Threats – Page 338 – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/05/052014/05/05

SchwartzReport: US Nuclear Infrastructure a Radioactive Time Bomb — We Are Not Ready and USG Lies to the Public About This…

04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Officers Call

Here we have a pretty realistic take on the state of the U.S. nuclear industry. We have been so lucky not to have had a crisis like Chernobyl. Click through to see the supporting graphics.

Our Nuclear Infrastructure Is a Radioactive Time Bomb
BRENDAN SCOTT – Vice News

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has had a busy few weeks. Last month, thanks to Freedom of Information Act queries filed by numerous organizations, the Commission was forced to disclose a dossier of emails showing the lengths it had gone to in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima disaster to downplay the risk of a similar catastrophe happening in the US. The correspondence showed a startling lack of preparedness.

In one example, NRC public affairs officer David McIntyre offered his opinion on what Energy Secretary Steven Chu should have done when asked by CNN whether American nuclear plants could withstand a force 9.0 earthquake: ‘He should just say, ‘Yes, it can.’ Worry about being wrong when it doesn't. Sorry if I sound cynical.”

The documents also show a background briefing for then NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko and other commissioners that split intelligence into ‘public answer” and “additional technical, non-public information.” In some cases the NRC withheld crucial details and misdirected the media.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: US Nuclear Infrastructure a Radioactive Time Bomb — We Are Not Ready and USG Lies to the Public About This…”

2014/05/042014/05/04

SchwartzReport: Fracking, Earthquakes, & 1% Corruption

05 Energy, 07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, IO Impotency, Law Enforcement

The matter is settled: Fracking causes earthquakes. My prediction: The carbon energy interests see Fracking and natural gas as a way to prolong the dominance of carbon energy for another 30 years. It may bring your house down in states like Oklahoma? Destroy your kids school while they are in it? A small price to pay so that the carbon barons and their corporations can continue making their obscene profits. And the people who voted ! the politicians in that will permit this? They can be relied upon to vote against their own self-interest, even their survival. It is one of our national mysteries.

Earthquake Experts: Yes, Fracking Earthquakes Are A Thing
Clean Technica

When the Seismological Society of America says that fracking earthquakes are a real thing, then it’s a good bet that they are. The annual SSA meeting last Thursday featured a daylong session on ‘Induced Seismicity” that featured new research indicating that oil and gas fracking, and the practice of disposing wastewater underground, can alter the state of an existing fault. The result is to spread the range of seismic hazard farther out from the faultline than previously thought.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Fracking, Earthquakes, & 1% Corruption”

2014/05/032014/05/03

Berto Jongman: Benghazi – Was Ambassador Steven Murdered to Cover Up CIA Arming of Al Qaeda?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 10 Transnational Crime, Government, Idiocy, Military, Peace Intelligence

CIA Pilot Bombshell!! Confirms Obama’s Gun Running Program To Al Qaeda

A very interesting interview over at InfoWars, which can be heard in part in the video below, with a former CIA gun runner, William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, which confirmed that before the Benghazi attack which killed four Americans, including Ambassador John Stevens, the Ambassador had expresed concern over the illegal arms reaching Islamic radicals. Plumlee talks about the lack of information provided to the mother of one of an information officer killed that fateful day:

“I began to wonder ‘why won’t they tell her anything?’” He asked. “Then a contact of mine in the Middle East, a high-ranking NATO official, mentioned to me that he had reports that the ambassador [J. Christopher Stevens] had been complaining about the dispatches and cables that he had got from the State Department about the weapons being received and [Islamic] radicals armed, including Stinger missiles.”

According to Plumlee, Steven was ordered to stand down after he asked the State Dept. what he should do about the American arm shipments to al-Qaeda.

“The ambassador and his people had written a series of field reports and cable dispatches advising our State Department that the rebel factions had been armed with U.S. weapons,” he said. “Now my contention is this: if that is the case, why is that classified as a national security matter?”

Was Stevens and the other three Americans killed because of what they knew and expressed concern about? Is that why the White House deliberately had officials providing false information to the public over the attack directly following it, which the latest Benghazi bombshell recently revealed? Is this also why the military was told to stand down and were not allowed to go in to save Ambassador Stevens and the others?

See Also:

Benghazi @ Phi Beta Iota

2014/05/022014/05/02

Berto Jongman: Why “Big Data” Cannot Find Malaysian Airlines Aircraft

07 Other Atrocities, IO Impotency

Why ‘Big Data' Can't Find the Missing Malaysian Plane

The ongoing search for Flight 370 exposes the world's serious information gaps.

Isaac R. Porche III

US News & World Report, 1 May 2014

How can a commercial airliner vanish and remain lost for weeks in an age in which data on virtually everything is collected and maintained either publicly or secretly? The answer is “quite easily.” It is one thing to collect huge amounts of information, but it is another to be able to fuse it quickly and meaningfully.

Much has been made about the reluctance of countries involved in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 to share sensitive aircraft tracking data that could help locate the doomed plane. But that is not the only issue.

The inability to quickly connect the dots is largely a technical problem. The sensed data of the world aren’t inherently organized or co-located or structured to be interoperable, semantically or otherwise. Even if all the data were being shared openly, it is simply not easy to marry disparate, dispersed data stores and perform timely searches to find connections, coincidences or errant commercial aircraft.

Read rest of article.

