Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 2073 – Public Intelligence Blog

To be Jedi is to face the truth, and choose. Give off light, or darkness, Padawan. Be a candle, or the night.

–YODA, Dark Rendezvous

China's Urban Air Kills Rural Plants

As people in Beijing and northern China struggle with severe air pollution this winter, the toxic air is also making life hard for plants and even food crops of China, say researchers who have been looking at how China's plants are affected by air pollution.

Beijing's extreme smog event this week has made headlines, with the American Embassy calling the pollution levels “hazardous” and Beijing writer Zheng Yuanjie blogging that “the air smells like sulfur perfume, as the capital city currently looks like a poisonous huge gas can,” according to a report on Al Jazeera.
BLOG: 7 of 10 Most Air-Polluted Cities Are in China

“In the last 50 years there has been a 16-fold increase in ozone pollution” in the Beijing area, said Hanqin Tian of Auburn University in Alabama, who studies the effects of China's pollution and climate change on plants. He said the soup of pollutants, including harmful sulfur and nitrogen compounds “is definitely expanding into new areas; into the countryside.”

Read full article.

Continue reading “Yoda: China — A Focal Point”

2013/01/182013/01/18

Stuart Umpleby: Limitations of Hand-Held Dashboards + Cyber-Brain RECAP

IO Impotency

Before Fruit Ninja, Cybernetics

By WILL WILES

New York Times, November 29, 2012

EXTRACT (Conclusion)

The No. 10 Dashboard taps into the same desire to master available information — a desire that has only grown as the amount of information in circulation has increased. Where Cybersyn needed dedicated national infrastructure and rooms full of equipment, the app runs on a hand-held device. And yet, the dashboard is actually less sophisticated.

It is not truly cybernetic because it lacks a mechanism to translate all that data into action. It can display information; it cannot consult and control. Less a driver’s dashboard, it is more a window out of which a passenger can observe the national scenery speeding past. Government might be given the illusion of hand-held, one-stop manageability, but no actual managing is going on.

The app could thus be an apt metaphor for politicians reduced to spectators by the surges and shocks of the globalized world. Mr. Cameron should remember that there’s at least one other instance of government-by-app: the team that worked on restructuring Greece’s debt used iPads too, equipped with an app purpose-built for the job.

However that turns out, we can at least say this: in terms of distractions, these apps are marginally more useful than Fruit Ninja.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Stuart Umpleby: Limitations of Hand-Held Dashboards + Cyber-Brain RECAP”

2013/01/182013/01/18

Steve Wheeler: Learning with e’s Series

04 Education, Advanced Cyber/IO, Knowledge, Science

Steve WheelerClick for BIo Page — Steve Wheeler
Click for BIo Page

01 Facing the future
At the end of each year many of us tend to focus on the future, wondering what it will bring. We wish each other a happy New Year, and hope that life will treat us kindly. We try to shape our own futures by making New Year resolutions, many of which fall by the wayside after a week or two. Much of our future is not ours to shape. But still we persist in trying to predict the future. Many of our predictions about the future are based on speculation or wishful thinking.

02 Is technology making us smarter?
When discussing the future, especially the future of technology, there are some writers who almost always seem to be quoted. Near the top of the list is the futurologist Ray Kurzweil, who has much to say about our technological future, and also about the growth in human intelligence. His views are quite optimistic, especially around computers and the nature of knowledge.

03 The future of intelligence
In my previous blog post I examined the debate about whether we are becoming more intelligent or less intelligent as a result of our prolonged and habituated uses of technology.

04 The future of classrooms
What will be the future of school classrooms? It is unlikely that we will see the demise of the classroom in the next decade. Those who study the future of education often suggest that the demise of traditional classrooms is not only inevitable, but imminent.

Parts 04-09 Below the Line.

Continue reading “Steve Wheeler: Learning with e's Series”

2013/01/182013/01/18

David Isenberg: How Responsible is the Chain of Command? IS THERE a “Chain of Command?” Does Yamashita Standard Apply to Commander in Chief?

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Ethics, Government, Military

Military Justice

Lawbreakers at War: How Responsible Are They?

By David Isenberg Jan. 18, 2013

Anybody around here remember Tomoyuki Yamashita?

He was an Imperial Japanese Army general during World War II. In terms of battles he was most famous for conquering the British colonies of Malaya and Singapore.

But his historical legacy comes from being tried in late 1945 by an American military tribunal in Manila for war crimes relating to the massacre of civilians in Manila, and atrocities in Singapore against civilians and prisoners of war, such as the Sook Ching massacre.

Even though the massacre in the Philippines was carried out by a subordinate commander, Imperial Japanese Navy Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, against Yamashita’s specific order – and without his knowledge or approval – a U.S. military tribunal held Yamashita responsible for the conduct of his troops. He was executed on February 23, 1946.

Nowadays most legal scholars acknowledge that Yamashita’s execution was a case of victor’s, not legal, justice. Nevertheless his case become a precedent regarding the command responsibility for war crimes and is known as the Yamashita Standard.

An interesting tidbit of history, you’re thinking, but what’s its relevance to today’s U.S. military?

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Morality is even more important in war than in peace. Extreme violations will have a lasting negative effect. The USS Liberty, 34 KIA, 171 WIA, is a classic modern example. No one is Israel has been held accountable for this atrocity, and for over 30 years no one in Washington has been held accountable for covering it up and abusing the surviving crew and families. We continue to recommend Truth & Reconciliation — educating the public on what has actually happened, why, and its consequences — rather than individual punitive measures that do nothing for the greater good of society.

2013/01/182013/01/18

SchwartzReport: Is PTSD Contagious? What Cost War to Society Over Generations?

Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military

Is PTSD Contagious?

