There is something very wrong about the narrative of the Edward Snowden story. I agree with this essay. Everything is focused on Snowden and not on what his leaks have revealed. A story with profound implications for our society has devolved instead into a kind of thriller movie script.
The entire security apparat, perhaps because it is predicated on priorities other than those of the Constitution is inherently in conflict with democracy. Here is yet another aspect of what I mean.
Recent studies by psychologists and social scientists in the US and UK suggest that contrary to mainstream media stereotypes, those labeled “conspiracy theorists” appear to be saner than those who accept the official versions of contested events.
In short, the new study by Wood and Douglas suggests that the negative stereotype of the conspiracy theorist – a hostile fanatic wedded to the truth of his own fringe theory – accurately describes the people who defend the official account of 9/11, not those who dispute it.
Recent studies by psychologists and social scientists in the US and UK suggest that contrary to mainstream media stereotypes, those labeled “conspiracy theorists” appear to be saner than those who accept the official versions of contested events.
The most recent study was published on July 8th by psychologists Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas of the University of Kent (UK). Entitled “What about Building 7? A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories,” the study compared “conspiracist” (pro-conspiracy theory) and “conventionalist” (anti-conspiracy) comments at news websites.
I attach two-day old SECDEF estimates for Congress of what will happen if sequester continues into next fiscal year. Big idea: emphasis on RIFs of military and civilian personnel in preference to furloughs of DoD civilians. SECDEF doesn't mention any specific numbers, but following would not surprise me:
*Active Army military personnel: RIF of 70K to 110K, dropping currently projected end strength of 490K to 380K to 420K..
*DoD civilians: RIF of 10 percent to 25 percent across DoD, meaning, for Army, RIF of roughly 27K to 68K Army civilians and, for DoD, RIF of 80K to 200K DoD civilians including Army.
On June 24th the “Prawer Plan for the Arrangement of Bedouin-Palestinian Settlement in the Negev” passed its first reading in the Israeli parliament. If implemented, the Plan will constitute “the largest single act of forced displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s,” expelling an estimated forty thousand Palestinian Bedouin from their current dwellings.
The Plan’s ultimate objective is to Judaize the Israeli Negev. In order to do this, however, seventy thousand (out of 200,000) Bedouin who currently live in villages classified as ‘unrecognized’ by the Israeli government must be moved.
The government already forbids them from connecting to the electricity grid or the water and sewage systems. Construction regulations are also harshly enforced, and in 2011 alone about a thousand Bedouin homes and animal pens—usually referred to by the government as mere “structures”—were demolished. There are no paved roads, and signposts from main roads to the villages are removed by government authorities. The villages are not shown on maps, since as a matter of official geography, the places inhabited by these second-class citizens of Israel do not exist.
Sky Deutschland has developed technology to deliver advertisements directly and silently into your head. Do we have the right to keep our thoughts our own??
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The highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Eastern Bloc says the Soviet Union orchestrated an anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda campaign in the Middle East four decades ago — and the effects of the effort still reverberate.
Ion Pacepa (archive photo) formerly headed Romania's foreign intelligence service and was an aide to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu before his defection in the late 1970s.
Ion Mihai Pacepa led Romania's foreign intelligence service and was an aide to dictator Nicolae Ceausescu before defecting to the United States in 1978.
In his new book, Disinformation, he and his co-author, U.S. scholar Ronald Rychlak, claim that under the leadership of Yury Andropov, the Soviet KGB helped sow the seeds of today's anti-American and anti-Israeli hatred in the Arab and Muslim world by initiating a sophisticated and covert propaganda campaign in the early 1970s.
Andropov, who led the Soviet spy agency from 1967 until he became Soviet leader in 1982, was “the father of a new disinformation era which revived anti-Semitism and generated international terrorism against the United States and Israel,” Pacepa and Rychlak write.
Humiliated by the defeat of the Soviet-backed Arab states in their 1967 war against Israel, they write, Andropov devised the operation to discredit the Jewish state and present Zionism as “Nazi-style racism” while at the same time restoring Moscow's stature in the region.
There is something very wrong about the narrative of the Edward Snowden story. I agree with this essay. Everything is focused on Snowden and not on what his leaks have revealed. A story with profound implications for our society has devolved instead into a kind of thriller movie script. 
