More than 150 house parties are being planned, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will join the parties by phone and webcast. For those in Manhattan, believe it or not, but there is only ONE event listed (60 Wall St, “the Atrium” which is also accessible from Pine St).
Worth a Look: RuckUs – No Parties, Just People
Worth A LookRuckUs: No Parties. Just People.
Ruck.us connects you with like-minded people based on your issues and positions, not politics and labels.
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Answer questions about your political positions and most important issues. - Find like-minded people
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Worth a Look: Open Oil
Worth A LookWhat happens if you marry Open Source to Oil?
Why don’t we use open source software development techniques in the energy industry? There’s an easy answer to that, of course. The current structure of competition is so heavily biased towards zero-sum game conceptions, between companies and between the corporate sector and host governments, that it would be hard to make happen. Ghana, or Yemen, or the UK come to that, wants to sell a data package to oil companies bidding for exploration licenses. They want to keep the results of their processing and analysis of that data as a competitive edge. Doh!
This has been bugging me for some time, being both an oil and open source geek. But it was given fresh edge yesterday while reading Daniel Yergin’s new Quest (of which one can only really say “masterful”), where he described the breakthrough of Petrobras in deep offshore Brazil. Continue reading →
Website OpenOil
John Robb: Open Source Insurgency and Much More
Blog Wisdom
Some random items of interest:
Study. Scientists finally realized the US electrical grid is too much of a patchwork to collapse with a small disruptive event. As in: the US grid doesn't have a single systempunkt. Not sure that matters much to global guerrillas. Why? Basically, an attack on a high level electrical systempunkt still works well regionally (as in 50-70 m people).
Greece fires its generals.
Anonymous cancels Operation Cartel. This entire thing was hilarious.
Interesting to see how much participation Occupy Oakland gets in its ‘general strike' today. Posters. Oakland's dynamics evolved the movement faster than what we've seen nationally. (as in: Police get violent with the movement, including some petty thuggery. Community pushback forces the mayor to back down and vacillate. Police confused….)
Open letter from Oakland PD
Horizontal gene transfer happens over much greater distances with greater frequency than expected.
Congress declares war on the Internet. Inevitable as the economy goes into perpetual reverse.
Coffee and Power. Another microwork startup.
Illicit cigarette sales on the rise. If you need to act like a criminal to smoke, why not be one?
Stuxnet blowback. It's very cool how the US/Israeli gov'ts demonstrated (with its use against Iran) the plausible promise of building cyber weapons that can damage, disrupt, or explode factories. They've set the bar, it's up to the global community of hackers and tinkerers to bring it to the next level. (The same is going to be true with military drones — particularly the small/cheap/smart ones).
Facebook builds new data center in Sweden, where no warrant is needed to intercept internet traffic.
Congress' net worth increased by at least 25% in the last two years.
Marcus Aurelius: Death Notice for Counterintelligence
07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call
Combat Commanders Gain Control Of Counterintelligence Ops
By Carlo Munoz
AOL Defense, November 1, 2011
Washington: The Pentagon is offering field commanders control of counterintelligence operations to cope with the never-ceasing efforts by countries such as China, Iran and Israel to gain access to classified information and technology.
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers approved the plan in an Oct. 5 memorandum. Groups such as Central Command and Special Operations Command can now choose to do their own CI work within their organizations, according to the memo. Formal investigations are still handled by the services.
“We gave the [combat commands] an option to develop an organic CI capability… or to rely on [the Defense Department],” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. James Gregory said. “We did not want to legislate either way but instead wanted to give [them] an option.” The decision comes as the Pentagon and intelligence community are preparing for a $25 billion to $40 billion budget cut over the next decade.
