Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. Having dismissed his mother’s snap judgment of the site (“Facebook is the devil”), Harmsen now passionately agrees. He says, not entirely in jest, that he considers it a repressive regime akin to North Korea, and sells T-shirts with the words “Shut Your Facebook.” What especially galls him is the commercialization and corporate regulation of personal and social life.
. . . . . . .
“The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook — and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent — the more Facebook can and does abuse us,” Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. “It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about you.”
Professor Loch Johnson is one of two people who have served on both the Church Committee and the Aspin-Brown Commission. The other is Britt Snider, Esquire.
Today he examines the lack of integrity on the Hill, or totthless, inattentive oversight. He does not address two factors that we comment on below the fold:
1. There are five CIAs, and as long as the Wall Street and White House CIAs are doing what they are told to do, no one really cares about the integrity or the pathos of the other three.
2. Leon Panetta could have been the greatest Director in history, just as Barack Obama could have been the George Washington of this century, but both sacrificed their integrity for partisan gain, deliberately ignoring the urgent calls for both reform at CIA and non-partisan reality-based policy-making in the White House. Phi Beta Iota
By Loch K. Johnson
Sunday, August 30, 2009
skip sad story . . . . . . .
The Church Committee discovered that intelligence abuses ran far deeper than initially reported. The CIA had indeed spied on Vietnam War dissenters at home, but the FBI had gone further, disrupting the lives of antiwar protesters and civil rights activists. It was “a road map to the destruction of American democracy,” committee member Walter Mondale said during a public hearing.
Church was equally appalled by the overseas excesses of the CIA, including covert actions against democratic regimes — such as Chile's — and assassination plots. He blasted the agency for “the fantasy that it lay within our power to control other countries through the covert manipulation of their affairs.”
State governments are in serious trouble now and once the federally-provided Stimulus Funds are used up in FY10 many states willhave no choice but to cut significant numbers of staff as well as marginalize social & health services programs (not to mention Corrections,compliance programs like Environmental Protection) dislocating chunks of the American population. As you can imagine, the US has manydomestic problems ahead.
Traces of cocaine exist in up to 90 percent of banknotes in many large US cities, a new study reports. Credit: The American Chemical Society
Reports are glossing over the fact that this pertains to notes from large cities, not all across America, but it is none-the-less an interesting signal of “contamination.” Noam Chomsky would say this is another indicator that the USA is moving toward “failed state” status.
We draw two different conclusions: 1) that Canada is as much if not more of a threat to the USA because of its extraordinarily ineffective policing of its borders and its illegal alien and underground criminal populations, both Arab and Asian; and 2) the cross-contamination of bills is probably as much an indicator of increasing sophistication of money-laundering by gangs, to include increasing use of halawa and other “off-banking” means of international transfer.
By Peter Moskos and Stanford “Neill” Franklin The Washington Post, Monday, August 17, 2009
Undercover Baltimore police officer Dante Arthur was doing what he does well, arresting drug dealers, when he approached a group in January. What he didn't know was that one of suspects knew from a previous arrest that Arthur was police. Arthur was shot twice in the face. In the gunfight that ensued, Arthur's partner returned fire and shot one of the suspects, three of whom were later arrested.
I received this from a friend who didn't know that Mitch “Taco” Bell is the son of very good friends from my church. He is an airline pilot who was in the USMC reserves and several years ago volunteered to return to active duty and requested service in Iraq. He's got a great web site, the link to which he provides in his message, that is well worth looking at. I'm not sure who is the original sender of Mitch's message. Best, Jim
1. Mitch “Taco” Bell, our area Marines For Life Commander, gives his AARep/SitRep of the situation in Afghanistan. This is not some superficial product of a dilitante, but rather an insightful, unvarnished, and candid analysis that shows the military professionalism that exits in our field grade officer Corps.
These are some of my thoughts on Afghanistan. It's long, but if you think the others would like to read it, please pass it on or send the link www.thesandgram.com
Semper Fi,
Taco
Afghanistan?
“How do you fix a problem like Maria???”
The song from the Sound of Music reverberates in my head as I sit here thinking about the situation in Afghanistan. How do you fix a problem like Afghanistan? When I tell folks that I served in Kabul, I think the number one question asked of me is, “What do you think will happen in Afghanistan?” I hate to say that my reply isn’t always positive. Our job there, and in Iraq, has come at a great price for America and her allies, and I firmly believe there are still lots of bad guys there who need to be given the chance to meet their maker, but maybe we need to change how we do business. These are my personal insights on the war there, good, bad or indifferent. They do not reflect the opinions of the Marine Corps or the administration.
“I mean, that's one of the things that's particularly troubling: This whole notion of radicalization of Americans,” Holder told ABC News during an interview in his SUV as his motorcade brought him from home to work. “Leaving this country and going to different parts of the world and then coming back, all, again, in aim of doing harm to the American people, is a great concern.”
Holder said the ever-changing threat of terror and the pressure to keep up with it weighs heavily on his mind as he tries to ensure that the government has done all it can to anticipate the moves of an unpredictable enemy.
“In some ways it's the most sobering part of the day,” Holder said of his morning intelligence briefing, in which he gets the latest report on the landscape of “the organizations, the people who are bound and determined to do harm to our nation.”
+++++++Phi Beta Iota Editorial Comment+++++++
NEWS FLASH FOR THE ATTORNEY GENERAL: There is a “Harvest of Rage” buidling up in America, and is is not from jihadists against the Nation, but rather normal, sober, average Americans full of common sense who are angry at the long list of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by a corrupt Congress and a White House that–regardless of occupant–represents Wall Street instead of Main Street.
The Watts riots by people of color will look like a kiss on the cheek if the white people of Middle America ever decide to march on New York and Washington. With all due respect to the good intentions of the Attorney General, he is out of touch with reality and with America. This is a Republic. The government is failing. It is time to fix it or abolish it. We favor the fix, and the fix is easy: the Electoral Reform Act of 2009.
American is going clinically insane because the federal government as a service of common concern to the United STATES of America is so busy transferring wealth from the individual taxpayer to the banks and special interests that it has failed to do its job: mind the public interest, nurture the public soul, and guard the public commonwealth.
Cheney and Rice equated informed patriotic objections to the elective war on Iraq at “treason”–General Tony Zinni in particular was tarred with that brush. Today the Obama Administration seems to equate opposition to its sophmoric efforts to do good while continuing to loot the Treasury for Goldman Sachs as “the radicalization of Americans.” Yes, America is being radicalized. The public intelligence question to be asked and answered is this: are We the People being radicalized by external or internal circumstances? Phi Beta Iota believes that our radicalization is caused by a government that has lost touch with the public it is meant to serve. Our good people trapped in a bad system have forgotten that their oath is to the Constitution, to defend America against all enemies, domestic as well as foreign, and that sometimes it is the integrity of the individual in the chain of command who remembers the Constitution, that prevents the abuse of power by political appointees who have been bought and paid for by Wall Street.
