The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
HOW RECOGNISING THE IMPORTANCE OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS COULD REVOLUTIONISE THE ROLE OF THE STATE
Edited by Graeme Cooke and Rich Muir
Featuring Lead Essays by Geoff Mulgan and Marc Stears
Institute for Public Policy Research (UK), November 2012
click here for the pdf file (64 pages)
Comment, Links, and Table of Contents Below
Continue reading “Michel Basuwens: The Relational State – The Human Factor”
Up, TIME is [Joke make, Yoda]
Time Gives Up on Factchecking: Corporate Media Can't Find a Way to Tell the Truth
PETER HART – Truthout.org
In October, the inevitable was announced: Struggling Newsweek magazine would be finished as a print publication as of the end of the year. But the last mass newsweekly left, Time, also made an announcement of sorts: It was out of the factchecking business.
Important enough to reproduce in full.
Politics is mostly marketing, and power is mostly pursued by those who would abuse it. After centuries of highly consistent behavior patterns among elected officials, there is little point in getting angry about politicians, lying. This is a basic matter of tradecraft and daily routine, part of the job description, no different than stage makeup or ghostwritten speeches.So it makes sense for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to claim that the NYPD had stopped 14 terrorist attacks — it’s just plain good copy, a reliable, strong finisher for an otherwise pointless press conference. It’s also not true. The specifics are mundane and matter very little, because the most remarkable part of the story was Bloomberg’s response when some reporters later questioned the veracity of his sales pitch. Faced with a fact-by-fact rundown, and the unspoken implication that he had been caught lying, he was not concerned in the least.
Bloomberg put it simply: “We’ll never know.”
That’s not a very satisfying answer, but it is a strikingly pure statement of where the American social contract is at in 2012. How can you evaluate the track record of a global ecosystem that consumes billions of dollars in almost total secrecy? Where are the solid data points in a history that’s mostly planted evidence, product placements and calculated lies?
Continue reading “DefDog: Modern Leadership as Self-Deception & Public Lies”
The Fiscal Cliff Is A Diversion: The Derivatives Tsunami and the Dollar Bubble
The “fiscal cliff” is another hoax designed to shift the attention of policymakers, the media, and the attentive public, if any, from huge problems to small ones. The fiscal cliff is automatic spending cuts and tax increases in order to reduce the deficit by an insignificant amount over ten years if Congress takes no action…
Phi Beta Iota: There is no fiscal cliff…..only an integrity chasm.
Legalizing Marijuana: What's Happening in Other States?
The Patriot-News (Central Pennsylvania)
Not surprisingly the legalization of Marijuana in Washington and Colorado, has set in motion a train of events. It is important to keep in mind that this is how alcohol prohibition ended; it began with the states.
Thomas Leo Briggs is a retired CIA operations officer with 3 years military experience in US Army military police, 3 years as a Special Agent in the Drug Enforcement Administration and 26 years in the CIA. He tried to make use of computer capabilities to aid and assist HUMINT operations in a variety of ways throughout his last 18 years as an operations officer. He is also the author of Cash on Delivery: CIA Special Operations During the Secret War in Laos (Rosebank Press, 2009).
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Further reflection on HUMINT and OSINT. I see them as complementary to both operations (HUMINT collection) and analysis. I also see that they should be looked at differently for operations and analysis.
In operations, which I know more about than analysis, there is the general need for HUMINT operators (so as to not bias this toward any one member of the intel community, I use HUMINT operators rather than case officers) to know as much as as possible about the country, region, culture, etcetera where they will be working. Operators collect raw intelligence and it is turned into field intelligence reporting. Someone in the field must review and vet that raw intelligence – we used to call them reports officers. The review must be able to determine if the alleged raw intelligence is really that and not openly known information somewhere in the country or region. Obviously, there must be one or more officers in a field office with knowledge of as much about the open source information as possible, or has the tools at hand to check open source information, and also with knowledge of the secret intelligence that has already been reported, so as to avoid duplicative raw intelligence reporting.
Continue reading “Thomas Briggs: Reflections on OSINT in Support of HUMINT”
The Five Pillars of the Growing Inequality in the U.S.
1- First. The ideology of an open world market and the free movement of capital and companies
2- Second. A broken immigration policy
3- Third. A tax code skewed in favor of the very rich
4- Fourth. The Housing crisis, the Financial crisis and the Fed's policies to shore up large banks
5- Fifth. The waging of foreign wars financed with debt