It's rampant among returning vets—and now their spouses and kids are starting to show the same symptoms.

—By Mac McClelland

Mother Jones | January/February 2013 Issue

EXTRACTS:

Brannan Vines has never been to war, but her husband, Caleb, was sent to Iraq twice, where he served in the infantry as a designated marksman. He's one of 103,200, or 228,875, or 336,000 Americans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and came back with PTSD, depending on whom you ask, and one of 115,000 to 456,000 with traumatic brain injury. It's hard to say, with the lack of definitive tests for the former, undertesting for the latter, underreporting, under or over-misdiagnosing of both. And as slippery as all that is, even less understood is the collateral damage, to families, to schools, to society—emotional and fiscal costs borne long after the war is over.

. . . . . . . . .

Whatever is happening to Caleb, it's as old as war itself. The ancient historian Herodotus told of Greeks being honorably dismissed for being “out of heart” and “unwilling to encounter danger.” Civil War doctors, who couldn't think of any other thing that might be unpleasant about fighting the Civil War but homesickness, diagnosed thousands with “nostalgia.” Later, it was deemed “irritable heart.” In World War I it was called “shell shock.” In World War II, “battle fatigue.” It wasn't an official diagnosis until 1980, when Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made its debut in psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, uniting a flood of Vietnam vets suffering persistent psych issues with traumatized civilians—previously assigned labels like “accident neurosis” and “post-rape syndrome”—onto the same page of the DSM-III.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: This may be the single most important article we have pointed to since we started. Please consider reading it in full. This is the home cost. Those we attack suffer, apart from the same casualties we do but on an order of magnitude scale, and also the effects of depleted uranium, now known as the “Fullujah mutant babies” effect. This is not something to be proud of, nor is it something that can be justified as being in the public interest once total true costs are understood. Having a dumbed down population is one thing — driving the population insane, at the same time that the elites are is such isolation as to be criminally insane, is another matter entirely.

2013/01/172013/01/17

Mini-Me: Sandy Hook, Israel’s “Art Students” in Purple Van, Greenwich Safehouse, Nurse’s False Testimony — Four Competing Narratives

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Law Enforcement

Huh?

Obama “Gun Address” Misses Real Terrorism Threat

by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor

Despite attempts to blame a seemingly endless group of lunatic mass murderers for the equally endless number of devastating mass killings now plaguing the United States, our government, our “protectors” and, most damnably, our president, are failing to react to real terror attacks that are becoming an almost daily occurrence.

Ambassador Susan Rice was “sacrificed” for failing to cite the Benghazi attack as terrorism.

However, when something worse, when a dozen “somethings worse” happens, not in North Africa, but here at home, our schools, movie theatres, military bases, college campuses, the use of the term “terrorism” is forbidden.

Why?

. . . . . . . . .

The US Army has recognized a pattern of terrorist activity in several of the recent mass shootings, based on timing, type of target, control of media, lost evidence, poor investigations, a pattern that shows signs of the involvement of a military type operation against “soft targets” in the US.

Sandy Hook, we are told, is a total failure as an “false flag” terror attack, having left too many “loose threads.” Some are listed in the video below. In truth, there are hundreds:

Initial suspicions led investigators to extremist groups in the US, the National Socialist Movement, the US Border Patrol and the Hutarees.

However, investigations found these groups to be both almost entirely inactive or with a majority of members FBI informants.

Read full article with video and photos.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Sandy Hook, Israel's “Art Students” in Purple Van, Greenwich Safehouse, Nurse's False Testimony — Four Competing Narratives”

2013/01/17

Owl: Tuareg Independence — Does This Scare the French More than Algerian Terrorists Armed by the USA?

08 Wild Cards

Tuareg Independence, not Al Quada Terrorists, is the the Real Target of the French and West

Justin Raimondo's analysis and debunking of what is really going on in Mali has it right, I believe: it is not about expunging Al Queda or terrorist affiliates, but rather about reasserting French imperialism at a time when the French government needs a way to distract its people from economic woes.

“News accounts refer to the rebels as “Islamists,” an easy label to affix to groups very few know anything about. The reality, however, is quite different: the rebels are Tuaregs of Northwest Africa, a nomadic group whose historic homeland crosses the boundaries of Mali, Algeria, Libya, Niger, and Burkina Faso. They are herders and smugglers, whose caravans once provided the only source of commercial contact between the empires of central Africa and the Arab lands to the north. Their fight for independence precedes the existence of Al Qaeda by a hundred and fifty years. In the Great Scramble for European colonies that began at the end of the 19th century, French colonialists invaded, seized the land, and subjected the locals to a program of forced “assimilation” into “French civilization.” The Tuaregs have been fighting to regain their independence ever since. Today, however, that struggle has been reinterpreted as yet another example of “Islamic terrorism.” This is outright false. The Tuareg independence movement is led by the National. Movement for the Liberation of Awazad (MNLA), a secular organization that only wants autonomy for the Tuareg areas of Mali. There are active Islamists in Mali, affiliated with Ansar Dine, which has no known affiliation with Al Qaeda in the Mahgreb other than the fact that Ansar Dine’s leader, Ag Ghaly, is a cousin of AQIM commander Hamada Ag Hamada. “It is true that Ansar Dine have the black flags, but they are not Al Qaeda,” said MNLA spokesman Ag Assarid. “They want stability on the streets,” which the “government” of Mali is unable to provide, and “they are against Al Qaeda too.” North African specialist Salma Belaala concurs: “We can’t make a systematic link between the AQIM and Tuareg. It’s completely false.”

As Raimondo shows, the government of Mali is deeply corrupt:

Continue reading “Owl: Tuareg Independence — Does This Scare the French More than Algerian Terrorists Armed by the USA?”