Owl: Do Koch Brothers Own Speaker Boehner?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government
Who?  Who?
Who? Who?

Koch Brothers and Boehner Plot to Take Down – or Over – the Government

The government shutdown and debt ceiling crises is getting wilder and more dangerous by the day. Here's writings, if true, showing very rich right-wing extremism at work behind Boehner:

“The Koch Brothers and other right-wing billionaires who provoked the government shutdown and now are angling for an even more devastating credit default see themselves as the people who deserve to rule the United States without interference from lesser citizens, especially those with darker-colored skin. Their “masters of the universe” world view is that they or their daddies or their daddies’ daddies were the ones who “built America” and, thus, it’s their right to tear down the remarkable edifice of U.S. law, politics and economics created over the past two-plus centuries — if the country’s less-deserving inhabitants insist on raising taxes on the rich to fund programs benefiting the poor and the middle class.  Oil billionaires David and Charles Koch. That is what we’re watching now, what might be called the Koch Brothers’ “Samson Option,” pulling down the temple to destroy their enemies even if doing so is also destructive to them and their fortunes…Now, in 2013, the Republican Right has doubled down on that strategy, merging a government shutdown with an impending credit default in an effort to extort more concessions from Obama and the Democrats. But the larger goal is to create a new constitutional structure in which the Right, regardless of its minority status, gets to dictate what the federal government can and cannot do. To make this strategy work, however, requires a readiness to play Samson and to pull down the temple on your enemies as well as yourself. That appears to be the extreme option that the Koch Brothers and their fellow right-wing billionaires have chosen. If they can’t rule America, they will reduce the country to economic rubble through a fiscal crisis and a premeditated financial collapse. Then, perhaps out of the rubble, a chastened American people will emerge to accept their subordinate position in this new plutocratic structure. In the future, they will know better than to do something that the Koch Brothers and their right-wing friends don’t like. All that stuff about a government of the people, by the people and for the people will finally have perished from the earth.

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Koch Brothers “Samson Option”

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SchwartzReport: Is Justice Scalia Insane? Or Merely Possessed by the Devil?

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement

schwartzreport newWhen I read this interview I was stunned. I have never thought much of Scalia. Like Clarence Thomas I have always thought of him as first and foremost an ideologue, and as with Thomas there are also growing ethical issues involving him. But I really had no idea how very inappropriate it is for this man to be an Associate Supreme Court Justice. This is like having your crazy un! cle oversee your rearing of your children. Read this interview and ask yourself: Would I even like to have this man as a neighbor?

This is why it matters who wins the Presidency, and why voting is important.

‘No. No. Not That I Know Of.”
DAHLIA LITHWICK – Slate

When I read this interview I was stunned. I have never thought much of Scalia. Like Clarence Thomas I have always thought of him as first and foremost an ideologue, and as with Thomas there are also growing ethical issues involving him. But I really had no idea how very inappropriate it is for this man to be an Associate Supreme Court Justice. This is like having your crazy un! cle oversee your rearing of your children. Read this interview and ask yourself: Would I even like to have this man as a neighbor?

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Is Justice Scalia Insane? Or Merely Possessed by the Devil?”

NIGHTWATCH: Afghanistan – 12 Years of Half-Measures

08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Afghanistan: In an interview with the BBC which aired on 7 October, President Karzai strongly criticized the NATO military campaign in Afghanistan. “On the security front, the entire NATO exercise was one that caused Afghanistan a lot of suffering, a lot of loss of life, and no gains because the country is not secure.”

“I am not happy to say that there is partial security. That's not what we are seeking. What we wanted was absolute security and a clear-cut war against terrorism.”

He also said the NATO leadership fought the wrong war. He said initially, relations with the US were good. “In those beginning years there was not much difference of opinion between us”.

“The worsening of relations began in 2005 where we saw the first incidents of civilian casualties, where we saw that the war on terror was not conducted where it should have been.”

Mr Karzai said the war should have been conducted “in the sanctuaries, in the training grounds beyond Afghanistan, rather than that which the US and NATO forces were conducting operations in Afghan villages, causing harm to Afghan people.”

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Steve Aftergood: CIA Halts Public Access to Open Source Service

Government
Steven Aftergood
Steven Aftergood

CIA HALTS PUBLIC ACCESS TO OPEN SOURCE SERVICE

For more than half a century, the public has been able to access a wealth of information collected by U.S. intelligence from unclassified, open sources around the world.  At the end of this year, the Central Intelligence Agency will terminate that access.

The U.S. intelligence community's Open Source Center (OSC), which is managed by the CIA, will cease to provide its information feed to the publicly accessible World News Connection as of December 31, 2013, according to an announcement from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), which operates the World News Connection (WNC).

The WNC “is an online news service, only accessible via the World Wide Web, that offers an extensive array of translated and English-language news and information,” an NTIS brochure explains. “Particularly effective in its coverage of local media sources, WNC provides you with the power to identify what really is happening in a specific country or region. Compiled from thousands of non-U.S. media sources, the information in WNC covers significant socioeconomic, political, scientific, technical, and environmental issues and events.”

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Berto Jongman: US Fails on Counterterrorism

Ethics
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

US intelligence so big that counterterrorism is failing? ‘Yes' say insiders

By

ComputerWorld, October 07, 2013

When might you consider quitting your job to be a “win”? When you work for the CIA and “the Company” tries to block the publication of your dissertation about the National Counterterrorism Center.

Bridget Rose Nolan, a sociology PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, worked as a counterterrorism analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) from 2010 – 2011. Basically she worked as an analyst while also conducting “ethnographic observations” by interviewing 16 female and seven male analysts for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia Inquirer explained, “She set out to explore the culture of the terrorism center and how it, and its counterparts, share information – or fail to.” After three years of “fighting” the CIA over the right to publish, she won, but the “win” meant she had to resign.

Instead of too big to fail, in essence, counterterrorism may be failing in some areas because it is too big, because counterterrorism analysts suffer from so much information overload that they are not effective in stopping terrorism. “Fewer people in the system could help to streamline the bureaucracy and reduce the number of emails and documents that make the analysts feel overwhelmed with information.” Other contributing factors that make terrorism harder to fight include sabotage among co-workers, stove-piping, confusion, bureaucracy that might make your head explode, and agencies that don’t play well together. Several people working in counterterrorism suggested that the solutions to be more effective include cutting out the bloat and making the intelligence community smaller, much smaller.

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Jean Lievens: Thomas Malone at MIT on Collective Intelligence

Collective Intelligence
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. He was also the founding director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and one of the two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on “Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century”. Professor Malone teaches classes on leadership and information technology, and his research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.

Thomas Malone on collective intelligence

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