The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Paul Craig Roberts discusses the dismantling of the U.S. constitution and the current Great Recession. With opening review of headlines by Alex Jones.
Phi Beta Iota: We embrace a diversity of commentators among our collective, in part to provide our hard-working subscribers and visitors with a panorama of cultural intelligence related to public intelligence in the public interest.
Click once. Do NOT click on the line that will appear, “Click to watch: “A Dream Revered” – must watch.” This is an audio.
As this story rolls out I am increasingly struck by the fact that the American corporate media has turned the Snowden Affair into a rather pedestrian thriller script completely missing the point. I ask myself are the reporters too dumb to see this, or is this a conscious choice. I think it is the later. You can see why American News is so often substance free. We can spend weeks talking about an absur! d, and emotionally damaged little man sending pictures of his penis around the net, but an issue like fundamental freedoms, civil liberties, whoa that would be like real journalism. We don't do that anymore. This is a really chilling trend.
Edward Snowden's Not the Story. The Fate of the Internet Is
JOHN NAUGHTON – The Guardian/Observer (U.K.)
Arab Spring countries
Egypt: Starting Friday and continuing over the weekend in Egypt, 80 to over 120 members of the Muslim Brotherhood and pro-Mursi demonstrators died in clashes in Cairo, Alexandria and other Nile Delta towns. The health ministry reported 792 people injured. The Brotherhood said 4,500 were wounded.
The interim president has authorized the prime minister to empower the military to make civilian arrests. A final showdown with the Muslim Brotherhood is emerging.
In north Sinai, Egyptian security forces began “Operation Desert Storm” against anti-government elements and tribes. The first official report is that government forces killed 10 militants and captured 20. According to al Ahram, the government estimates there are 500 active militants. The government has more than ten times that number.
Tunisia: A general strike in reaction to a political assassination last week emptied Tunis and grounded some commercial aircraft on Friday. On Saturday thousands protested against the Islamist-led government. Protests continued on Sunday resulting in clashes between pro- and anti-government groups. Anti-government groups have threatened to create an opposition counter-government.
Police clashed with anti-government protestors in Sidi Bouzid. This is the Tunisian town considered to be the birth place of the Arab Spring because it is where the first violent protests occurred in December 2010. The murdered opposition leader, Brahmi, came from Sidi Bouzid.
NSA Youth Outreach
In the swirl of information about the NSA, some interesting chunks of data get lost. I am not referencing the fascinating assertion that the NSA cannot search its own emails. (You can find the details of this possibly inaccurate but quite amusing story at http://goo.gl/2Lx0hs.
Like Fish & Wildlife, the NSA has a youth communication program in place. One of the facets of this initiative is called Change the World. The subsite of NSA.gov (http://www.nsa.gov/change/
The most interesting item on the NSA subsite offers:
Be a savvy social networker! First thing for any savvy social networker is to access your own privacy and security settings so that only people you know can access your social networking site. If you are involved in social gaming with people you don’t know, stay in control and stay comfortable. Stay in disguise and if you suspect someone is “gaming” you or asking too many personal questions, tell your parents or a trusted adult. Keep track of what the person is saying, but do not communicate or send chats to them. Do you download “cheat” programs that promise information to how to perform better or beat a game? Sometimes cheat downloads are used to implant a virus or malware on your computer!
The footer to the Web page contains the standard NSA tag and a 2009 date stamp.
Stephen E Arnold, July 29, 2013
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OPEN CIVICS
Beginning with National Service
I begin with an apology for the three generations that preceded you. I am 72 and a member of the generation of your grand and sometimes great grand-parents. My generation did many things to change our society for the better, sometimes in street demonstrations resembling those you see now in Europe and the Middle East, but we never valued what we had or how we, as Americans, were succeeding. We forgot how to govern ourselves.
And perhaps for that reason, my generation, born between 1925 and 1945, never raised a President. It followed that the post-war generation of Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush would be ill -equipped and unconstrained by the historical perspective necessary to govern *the* Superpower in a unipolar world. As a consequence, your generation, including your older brothers and sisters, have been robbed of the security and promise which supported my youth. Your generation has compensated with new means to communicate and ways to frame your identities. And it is from these ways and means, new ways and means to govern ourselves must emerge. Your generation can master the new because you are already creating it. This site, with your help, tests that idea.
The Site opens with Professor Sheldon Wolin's 1988 discussion about American democracy. The democracy he describes differs from the democracy many of us believe ourselves and advertise ourselves to be a part of. Twenty-five years later, your chance to judge the accuracy of his assessment is just beginning.
Continue reading “Penguin: Open Civics – Defining Citizenship”
Reason and feeling each have gifts and limitations. Used well together they generate wise caring. There are examples of wise caring in earlier human societies and we have an opportunity today to build on them and enhance that capacity in our whole civilization.
Down deep within us – underlying everything that we think, feel and do – we find our needs burning brightly along with our values (the cultural expression of our needs). When I say “needs” I’m referring to deep universal needs, such as our needs for love, expression, nutrition, control, respect, etc. I’m not referring to the specific desires and strategies we pursue – like a new car or time with our children – in an effort to meet those fundamental needs.
Our fundamental needs and values are the wellsprings of our motivations. They stimulate us to understand what we need to do to find satisfaction and happiness. We use two primary tools in that pursuit: feeling and reason.
Feeling manifests as sensation, emotion, empathy, resonance, and gut impulses and responses. Our feelings orient us to what we want and get us moving toward and away from things. In contrast, reason works with facts, evidence, ideas, and logic. It helps us appraise what we want and don’t want, to make meaning of what’s happening, and to clarify HOW we should satisfy our needs.
