On the 44th anniversary of the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. COPA will hold a vigil with banners and handout sheets at the new Martin Luther King Memorial site on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The event will start at 9:00 am and last until 10:00 pm in the Forecourt entrance to the Memorial, off Maine Avenue south of the Lincoln Memorial. We want to commemorate the event because we cannot remember his life if we forget his death. Our flyer will focus on the evidence of James Earl Ray’s innocence, the Memphis Civil Trial ruling, and our efforts to release the classified government records on his life and death. The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Records Act is still pending introduction by Senator John Kerry and Representative John Lewis, and people attending our event are encouraged to visit their offices near the Capitol that day to urge them to move on the bill. We have been assisting in an effort to get the Memphis trial transcript up on the web, since it has been removed in large part at the Martin Luther King Center site. I hope you will join us there for a shift. RSVP.
A dispute has broken out between the Cato Institute, a leading libertarian think tank, and two of its longtime backers – David and Charles Koch. The institute is not the usual form of nonprofit but actually a company with shares; the Koch brothers own two of the four shares and are arguing that they have the right to acquire additional shares and thus presumably exert more control. The institute and some of its senior staff are pushing back.
According to Edward H. Crane, the president and co-founder of Cato, “This is an effort by the Kochs to turn the Cato Institute into some sort of auxiliary for the G.O.P.” Bob Levy, chairman of the Cato board, told The Washington Post: “We would take closer marching orders. That’s totally contrary to what we perceive the function of Cato be.”
Far from being just an unseemly row between prominent personalities on the right, this showdown reflects a much deeper set of concerns for American politics and society. And it raises what I regard as the central question of an important book, “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty,” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson that will be published on March 20.
Robert Steele has for some time been saying that “The truth at any cost lowers all others costs.” He has also been focusing on the importance of intelligence with integrity. Among all governments, only Iceland appears to be serious about dealing with the financial crisis as it should be dealt with: as a criminal conspiracy enabled by all of the parties in both public and private sectors who sacrificed their integrity and betrayed the public trust.
Corporations operate under public charters. It is difficult to police the corporations when the governments have themselves become criminalized, but the tide is turning — the public is beginning to recognize that governments lack integrity and intelligence and cannot be trusted — in their present form — to manage the public interest.
When Goldman Sachs goes out of business the healing can begin. Slamming PWC is a good start.
The resolution committee of the failed Icelandic bank Old Landsbanki has subpoenaed the international auditing firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers, accusing the company of creating wrong annual accounts which misled the markets. The committee’s damages claim runs to hundreds of millions of krónur.
Okay. You got me. I can’t really tell you everything you need to know about big data. The one thing I discovered last week – as I joined more than 2,500 data junkies from around the world for the O’Reilly Strata conference in rainy Santa Clara California—is that nobody can, not Google, not Intel, not even IBM. All I can guarantee you is that you’ll be hearing a lot more about it.
What is big data? Roughly defined, it refers to massive data sets that can be used to predict or model future events. That can include everything from the online purchase history of millions of Americans (to predict what they’re about to buy) to where people in San Francisco are most likely to jog (according to GPS) to Facebook posts and Twitter trends and 100 year storm records.
Phi Beta Iota: Big data is most important for what it can tell you about true cost and whole system cause and effect, inclusive of political corruption and organizational fraud. These are past and present issues, not future issues. We design the future based on the integrity present today. This is why “open everything” matters.
With that in mind, here’s the three most important things you need to know about big data right now:
The American radical right grew explosively in 2011, a third consecutive year of extraordinary growth that has swelled the ranks of extremist groups to record levels, according to a report issued today by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The rise was led by a stunning expansion of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement.
“The dramatic expansion of the radical right is the result of our country's changing racial demographics, the increased pace of globalization, and our economic woes,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the SPLC and editor of the new report.
“For many extremists, President Obama is the new symbol of all that's wrong with the country – the Kenyan president, the secret Muslim who is causing our country's decline,” Potok said. “The election season's overheated political rhetoric is adding fuel to the fire. The more polarized the political scene, the more people at the extremes.”
Many Americans are enraged by what they see as America's decline, and opportunistic politicians have done their best to stoke those fears and demonize President Obama in the process. For some, the prospect of four more years under the country's first black president also is an infuriating reminder that non-Hispanic whites will lose their majority in this country by 2050.
The Obama administration simulated a cyber attack on New York City's power supply in a Senate demonstration aimed at winning support for legislation to boost the nation's computer defenses. Senators from both parties gathered behind closed doors in the Capitol Wednesday for the classified briefing attended by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other administration officials. The mock attack on the city during a summer heat wave was “very compelling,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who is co-sponsoring a cybersecurity bill supported by President Barack Obama. “It illustrated the problem and why legislation is desperately needed,” she said as she left the briefing. Bloomberg.
