Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 2050 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/02/12

Mongoose: NASA Notices Middle East Water Loss — Israeli Theft of Water from Arab Aquifers Not Mentioned

Counterintelligence really has to broaden its mandate. A unified Arab water intelligence and counterintelligence authority would be most interesting!

Alarming water loss in Middle East, NASA study says

DOHA, Qatar – A NASA study found that an amount of freshwater almost the size of the Dead Sea has been lost in parts of the Middle East due to poor management, increased demands for groundwater and the effects of a 2007 drought.

The study, to be published Friday in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, examined data over seven years from 2003 from a pair of gravity-measuring satellites. Researchers found freshwater reserves in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins had lost 117 million acre feet of its total stored freshwater.

About 60 percent of the loss resulted from pumping underground reservoirs for ground water and another fifth due to impacts of the drought including declining snow packs.

Continue reading “Mongoose: NASA Notices Middle East Water Loss — Israeli Theft of Water from Arab Aquifers Not Mentioned”

2013/02/122013/02/13

Stuart Umpleby: US Making Strategic Mistake in Science and Management Education — Robert Steele Connects to OSA, OSE, & M4IS2

Advanced Cyber/IO

RM 130212 Cybernetics Management and Security Policy

I think the U.S. may be on the verge of making an important strategic mistake in science and in management education. Here are three stories to illustrate the historical background.

1. The Macy Foundation conferences in 1948-1953 led to founding the field of cybernetics. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences The Am. Society for Cybernetics was founded in 1964, about 50 years ago, at the Cosmos Club on Mass. Ave. There was some government money, perhaps CIA, behind it. A man named Jack Ford, who worked at the CIA, was involved. At the time there was concern about a “cybernetics gap” with the Soviet Union. Recall JFK's “missile gap” during the 1960 campaign. At the time the Soviets thought cybernetics would tell them how to manage their centrally planned economy. About this time Soviet Cybernetics Review was created to translate key Russian articles into English and make them available to US scientists. As late as the early 1980s, when I first went to Moscow, I was asked privately by one scientist if prices were set by a big computer in the basement of the Dept. of Commerce. For a history of Soviet cybernetics, see Slava Gerovitch From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. Although some courses and research centers in cybernetics were set up on university campuses, such as the Bio. Computer Lab at the U of Ill., on the whole cybernetics was widely discussed but did not take root as a separate discipline in the US. Also, cybernetics needed support from the govt. Research was funded mostly by AFOSR and ONR. The Mansfield Amendment unintentionally ended support for fundamental cybernetics research in the US and greatly boosted research on the electronic battlefield and robotics. See http://www.gwu.edu/~umpleby/recent_papers/2003_Heinz_von_Foerster_and_Mansfield_Amendment.pdf

Continue reading “Stuart Umpleby: US Making Strategic Mistake in Science and Management Education — Robert Steele Connects to OSA, OSE, & M4IS2”

2013/02/12

Yoda: BIll Moyers & Others US Internet Access Slow, Costly, Unfair

Autonomous Internet, Commerce, Corruption, Government

Dark, the Force is, in Washington DC.

Bill Moyers: Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair

>Americans are getting bilked for second class internet access.

BILL MOYERS: You’ve heard me before quote one of my mentors who told his students that “news is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.” That’s why two books are rattling the cages of powerful people who would rather you not read them. Here’s the first one. Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age by Susan Crawford. Read it and you’ll understand why we Americans are paying much more for internet access than people in many other countries and getting much less in return. That, despite the fact that our very own academics and engineers, working with our very own Defense Department, invented the internet in the first place.

EXTRACT (Susan CVrawford)

What's happened is that these enormous telecommunications companies, Comcast and Time Warner on the wired side, Verizon and AT&T on the wireless side, have divided up markets, put themselves in the position where they're subject to no competition and no oversight from any regulatory authority. And they're charging us a lot for internet access and giving us second class access. This is a lot like the electrification story from the beginning of the 20th century.

. . . . . . . .

BILL MOYERS: In here you call it the digital divide. Describe that to me.

SUSAN CRAWFORD: Well, here's the problem. For 19 million Americans, many in rural areas, you can't get access to a high speed connection at any price, it's just not there. For a third of Americans, they don't subscribe often because it's too expensive. So the rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out. And this means that we're creating yet again two Americas and deepening inequality through this communications inequality.

