First Crimea, now Iraq. Why does America's $50 billion intelligence community keep getting taken by surprise?
Shane Harris
Foreign Policy, 12 June 2014
nited States intelligence agencies were caught by surprise when fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) seized two major Iraqi cities this week and sent Iraqi defense forces fleeing, current and former U.S. officials said Thursday. With U.S. troops long gone from the country, Washington didn't have the spies on the ground or the surveillance gear in the skies necessary to predict when and where the jihadist group would strike.
This story broke almost a week ago, but it was so inflammatory that I decided not to run it immediately. I wanted to be sure it was accurate. Nearly 800 dead babies found in a septic tank on the grounds of a Roman Catholic home for “unwed mothers” was just too damning. As time as gone on however the story just gets worse. Here is the current state of the situation. This is part of the trend of the imploding Catholic Church. And I suspect there will be more revelations to come.
It gets worse. One week after revelations of how over the span of 35 years, a County Galway home for unwed mothers cavalierly disposed of the bodies of nearly 800 babies and toddlers [3] on a site that held a septic tank, new reports are leveling a whole different set of charges about what happened to the children of those Irish homes.
“Essentially, the Tamr tool is a data cleanup automation tool. The machine-learning algorithms and software can do the dirty work of organizing messy data sets that would otherwise take a person thousands of hours to do the same, Palmer said. It’s an especially big problem for older companies whose data is often jumbled up in numerous data sources and in need of better organization in order for any data analytic tool to actually work with it.”
Far from being a subject of merely antiquarian interest, military history is an essential tool for training of soldiers and for institutional accountability, according to newly updated Army doctrine.
But only if it is done right.
In Military History Operations (ATP 1-20, June 2014), the Army discusses what military history is for, its development over time, and the proper way to produce it.
It is an old question in social movements: Should we fight the system or “be the change we wish to see”? Should we push for transformation within existing institutions, or should we model in our own lives a different set of political relationships that might someday form the basis of a new society?
Over the past fifty years—and arguably going back much further—social movements in the United States have incorporated elements of each approach, sometimes in harmonious ways and other times with significant tension between different groups of activists.
In the recent past, a clash between “strategic” and “prefigurative” politics could be seen in the Occupy movement. While some participants pushed for concrete political reforms—greater regulation of Wall Street, bans on corporate money in politics, a tax on millionaires, or elimination of debt for students and underwater homeowners—other occupiers focused on the encampments themselves. They saw the liberated spaces in Zuccotti Park and beyond—with their open general assemblies and communities of mutual support—as the movement’s most important contribution to social change. These spaces, they believed, had the power to foreshadow, or “prefigure,” a more radical and participatory democracy.
Once an obscure term, prefigurative politics is increasingly gaining currency, with many contemporary anarchists embracing as a core tenet the idea that, as a slogan from the Industrial Workers of the World put it, we must “build the new world in the shell of the old.” Because of this, it is useful to understand its history and dynamics. While prefigurative politics has much to offer social movements, it also contains pitfalls. If the project of building alternative community totally eclipses attempts to communicate with the wider public and win broad support, it risks becoming a very limiting type of self-isolation.
For those who wish to both live their values and impact the world as it now exists, the question is: How can we use the desire to “be the change” in the service of strategic action?
The Washington Post blog The Switch interviewed the American Library Association’s Director of Government Relations Lynne Bradley in the article “Why The Death of Net Neutrality Would Be A Disaster For Libraries” about how libraries would be adversely affected without net neutrality. As public institutions with most of their resources online, libraries rely on free Web to serve their users and provide information. With budgets already stretched to their limits, libraries will not be able to afford to pay to ISPs. More people are going to the public libraries to have access to the Internet and other digital services. If that is taken away, not only will libraries suffer, but public education institutions will also suffer.
