Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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SchwartzReport: Matt Taibbi on the Legal Divide — Two Justice Systems — Criminalization of Poverty Among the 99%, Impunity for the 1%

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government
Stephan A. Schwartz
Stephan A. Schwartz

This is a very good interview with Matt Taibbi discussing what has happened to the American justice system. One of our myths is that we have the fairest justice system in the world but, like our fantasy that we have the world's freest press, it is a delusion. As with the press we aren't e! ven in the top 25. It is very hard to maintain a healthy democracy if both the government and the people insist upon lying to themselves.

‘It’s Total Moral Surrender”: Matt Taibbi Unloads on Wall Street, Inequality and our Broken Justice System
ELIAS ISQUITH, Assistant Editor – Salon

EXTRACT

Morally, it doesn’t work anymore. You just cannot have a society where people instinctively know that certain people are above the law, because it will create total disrespect for authority among everybody else. And that’s completely corrosive. You need to have people believing in the system to some degree – even if it’s just an illusion, you need to have them believing. And that was … another thing I was trying to get to in this book, the difference between what happened in the Bush years, with the scandals with Adelphi and Enron and Tyco, and what happened now, [when] they just stopped seeing the necessity of keeping up appearances. They didn’t even make a few symbolic prosecutions, and so it leaves the entire public with this glaring statistic that there were no prosecutions and there was massive crime. How does that make anybody else feel? How does it make you feel when you pay a speeding ticket, you can’t write that off, but HSBC can write off its $1.9 b! illion fine for drug trafficking? People start to think about these things, and they start losing their faith in the system and it doesn’t work anymore. It’s funny, because when they talk about income inequality on the campaign trail and in these elections … They always talk about it in this unthreatening, antiseptic way, and it’s just so much more extreme than that. It’s much broader and more disgusting problem than the way they typically present it in our political debate. So that was another thing I was trying to do, was to try to bring out the grotesque nature of the whole thing.

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Wayne Madsen: NSA Spies on US Allies — With Direct Witting Assistance of AT&T, EDS, Qwest, H-P, Motorola, Cisco, Qualcomm, Oracle, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Verizon

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call
Wayne Madsen
Wayne Madsen

Washington Spies on NATO; Other Allies

Wayne MADSEN

Strategic Culture.org | 18.05.2014

EXTRACT

Implants are inserted by NSA into targeted computer systems and network devices through what the NSA calls «supply-chain interdiction». Equipment is intercepted between the manufacturer and the end-user. At a secret facility called a «load station», devices called «beacons» are inserted clandestinely into a device’s hardware. These pre-positioned access points permit later access by NSA into «hard target» networks around the world.

NSA names its strategic partners in its «collect-it-all», codenamed ASPHALT operations, around the world. These are AT&T, EDS, Qwest, H-P, Motorola, Cisco, Qualcomm, Oracle, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Verizon. In all, over 80 «major global corporations» support NSA’s worldwide collection efforts. With corporate cooperation, NSA captures Internet data from seven «international choke point» access sites in the continental United States. Their cover names are Breckenridge, Tahoe, and Sun Valley on the U.S. West Coast; Whistler in the South; and Killington, Coppermountain, and Maverick on the East Coast.

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Continue reading “Wayne Madsen: NSA Spies on US Allies — With Direct Witting Assistance of AT&T, EDS, Qwest, H-P, Motorola, Cisco, Qualcomm, Oracle, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Verizon”

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Berto Yongman: Red (Team) Analysis Society

Worth A Look
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Worth a look.

The Red (Team) Analysis Society

Strategic Foresight & Warning, Anticipatory Intelligence, Political Risk Assessment

Creating anticipatory intelligence is nothing else than deciphering the dynamics of the world… What will happen to us in the future? How shall we fare, collectively and individually? How can we improve how we deal with the future? How shall we cope with various dangers, pressures but also opportunities? Which are those issues, how do they evolve and what to expect next? Welcome to the website of The Red (Team) Analysis Society.

