Journal: Why Bail-Out Has Not Reduced Foreclosures

03 Economy, 06 Family, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

Assuming there is no fraud among the buyers and sellers in a market exchange, Caveat Emptor — the principle that the buyer alone is responsible for determining the quality and suitablity of goods or services before a purchase is made — is the cornerstone of free market ideology.  Implicit in this belief is the necessary albeit patently absurd condition in economic price theory that reliable information is freely available to the all the parties and potential parties to an economic exchange.  After all, if information were truly free, the data processing and data-free manipulation industry of the post industrial society and its contemporary successor, the post-information era (an era synthesized by the petri dish of Pentagon, but now acculturated by the media and Wall Street), would be a non sequiturs.  Today, for example, we have an economy where advertisers can profitably invest large sums of money in subliminally marketing their wares on reality TV, an invention to dumb down people, and make them more vulnerable to the subliminal marketing techniques they are being subjected to by conditioning viewers to substitute vicarious fantasy for realty.
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Journal: Obama Coup of 2011 Fails

Ethics, Government, Reform
We're Not Making This Up....
We're Not Making This Up....

A new online computer game attempts to capitalize on the current strain of right-wing paranoia and activism, embodied by Glenn Beck's televised blustering and the Tea Party protests, by allowing players to inhabit a world of the near-future that represents a conservative nightmare.   The game, called “2011: Obama Coup Fails,” is hosted by a website called The United States of Earth, and according to David Corn of Mother Jones, it was developed by “a small group of Ron Paul-loving libertarians living in Brooklyn.”  See  Huffington Post andPrisonPlanet.

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Journal: Citizen Wisdom in California

11 Society, Civil Society, Government, Methods & Process

Full Story Online
Full Story Online

THE STATES WE’RE IN

by Hendrik Hertzberg

The New Yorker

AUGUST 24, 2009

The states of the Union are supposed to be laboratories of democracy, but this summer they have been looking more like toxic-waste dumps of futility. From coast to coast, from tundra to coral reef, state governments are in an awful fix. Their budget gaps are on track to add up to at least a third of a trillion dollars. In half the states, education funding is being cut, which means bigger classes, shoddier facilities, and fewer frills like music, art, languages, and library
books. States are closing parks, draining rainy-day funds, and shrinking services for children, the elderly, and the disabled. . . . . . . .

California, it turns out, is ungovernable. Its public schools, once the nation’s best, are now among the worst. Its transportation and water systems are deteriorating. Its prisons are so overcrowded that it has to turn tens of thousands of felons loose. And its legislature has spent most of the year in a farcical effort to pass the annual
budget, leaving little or no time for other matters, such as—well, schools, transportation, water, and prisons. This is “normal”: the same thing has happened in eighteen of the past twenty-two years. But the addition of economic disaster to legislative paralysis may have brought California to a tipping point.

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Journal: Junk food turns rats into addicts

03 Economy, 07 Health, 11 Society, Ethics
Bacon, cheesecake and Ho Hos alter pleasure centers in rats' brainsScienceNews By Laura Sanders October 21st, 2009

CHICAGO — Junk food elicits addictive behavior in rats similar to the behaviors of rats addicted to heroin, a new study finds. Pleasure centers in the brains of rats addicted to high-fat, high-calorie diets became less responsive as the binging wore on, making the rats consume more and more food. The results, presented October 20 at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, may help explain the changes in the brain that lead people to overeat.

“This is the most complete evidence to date that suggests obesity and drug addiction have common neurobiological underpinnings,” says study coauthor Paul Johnson of the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla.

Schwartz Report Comment:

I think there is a more fundamental and alarming trend here. Both the chicken story and this one, are further examples of the results of America's decision to make greed and profit the only social priorities — the core values of our society. We are destroying ourselves as surely as the Easter Islanders cut down the trees upon which their environment and society depended.

Search: Conops for genocide prevention

06 Genocide, Searches

Conops for genocide prevention. The master work on this topic is by John Heidenrich, the first and last true employee of OSS.Net, Inc. at the time finishing his book,How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and the Concerned Citizen while also doing the daily Genocide Report for the Department of State (until the Bush-Cheney Administration shut down that office early in their regime).  The single most important thing to know about genocide prevention is that it is EASY to achieve Early Warning.  Dr. Gregory Stanton's web site, Genocide Watch, and Dr. Stanton's Eight Stages of Genocide also found free online and in the book,2002 THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, & Political. See John Heidenrich's briefing on Genocide detection and prevention here: 1999 Heidenrich (US) Early Warning of Genocide: The Utlity of Open Sources & Methods. Other references: World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability;Genocide in the Congo (Zaire);Review: Imagery of Lynching–Black Men, White Women, and the Mob.

Nothing evil can survive the orchestration of enough eyeballs.  That is our mission.

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Search: bhopal, yes men, ethics

Ethics, Searches

Bhopal, Yes Men, Ethics. Absolutely correct juxtaposition of terms.  What governments and corporations do everyday to their own citizens is vastly more lethal than any possible combination of “terrorist/freedom fighter” actions.  See especiallyThe Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters and alsoActs of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America as well as Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West andThe Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised As Freedom (Hardcover)ETHICS as discussed in Will Durant'sPhilosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition is the lubricant of the Cosmos.  Ethics are what provide the INTEGRITY in the FEEDBACK LOOPS that lead to the triumph of good over evil and the service of mankind in creating infinite wealth rather than the corruption of the processes for the benefit of the few at the cost of the many.  Bhopal is what happens when Ethics breaks down at every level (not just the corporation, but the Government of India so eager to have the business as to set aside the basics of science and sensibility).

Handbook: Harvard on Congress & Intelligence

Memoranda, Threats/Topical
Full Report Online
Full Report Online

Confrontation or Collaboration? Congress and the Intelligence Community

Memorandum, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

July 2009

Authors: Eric Rosenbach, Executive Director for Research, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Aki J. Peritz

CONTENTS

Click any of the links below to read and download the individual memos online.

You can download the complete report containing all the memos at the bottom of this page.

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