See Also:

Big Data @ Phi Beta Iota

Malaysian Airlines @ Phi Beta Iota

2014/04/302014/04/30

Chris Hedges: The Crime of Peaceful Protest

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement

The Crime of Peaceful Protest

Truthdig.com, 27 April 2014

NEW YORK—Cecily McMillan, wearing a red dress and high heels, her dark, shoulder-length hair stylishly curled, sat behind a table with her two lawyers Friday morning facing Judge Ronald A. Zweibel in Room 1116 at the Manhattan Criminal Court. The judge seems to have alternated between boredom and rage throughout the trial, now three weeks old. He has repeatedly thrown caustic barbs at her lawyers and arbitrarily shut down many of the avenues of defense. Friday was no exception.

The silver-haired Zweibel curtly dismissed a request by defense lawyers Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg for a motion to dismiss the case. The lawyers had attempted to argue that testimony from the officer who arrested McMillan violated Fifth Amendment restrictions against the use of comments made by a defendant at the time of arrest. But the judge, who has issued an unusual gag order that bars McMillan’s lawyers from speaking to the press, was visibly impatient, snapping, “This debate is going to end.” He then went on to uphold his earlier decision to heavily censor videos taken during the arrest, a decision Stolar said “is cutting the heart out of my ability to refute” the prosecution’s charge that McMillan faked a medical seizure in an attempt to avoid being arrested. “I’m totally handicapped,” Stolar lamented to Zweibel.

The trial of McMillan, 25, is one of the last criminal cases originating from the Occupy protest movement. It is also one of the most emblematic. The state, after the coordinated nationwide eradication of Occupy encampments, has relentlessly used the courts to harass and neutralize Occupy activists, often handing out long probation terms that come with activists’ forced acceptance of felony charges. A felony charge makes it harder to find employment and bars those with such convictions from serving on juries or working for law enforcement. Most important, the long probation terms effectively prohibit further activism.

Read full article (3 screens)

2014/04/302014/04/30

Owl: “Suicided” Bankers Worth Over Half a Trillion in Life Insurance, Payable to Banks, Not Families — JP Morgan in Spotlight

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Corruption

Maybe They are Killing Bankers for Their Life Insurance?

Criminality can take many forms, based on the breadth and depth of human depravity and pathological ingenuity. Applying life insurance to pay off corporations when a current or former employee dies, in this case for bankers, a life insurance program called BOLI (bank-owned life insurance), has to represent a new low in corporate psychopathological viciousness and depravity in the corporate pursuit of money at all costs, even that of life itself, as long as is another's life and not that of schemers who pursue such routes to profit themselves. To paraphrase a famous country song, Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Bankers if you them to have a long life:

“It doesn’t get any more Orwellian than this: Wall Street mega banks crash the U.S. financial system in 2008. Hundreds of thousands of financial industry workers lose their jobs. Then, beginning late last year, a rash of suspicious deaths start to occur among current and former bank employees. Next we learn that four of the Wall Street mega banks likely hold over $680 billion face amount of life insurance on their workers, payable to the banks, not the families. We ask their Federal regulator for the details of this life insurance under a Freedom of Information Act request and we’re told the information constitutes “trade secrets.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the life expectancy of a 25 year old male with a Bachelor’s degree or higher as of 2006 was 81 years of age. But in the past five months, five highly educated JPMorgan male employees in their 30s and one former employee aged 28, have died under suspicious circumstances, including three of whom allegedly leaped off buildings – a statistical rarity even during the height of the financial crisis in 2008. There is one other major obstacle to brushing away these deaths as random occurrences – they are not happening at JPMorgan’s closest peer bank – Citigroup. Both JPMorgan and Citigroup are global financial institutions with both commercial banking and investment banking operations. Their employee counts are similar – 260,000 employees for JPMorgan versus 251,000 for Citigroup.

Continue reading “Owl: “Suicided” Bankers Worth Over Half a Trillion in Life Insurance, Payable to Banks, Not Families — JP Morgan in Spotlight”

2014/04/282014/04/28

Robert Young Pelton: General Dostom is INNOCENT of the Dasht-i-Leili Massacre [PBI: What’s It Worth To Set Record Straight in Time for Run-Off?]

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

ROBERT STEELE: General Dostom is accused of the being directly responsible for the Dasht-i-Leili massacre aka container massacre that has been hugely overblown — as well as civilian collateral damage over time — and this remains a sore point with many Pashtuns and of course those that also consider themselves Taliban. What is your understanding?

ROBERT YOUNG PELTON: I was there for all this and have told many journos (NYTimes, Newsweek, BBC etc) that they are full of shit since they use second hand sourcing and constantly avoid using my first hand testimony since I was in the prison, saw the containers unloaded, took real time photos, notes etc. I also was there with Doran when his doco on Dostum got cancelled by the BBC and he had to make a “massacre” doco, first with British then American troops…using second hand footage and testimony. I have already gathered all the facts at: www.generaldostum.com, see especially the Conflict & Controvery section including the detailed timeline inclusive of photographs. I have been out of touch but this is a long beaten horse started by Atta [Muhammad Nur] with the eager ear of the State Dept flunkies. They wanted to minimize the threat of Dostum to promote Karzai. Ghani was no where near all this but the Pansjiris love to spread this bullshit before every election. One also has to be aware that there are Massoud groupies in the journo world that hate Dostom blindly and have been caught fabricating stories.