Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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SchwartzReport: Water Denial as War Measure

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 12 Water
Stephan A. Schwartz
Stephan A. Schwartz

That water is destiny is becoming clear to all but the dimmest minds. By the end of this decade we will be seeing water wars.

UN Decries Water as Weapon of War in Military Conflicts
THALIF DEEN – Common Dreams/Reader Supprted News

The United Nations, which is trying to help resolve the widespread shortage of water in the developing world, is faced with a growing new problem: the use of water as a weapon of war in ongoing conflicts.

The most recent examples are largely in the Middle East and Africa, including Iraq, Egypt, Israel (where supplies to the occupied territories have been shut off) and Botswana.

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Neal Rauhauser: Fire & Ice — Arctic Melts, Forest Fires, and an India-Pakistan Worst Case Scenario

03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict
Neal Rauhauser
Neal Rauhauser

Fire & Ice

The two biggest melts for Greenland were in 1889 and 2012. We didn't know why the entire surface of Greenland turned to slush in a 96 hour period back when it happened, but now we know it was warm, ash laden air and that a similar event happened in 1889. This is double the normal maximum summer melt area.

Greenland melting is an issue on a scale of centuries to maybe a whole millennium, but there are other icy places that are much closer to fires. The Himalayas, which translates into The Abode of Snow, are commonly called Asia’s water tower. I have already mentioned the Kashmir Conflict, which affects the headwater’s of the Indus river valley at the far western end of the range. The Ganges and the Brahmaputra also originate in the Himalayas and well over a billion people depend on the mountain glaciers as a buffer for precipitation.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Read full post with additional graphics.

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Berto Jongman: CSIS on Rebuilding Trust in Intelligence — Really….

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Military
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

CSIS Statement of Principles for Rebuilding Trust in Intelligence Activities

By
Monday, May 19, 2014 at 5:55 PM

A group convened by the Center for Strategic and International Studies has issued a Statement of Principles for rebuilding trust in intelligence activities. It is signed by the following people:

Read list.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: CSIS on Rebuilding Trust in Intelligence — Really….”

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Rickard Falkvinge: European Pirate Party Promotions & Prospects

Cultural Intelligence
Rickard Falkvinge
Rickard Falkvinge

The Pirate Bay Running Promos For European Pirate Parties In Election Week

Pirate Parties:  In a last-minute visibility boost, The Pirate Bay is providing front-page exposure to the European Pirate Parties in this European Election. Offline-borns would tend to scoff at this; however, the net generation understands that this is an enormous amount of exposure, corresponding to buying the full cover of every newspaper, every day of the campaign, in the respective countries. This is The Pirate Bay lending a hand to the political arm of the movement.

pirate election dayRead full post.

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Neal Rauhauser: Russia’s Future Conflict in Transnistria

06 Russia
Neal Rauhauser
Neal Rauhauser

The Fourth Frozen Zone

Four months before the Boston Bombing I wrote Four Places You Have Not Heard Of. Yet., which contained a map that showed three of the four ‘frozen conflicts’ from the collapse of the Soviet Union, all in the Caucasus. These are Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. The Marathon day bombing renewed the world’s acquaintance with Chechnya.

. . . . . . . .

The U.S. adventure in Iraq was driven by a militarist, neo-conservative obsession with ‘cleaning up’ the last of what had been the Soviet Union’s client states in the Mideast. Instead of extending and solidifying American influence we overreached and bled out in Afghanistan just as the Soviet Union did. But don’t see this new Russian assertiveness as the rebirth of that old foe. Communism died by disproof via counter-example. What is happening now are the stirrings of two hundred years of Romanov Imperial Russia that preceded the Soviet Union’s seventy five year experiment. This new rising force ought to be a bit mercantilist in temperament, with natural gas and oil being tools of statecraft.

Read full post with graphics.

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Stephen E. Arnold: Is Google Breaking the Internet?

IO Impotency
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Google: Owning the Internet

I read “Google Is Breaking the Internet.” The write up addresses the issue of links between and among other Internet accessible content. The discussion focuses on search engine optimization. Google has a problem with relevance related to generating revenue. The pressure Google is exerting with regard to links is a logical reaction to the situation that Google has created. Once the relevance horse is out of the barn, Google has to send out search parties and take extraordinary actions to find the horse, get the horse under control, and put the horse back into its stall. Web sites desperate for traffic want to let horses out of the Google barn. An arms race for ad related relevance control is underway.

The author makes one of those statements that make sense from the point of view of a non Googler; for example:

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Is Google Breaking the Internet?”

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