The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The following four publications by Michael Vlahos were overlooked when they first came out. They continue his brilliant track record of deep cultural analysis of both the home front and the real world.
Colonial Britain, Neocolonial America?
Why America Is Like Imperial Spain (Part I)
This is very old news, but thought it interesting to highlight lag time between FBI and the original reports.
The FBI Announces Gangs Have Infiltrated Every Branch Of The Military
The FBI has released a new gang assessment announcing that there are 1.4 million gang members in the US, a 40 percent increase since 2009, and that many of these members are getting inside the military (via Stars and Stripes).
The report says the military has seen members from 53 gangs and 100 regions in the U.S. enlist in every branch of the armed forces. Members of every major street gang, some prison gangs, and outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMGs) have been reported on both U.S. and international military installations.
Read full story with link to report.
Phi Beta Iota: One can only marvel at the ability of the US Government (both political leaders and senior civil servants) to carry on without intelligence or integrity for decades. The USA remains the top proliferator of nuclear, biological, chemical, radiological, and small arms as well as cyber-weaponry. The USA remains locked into elective wars that have nothing to do with national interests and everything to do with special interests. And now we learn again (DHS published first, in 2007) that we are also training tens of thousands of gang members who are at the same time gaining access to weapons and munitions that we cannot account for…
See Also:
2007 Reference: Gangs in the US Military
Naomi Wolf: how I was arrested at Occupy Wall Street
Arresting a middle-aged writer in an evening gown for peaceable conduct is a far cry from when America was a free republic
Naomi Wolf
Guardian, Wednesday 19 October 2011
Last night I was arrested in my home town, outside an event to which I had been invited, for standing lawfully on the sidewalk in an evening gown.
Read full article (includes short video).
Phi Beta Iota: Naomi Wolf is the author of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot and also Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. Safety copy of Guardian article with additional comments from others below the line. The NYPD and DHS are OUT OF CONTROL and far, far beyond the bounds of the Constitution. The time has come to begin demanding impeachments of public officials and criminal prosecution of specific police officers so that they might learn what they evidently were not taught: the responsibility to refuse illegal orders. What our military officers abroad and our police officers at home are doing is illegal, unconstitutional, and reprehensible in every possible morally disengaged way.
See Also:
Updates from Naomi Wolf – Permit Seen, NYPD Officers Were Ignorant or Lying
Continue reading “Naomi Wolf: #OWS NYPD & DHS OUT OF CONTROL”
The Rise And Rise Of Western Covert Ops
By Peter Apps, Political Risk Correspondent
Reuters.com, October 18, 2011
WASHINGTON — Four months ago, Admiral William McRaven commanded the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Now, as the new head of U.S. special forces, he argues that his shadowy, secretive warriors are increasingly central to how America and its allies fight.
When the suntanned, towering SEAL testified to the Congressional House Armed Services Committee in September, just a few weeks after he took over his new role, he used posters detailing the growth of his forces. In the decade since September 11 2001, U.S. Special Operations Command personnel numbers have doubled, its budget tripled and deployments quadrupled.
Phi Beta Iota: In a debt-based secrecy-enabled government, there is no scrutiny of such programs, neither in relation to return on investment or in relation to moral engagement. The US Government lacks intelligence and integrity and is OUT OF CONTROL.
Darpa Wants to Master the Science of Propaganda
Dawn Lim
WIRED, 18 October 2011
Mark Twain once tried to distinguish between the storyteller’s art and tales that a machine could generate. He observed that stringing “incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities,” was the province of the American storyteller. A machine might imitate simple formulas behind yarns, but never quite master them.
The Pentagon’s freewheeling research arm is hoping to prove Twain wrong. Darpa is asking scientists to “take narratives and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion.” The idea is to detect terrorists who have been indoctrinated by propaganda. Then, the Pentagon can respond with some messages of its own.
The program is called “Narrative Networks.” By understanding how stories have shaped your mind, the Pentagon hopes to sniff out who has fallen prey to dangerous ideas, a neuroscience researcher involved in the project tells Danger Room. With this knowledge, the military can also target groups vulnerable to terrorists’ recruiting tactics with its own counter-messaging.
Continue reading “DefDog: DARPA Fine-Tuning Propaganda a la 1984?”
George:
Re the article below: This is terrible. It is bad enough on its face, but to realize that MIT's Malone is at the heart of this breaks my heart, devastates my soul and outrages my professional sensibilities. Now I am sorry that we didn't do a paper on pubic wisdom for his conference next year! Talk about the applications of collective intelligence unmonitored by collective wisdom!! This is NOT the power and capacity we sought to free by trying to pull together the field with our Collective Intelligence Convergence conference.
I see much more clearly now the distinction between my sense of “intelligence” and the use of that term by “intelligence” agencies. My sense of intelligence is that it means we are able to assess reality in a learning feedback loop where we've taken an action based on certain assumptions/mental models and seen how it works in real life. The results inform our reinforcement or revision of our assumptions and mental models. Collective intelligence is our ability to do that collectively, as whole communities and societies and humanity. The mere accumulation of data to inform official decision-makers – particularly in hierarchical power systems like ours – is a dangerous bastardization of the generic concept of CI. Notice that they aren't talking about using this system to find out how successful a particular government policy or program is – whether it actually served the public good or not – so that we could have a more evidence-based government. It is being used primarily to predict social unrest so it can be stifled or discharged so that the existing toxic power structures can remain as they are.
I notice it says the system will use “publicly accessible data”. I'm so dubious. They talk about traffic webcams and digital location trails from cell phones. Are these publicly accessible? And that begs the question of the fact that no one except giant institutions (governments, corporations) has the computing power to do those analyses. It's like freedom of the press when you can't afford a press.
They want to predict when the people will revolt. Ok. But where's the people's capacity to predict what the government and specific corporations are going to do? This is so one-sided. It empowers only half of Robert's vision of open source intelligence, and it feels like the same old crap is being given new capacities. This is collective intelligence?!!!? This is panopticism – the ability of the power center at the top to see everything going on the whole system. It has been brilliantly contrasted by Jean-Francois Noubel with holopticism – the ability of the whole and all its parts to view the whole. We don't need more panopticism. We need more holopticism, to help us navigate our collective destiny.
I am disgusted and horrified.
What can be done to reclaim the good name of collective intelligence? I do not feel drawn to or capable of organizing the kind of professional outrage that headed off Operation Camelot and Total Information Awareness (see the article). But I'll be damned if I will lend my good name to this so-called collective intelligence initiative. At the very least, I can blog my protest – and have it picked up at least by IARPA….
Shit! Damn! I want to cry!
Tom
Begin forwarded message:
*GOVERNMENT AIMS TO BUILD A ‘DATA EYE IN THE SKY‘*
By John Markoff
New York Times, October 10, 2011
Safety Copy of Full Article Below the Line.
Continue reading “Tom Atlee: Government Data Eye in Sky – Sickening”
YouTube
I AM NOT MOVING – Short Film – Occupy Wall Street
Phi Beta Iota: If there is one video that could catalyze a General Strike and a demand for the impeachment of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton, along with the recall of Mayor Mike Bloomberg, this is the one. The US Government–and the New York Police Department–are OUT OF CONTROL, committing crimes against humanity, and long overdue for abolishment and a clean-sheet fresh start. The Electoral Reform Act of 2012 may be the last opportunity for a non-violent revolution in what was once America the Beautiful.
