by Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, was showered with praise by many, but attacked in a review by Julian Assange for the New York Times, where it is described as a “love song” from Google to the US state. Also addressed in Assange’s subsequent book When Google Met WikiLeaks, Google’s book makes an unconvincing effort to depict the internet as a double-edged sword, both empowering (p. 6) and threatening our lives (p. 7).
The popular internet, Google argues, might help defeat the US’s “authoritarian” opponents, but also threatens to aid “terrorism” (p. 9) (Google’s word for cypherpunks and anti-statists) against the US itself. Thus, Google argues, the internet is potentially disruptive and harmful to US national security priorities – as is the possibility of individuals being personally empowered by technology. Google laments the “anarchy” being caused by the “agents of chaos”: generations of tech-savvy individuals armed with modern personal technologies (p. 46-47, 59, 207-208). Anonymous and other clans of hackers, we are told, “might as well be terrorists” (p. 151-182).
This is fairly consistent with the ideas of former President George W. Bush, who famously warned graduates at West Point that the gravest danger to the United States is “at the crossroads of radicalism and technology.” This point of view, alongside its knuckle-dragging obsession with defeating “rogue states” and “terrorists”, places Google’s apparent value-system unambiguously within the neoconservative ideological camp. The case for “guiding” the path of the internet (p. 11, 36-39), in particular, sounds equally shy and unsustainable as the authoritarian regimes (p. 6) Google claims to oppose.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Harry Bentham on Google's Betrayal (and Hypocrisy…)”
Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters to see — and write about — the Edward Snowden files, with their revelations about the United States' extensive surveillance of private citizens. In this searing talk, Greenwald makes the case for why you need to care about privacy, even if you’re “not doing anything you need to hide.”