See Also Today by This Team:

Strategic Intelligence Assessment for Ukraine – Setting the Stage

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Neal Rauhauser: Nature Bats Last – Global Wildfires

03 Environmental Degradation
Neal Rauhauser
Neal Rauhauser

Global Wildfire Patterns

Over the last seven years I have become interested in the following topics in roughly chronological order: peak oil, renewable energy with a focus on wind, renewable ammonia, food security, and water security. More and more I am starting to see that global wildfire patterns are also important. The video seen here was originally posted at NASA’s Earth Observatory

Fire is a natural part of all but the wettest ecosystems. Everywhere west of the Mississippi except the coastal Pacific Northwest used to burn in a fairly regular fashion. Some plant species need fire as part of their natural cycle. Humans have been exhuming fossil carbon for two hundred years and when World War II flying boats like the PBY Catalina came out of service they were repurposed into water bombers and we suppressed fire everywhere. This worked until critical masses of dead growth fueled fires of previously unseen scope and intensity. We grudgingly began to permit fire to do its work in ecosystems.

This April was the 350th month of above average temperatures. My next big birthday is fifty, the last time we had a normal month I was still a minor. This is a ‘fire tornado’, with thousand degree temperatures and category five hurricane force winds feeding into it. These are a normal event in hilly, windy country, but there are many, many more of them in California this year thanks to a record fire season. This is the hottest May for California since record keeping started in 1896, the state has a record drought, and the fires came sixty days early and at triple the normal rate.

Read full article with additional graphics.

See Also:

03 Environmental Degradation (250) @ Phi Beta Iota

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SchwartzReport: Insurance Companies Begin Acknowledging Climate Change, Break with Energy Industry Denials of Climate Change

03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics
Stephan A. Schwartz
Stephan A. Schwartz

If you have been reading SR for some time you know I predicted this in the late 90s. Eventually a wide range of industries are going to be opposed to the carbon energy interests. This is an important trend, and one to watch closely.

Rift Widening Between Energy And Insurance Industries Over Climate Change
KEN SILVERSTEIN – Forbes

Being a big business, the insurance industry is a strong backer of free enterprise and its laissez-faire leaders. But a rift could be developing now that some major carriers are staking claims in the climate change cause while many of their congressional backers have remained skeptical of the science.

For insurers, it’s not about the political machinations but rather, it’s about the potential economic losses. If even part of the predictions hold – the ones released by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change that ascribe temperature change to humans with 95 percent certainty – then the rate of extreme weather events will only increase and the effects would be more severe. That, in turn, would lead to greater damages and more payouts.

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Berto Jongman: South Sudan Crisis at Tipping Point — But Donors Still in Grid-Lock with Ancient Protocols

01 Poverty, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Government, Non-Governmental
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

South Sudan crisis: famine and genocide threaten to engulf nation

Aid agencies say South Sudan at ‘tipping point' as ethnic violence puts millions of people at risk of starvation and disease

It is happening again. Twenty years after the genocide in Rwanda, 30 years after the famine in Ethiopia, Africa‘s twin scourges are back. This time it is a single country facing a double disaster. South Sudan, the world's newest nation, not yet three years old, is on the brink of catastrophe.

Here in Melut, on the banks of the Nile, close to the oilfields and the border with Sudan, the signs of impending disaster are impossible to miss. This week the world's richest nations will have one last chance to make good their promises of help.

Nearly 20,000 people have fled to the refugee camps in Melut since fighting between rival government factions broke out last December. In total, more than a million people have fled from their homes and, with the rainy season starting, more than a third of the population – 3.7 million people – are already facing emergency and crisis levels of hunger.

“There is no food here,” a man tells me as we sit in the dust beneath an acacia tree in one of Melut's makeshift camps. “No food. We eat leaves from the trees and the women go out to collect firewood. But when the rain comes, it will be still worse. We will starve – and then we will die.”

Relief agencies are fighting a desperate battle to alert the outside world to the scale of the impending disaster. Last week Oxfam warned that the crisis has reached a “now or never moment” to avoid catastrophic levels of hunger and suffering. Chief executive Mark Goldring said: “The crisis is at a tipping point. We either act now or millions will pay the price. We need a massive and rapid global surge in aid … We cannot afford to wait, and we cannot afford to fail.”

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: South Sudan Crisis at Tipping Point — But Donors Still in Grid-Lock with Ancient Protocols”

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