The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Phi Beta Iota: One more reason why exploitation of all 15 slices of HUMINT need to be governed and managed as one.
CULTURE: Brzezinski on Ukraine's Irreversible Events
CULTURE: Japanese-Korean Spies & Future
CULTURE: National Security and Local Police (PDF 86 Pages, Brennan Center for Justice)
CYBER: 62% of Web Taffic is Not Human (The Atlantic)
CYBER: Electormagnetic Pulse “Black Swan” Coming Soon? (High Frontier)
3 Ways the Super-Rich Suck Wealth out of the Rest of Us
The facts are indisputable, the conclusion painful. The wealthiest people in the U.S. and around the world have used the stock market and the deregulated financial system to lay claim to the resources that should belong to all of us.
This is not a matter of productive people benefiting from their contributions to society. This is a relatively small number of people extracting massive amounts of money through the financial system for accomplishing almost nothing.
1. They Create Imaginary Money That Turns Real
The world’s wealth has doubled in a little over ten years. The financial industry has, in effect, created a whole new share of global wealth and redistributed much of it to itself.
Continue reading “4th Media: 3 Ways Tthe Super-Rich Suck Wealth out of the Rest of Us”
Yet another chapter opens on our distant past. Fascinating story.
Ancient DNA Coded From Early Human, Creating New Mystery
MONTE MORIN – Los Angeles Times
Here is something else you don't see in the corporate media business news. It is the latest in the GMO trend.
China Rejects Fifth US Corn Cargo in a Month, Citing GMO Strain
RT (Russia)
Here is a growing trend you don't really hear much about in the corporate business media, but that should concern all of us considerably. I was leery of this site, but it turned out this is a well-documented report.
Meet Your New Boss: Buying Large Employers [eg Smithfield Foods] Will Enable China To Dominate 1000s Of U.S. Communities
MICHAEL SNYDER – BlackListed News
Whether one calls it Randian, trickle-down, supply side, neoliberal, or austerity it is becoming clearer every day that the Rightist economic theories are utterly discredited and, over the past 30 years, have done incalculable damage to the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Yet these policies are still being pursued by the Republicans in the U.S. House, and touted by Wall Street, which has s! een the greatest transfer of wealth to its coffers in human history. Here is an excellent essay on the subject.
Is government aid a giant money laundering scheme?
Remember something called the War on Poverty? The Great Society?
President Lyndon Johnson declared it and announced it in 1965. Since then, the federal government and state governments have poured staggering amounts of dollars into the program.
How many dollars? Does anyone know?
In his 1992 book, Paved With Good Intentions, Jared Taylor puts the figure (1965-1992) at $2.5 trillion. So, for the sake of argument, let’s accept that.
Yet, by 1992 (and to an even greater degree since then), poverty had accelerated in America. Had gotten much, much worse.
So the logical question was and is: where did all that money go?
2013 Top Economic Stories in 42 Graphics
California Solitary Cells – Torture? (BBC)
Death of global web: Internet will end in 2014 – Kaspersky Lab
Dementia – Five Priorities (BBC)
EU Bank Rescue Plan – Why? (BBC)
Hacking The Zero-Day Vulnerability Market (DarkReading)
New H7N9 bird flu resists drugs without losing ability to spread (Reuters)
Non-VIolent Climate Insurgency (Foreign Policy in Focus)
NSA Damned by Nobel Prize-Winning Authors (Huffington Post)
Nuclear Madness – Russia Warns Over US Global Strike Program
Over-Policing America (Le Monde Diplomatique)
Russian Financial Crime – The Magnitsky List Grows (BBC)
Ukraine Crime Family Boss as President? (BBC)
Whither al Qaeda: A ‘Tri-alogue' with Brian Michael Jenkins, Seth Jones, and Andrew Liepman (RAND)
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| Dr. Paul M. Torrens, Dept. Geographical Sciences and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Univ. Maryland | ||||||
See Also:
Background material on the following topics is available on this site:
Huh?
Do You Trust the Washington Post‘s Sources on Morale at the NSA?
Former officials insist that employees are upset because President Obama hasn't visited to show his support.
Reuters via The Atlantic,
A strange Washington Post story gives readers the impression that morale is low at the NSA because President Obama hasn't visited to signal his support for the intelligence agency, even as Edward Snowden's leaks are causing many to criticize it.
The headline: “NSA morale down after Edward Snowden revelations, former U.S. officials say.”
The lead:
Morale has taken a hit at the National Security Agency in the wake of controversy over the agency’s surveillance activities, according to former officials who say they are dismayed that President Obama has not visited the agency to show his support.
What these “dismayed” sources told the newspaper:
Supporters of the NSA say staffers are not feeling the love.
“The agency, from top to bottom, leadership to rank and file, feels that it is had no support from the White House even though it’s been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions,” said Joel Brenner, NSA inspector general from 2002 to 2006. “They feel they’ve been hung out to dry, and they’re right.”
A former U.S. official—who like several other former officials interviewed for this story requested anonymity because he still has dealings with the agency—said: “The president has multiple constituencies—I get it. But he must agree that the signals intelligence NSA is providing is one of the most important sources of intelligence today. So if that’s the case, why isn’t the president taking care of one of the most important elements of the national security apparatus?”
Is this just an attempt to exert pressure on the president and stave off even the mildest criticism of the NSA? The sourcing here seems awfully shoddy. Is a former NSA inspector general who hasn't worked for the agency in seven years really qualified to pronounce upon the current feelings of every employee? Is the proposition that NSA staffers are all of one mind about recent controversies something we'd credit even if a current NSA employee said it? Did the anonymous “former U.S. official” ever work for the NSA? What “dealings” does he or she presently have with the agency, and how remunerative are those dealings?
After reading what these former officials had to say, Marcy Wheeler points out that NSA employees have a reason for low morale that has nothing to do with Obama's support:
Most of the NSA’s employees have not been read into many of these programs … That raises the distinct possibility that NSA morale is low not because the President hasn’t given them a pep talk, but because they’re uncomfortable working for an Agency that violates its own claimed rules so often. Most of the men and women at NSA have been led to believe they don’t spy on their fellow citizens. Those claims are crumbling, now matter how often the NSA repeats the word “target.” [PBI: Emphasis added.]