Phi Beta Iota: At the tactical level intelligence has always been the runt, generally one rank down from operations, and within intelligence, counterintelligence is where the runts of the runts go. Marty Hurwitz destroyed tactical intelligence with his consolidation of the General Defense Intelligence Program (GDIP) and the well-intentioned but badly conceived Joint Intelligence Center (JIC) concept. While Jim Clapper destroyed Marty Hurwitz, he did not make tactical intelligence (counterintelligence silent as in non-existent) healthy again, going on to make national consolidation every worse. There is a huge difference between security and defensive counterintelligence – they are not the same but ignorant commanders will treat them as one. There is a huge difference between defensive counterintelligence and offensive counterintelligence – no one in the US national intelligence community is competent as offensive counterintelligence, and the commanders will be oblivious to this until such time as we finally eliminate the regional commands and reset national defense and multinational information-sharing and sense-making. The budget cuts are trivial – $40 billion over ten years is $4 billion a year, that is a 4% cut on $90 billion a year, while at least 50% of what the IC spends now is fraud, waste, and abuse, 70% of that on contractor vapor-ware. The greatest enemy of America is a dishonest intelligence community that cannot do holistic analytics relevant to everything we need to know.
More practically, COCOMs consist of headquarters staffs and operational units sourced from the Services. Counterintelligence is currently a functional support service provided to the COCOMs by the Services and perhaps DIA. I know of no joint CI force structure designed for COCOMs. So, for COCOMs to run their own CI operations, they will require resources to be sourced, either permanently or temporarily, from the Services or from DIA, which itself gets its military personnel from the Services and competes with the rest of the Intelligence Community to hire civilians. That would serve principally to exacerbate existing shortages in counterintelligence personnel and force structure. In other words, Mike Vickers is not leading, he is scamming.
NIGHTWATCH: Drums of War Israel Iran USA
04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special InterestsIran-Israel: Iran is on “full alert” and ready to retaliate for any strike against the Islamic Republic, Iranian military officials warned Wednesday amid Israeli media speculation of plans for an attack.
“We consider any threat — even those with low probability and distant — as a definite threat,” said General Hassan Firouzabadi, the armed forces' chief of staff. “We are ready to punish them.” The United States also “will suffer serious damages should there be a military attack by the Zionist regime against Iran,” the Iranian chief of staff warned.
Comment: The significance of this statement is that it represents feedback to the Israelis that their chest thumping and foot stomping is registering in Tehran. It also makes clear that if Israel ever attacks Iran, Iran will attack US installations in reach as well as Israel.
Phi Beta Iota: We have learned not to underestimate the ideological idiocy of the neo-cons still entrenched across the US national security “regime,” nor the ineffectiveness of the White House is doing anything other than “going along.” Israel is out of control; the US Government is out of control; this does not bode well for anyone.
Cynthia McKinney: More Truth on Libya
04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, Military, Movies, Officers Call
It's really sad when journalists want to print the truth, but are prevented from doing so because of concerns about keeping their jobs. It seems that is the situation today with the video that shows that all of the Libya destruction was built on a pack of lies. The video done by Julien Teil called “The Humanitarian War” demonstrates, in the words of the author of the original lie, that there was no evidence at all to back up the allegation that thousands were killed by the Jamahirya government, but that instead, a small circle of friends “worked” that lie throughout the various organs of the United Nations and the result is genocide of a people and contamination of a land.
Now, here's my request to you. Can you become a journalist for a day and post the video link to just a few of the sites that you visit regularly? If the real journalists won't do it, then could you? It is clear that we have to become the journalists that we seek.
Please post this video link to Daily Kos, Common Dreams, OpEd News, Democracy Now!, and the rest that we visit regularly. But could you also please visit FOX, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBC, Russia Today, PRESS TV, etc. and post it there?
I'll do my part, too, and make sure that it's posted to my sites or sites that I'm supposed to have control over. Only, I have to learn how to post! (That's another matter!)
Finally, if you haven't taken the time to watch this video, please do. It will take your breath away that all of this has been done by NATO to Libya and its foundation is a lie. What kind of people would do that to their own country?
Click here to have a look at Julien (not Jonathan) Teil's, “The Humanitarian War:” http://www.youtube.com/watch?
(Those of you in Europe, Africa, and Asia might want to use this link instead: http://www.