The US defense industry is in a full court press to get tens of billions in funding for cyberwarfare.
To get that funding, they need to dramatize the potential threat of cyberwarfare. Here's how. The central method of attack in cyberwarfare is systems disruption. Systems disruption is a way to break networks to achieve extremely high levels of damage (or, in financial terms, high ROIs). One of the best ways to demonstrate that type of attack is through a disruption of the power supply (usually with NYC as a target).
Two John Robb posts, comment, and see also — university grants at risk.
Syria: Deputy Oil Minister Abdo Hussameddin announced his resignation and departure from the Ba'ath Party to side with the opposition against President Al-Asad's regime. If confirmed, he would be the highest-ranking official to defect, and the third member of the administration to do so. A video of his declaration was posted on YouTube and repeated around the world.
Comment: Most news outlets reported this man as the highest-level official to defect, which means very little. A lengthy search showed the man was a Baath Party member for a long time, but failed to discover whether the defector was a Christian, Druze, Sunni, Alawite or member of another group. The implications of the defection hinge largely on details not available in the public domain.
Syria celebrated the 49th anniversary of the Syrian coup by Hafez al-Asad on 8 March 1963. Revolution Day is 8 March.
Correction: The place names cited by the Red Crescent official and reported in the 7 March edition of NightWatch are governates, not cities and towns. Syria has 14 governates – often translated as provinces – which administer 61 districts.
It is important to enter an instability problem at the right level, meaning at the level of political organization that provides diagnostic and prognostic results. The international press persists in describing unrest in terms of governates. Entering the instability problem at this level results in distorted narratives and exaggerated reports about the strength of the opposition and the weakness of the government.
Readers are justified in wondering why the government in Damascus has not collapsed. The reason is that the government is not now and has never been threatened by a governate-level insurrection. The fight is in local neighborhoods and most are on the political or geographic periphery of the governates, posing little threat to central authority.
Syria is about the size of North Dakota, according to the CIA World Factbook, with a few differences. Syria has 61 districts which more or less correspond to North Dakota's 53 counties. North Dakota's counties, however, are not organized into governates or provinces.
Syria supports more than 22.5 million people in the same space that North Dakota supports just under 700,000, but with a lot less water. North Dakota has no cities as populous as Syria's Homs which contains over a million people. North Dakota has no sea ports or borders with hostile enemy states.
NightWatch has sought to enter the Syrian instability problem at the district or sub-district level so as to guard against bias and get finer ground truth granularity about just what is happening in Syrian neighborhoods.
For example, a careful survey shows that today the Free Syrian Army and its supporting web sites posted situation reports indicating that this force engaged in six operations in five different governates on 7 March. Several were exchanges of gunfire in which no one was injured and one was erection of a roadblock, in a territory the size of North Dakota.
This data supports leaked information attributed to US intelligence persons that there isn't much of a Free Syrian Army. There is unrest in Syria, but there really isn't much of an insurgency. For the purposes of comparison, in Iraq in 2006, more than 300 firefights occurred daily. In Afghanistan last spring, there were around 50 firefights daily and hundreds of incidents involving makeshift explosives.
Syrian security forces were busy. Opposition sources reported dozens of activities in nine of the 14 governates. A closer look showed that the activities were concentrated in about a dozen of the 61 districts.
Nine governates sounds like a big insurrection. Unrest in 12 districts presents a far more manageable security problem than nine governates supposedly out of control, but in fact not. No governates are out of control and apparently neither are any of the 61 districts.
A still finer focus showed that most of the opposition activities were small, brief street demonstrations (which were not further defined), according to the opposition's own postings. There were no clashes except as noted above; no bombings and no terror attacks on 7 March.
Most of the government operations were local neighborhood sweeps that encountered no resistance. Other reported government actions included over flights of aircraft, some vague armor movements and shelling. The opposition sources that posted the reports were not careful to distinguish whether the operations were by law enforcement and police personnel, paramilitary militias or the Syrian armed forces. Most were attributed to “thugs,” which suggests the paramilitary militias.
Unfortunately the sources also were not specific about which sub-districts or neighborhoods were under stress from government operations. Each of the 61 Syrian districts has multiple sub-districts what are called, nawahi. It is not yet possible to track activity at the nawahi level, but it would show a more fine grained definition of the status of the instability problem in Syria.
Phi Beta Iota: CNN and BBC both appear to be taking direction from US covert operations / media influence staffs. Both appear unintelligent and dishonest. We hold NIGHTWATCH and its editor in the highest regard, consistently superior to the larger organizations that lack both intelligence and integrity. We note with interest that the Syrian Diaspora and the crisis mapping communities are relatively silent on this matter.