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2013/02/122013/02/12

Owl: Relationship Science Releases Dream “Hit List” Database for Use by Occupy and Others Upset with 1% Looting of the US Economy

Advanced Cyber/IO

This new database will be useful for Robb's global guerrillas to compile “Highly Accurate Lists”:

A Database of Names and How They Connect

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

It sounds like a Rolodex for the 1 percent: two million deal makers, power brokers and business executives — not only their names, but in many cases the names of their spouses and children and associates, their political donations, their charity work and more — all at a banker’s fingertips.

Such is the promise of a new company called Relationship Science.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Owl: Relationship Science Releases Dream “Hit List” Database for Use by Occupy and Others Upset with 1% Looting of the US Economy”

2013/02/12

GI Wilson: Republicans Focus on Malfeasance by Brenner and CIA 7th Floor

Corruption, Government, Military

MILNET passing this around.

Brennan-led secret raids may have led to Benghazi retaliation, book claims

EXTRACT

“Brennan waged his own unilateral operations in North Africa outside of the traditional command structure,” the book says, calling it an “off the books” operation not coordinated with Petraeus and the CIA. The authors then claim that these raids were a “contributing factor” in the militant strike on the U.S. Consulate and CIA annex on Sept. 11. The raids, they said, “kicked the hornets' nest and pissed off the militia.” Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in the attack, “was kept in the dark and ultimately killed in a retaliation that he never could have seen coming,” they wrote. “Likewise, the CIA never knew what hit them.”

. . . . . . .

“The reality of the situation is that high-ranking CIA officers had already discovered the affair by consulting with Petraeus' PSD and then found a way to initiate an FBI investigation in order to create a string of evidence and an investigative trail that led to the information they already had — in other words, an official investigation that could be used to force Petraeus to resign.”

Read full article.

Reference: John Brennan’s Opening Statement — Extreme Fluff + CIA Meta-RECAP

2013/02/122013/02/12

Owl: Lt Chris Dorner USNR Fan Club Grows — Are Citizen Snipers Swarming to Los Angeles? Presidential Pardon and Truth & Reconciliation Recommended!

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement

Lt Chris Dorner, USNR (Honorable Discharge) is acquiring a fan club.

Chris Dorner Fan Club

The 2nd half of this article below is about a a 1972 incident in New Orleans about another black, a vet, who loses it from constant injustice, and ends up killing a lot of cops and civilians before they get him. What amazes me is he has virtually no gun training, since he's Navy, yet he's an amazing shot, who himself avoids the bullets most of the time:

Exterminating Angels

Blacks in the street cheered this guy as he's shooting at cops, and the author of this piece concludes, “Does anyone cheer Dorner”

Well, yes. Scroll down to last reply (I bolded most interesting text) – here's cut/paste:

Continue reading “Owl: Lt Chris Dorner USNR Fan Club Grows — Are Citizen Snipers Swarming to Los Angeles? Presidential Pardon and Truth & Reconciliation Recommended!”

2013/02/12

Chuck Spinney: The Iraq Surge Memo No One Read

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, Military, Peace Intelligence

For those who think the Iraqi surge was a stunning success, a small dose of reality from one of the most knowledgeable observers of Iraq

The Sunni Revolt Is Growing

Saddam and the US Failed Iraq

by PATRICK COCKBURN

Counterpunch, FEBRUARY 11, 2013

Baghdad.

The civil war in Syria is destabilising Iraq as it changes the balance of power between the country’s communities. The Sunni minority in Iraq, which two years ago appeared defeated, has long been embittered and angry at discrimination against it by a hostile state. Today, it is emboldened by the uprising of the Syrian Sunni, as well as a growing sense that the political tide in the Middle East is turning against the Shia and in favour of the Sunni.

Could a variant of the Syrian revolt spread to the western Anbar Province and Sunni areas of Iraq north of Baghdad? The answer, crucial to the future of Iraq, depends on how the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, responds to the seven-week-long protests in Anbar and the Sunni heartlands. His problem is similar to that which, two years ago faced rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. They had to choose between ceding some power and relying on repression.

Most Arab rulers chose wrongly, treating protests as if they were a plot or not so broadly based that they could not be crushed by traditional methods of repression. The situation in Iraq is not quite the same, since Maliki owes his position to victory in real elections, though this success was not total and depended overwhelmingly on Shia votes. He has nevertheless ruled as if he had the mandate to monopolise power.

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